Massive AI infrastructure is being built out across the US. But if you want to know what the data center occupation looks like, visit Loudoun County, Virginia, where that future arrived 20 years ago.
InIn 2007, the US was on the cusp of an economic recession, and Buddy Rizer was tasked with finding Loudoun County, Virginia, a new way to make money. Rizer’s earlier career as a radio DJ didn’t exactly make him an obvious candidate to find a solution, but he was looking for what he called a “real job” and stumbled into a role at Loudoun’s economic development authority.
This new gig came with urgency thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble: More than 80 percent of the county’s revenue came from residential real estate. The goal, at the time, was to raise the commercial tax base from about 19 percent of revenue to something like 23 percent, Rizer recalls. Today, just over half of the county’s tax revenue comes from commercial sources. To jumpstart that turnaround, Rizer turned to the carcasses of another recent bubble burst — those of the dot-com era.
The county had been home to the headquarters of AOL, which by 2000 was the US’s largest internet provider. Combined with its proximity to the nation’s capital and access to resources including water and electricity, Loudoun quickly emerged as the physical manifestation of the internet, the place responsible for how the majority of Americans got online. Estimates suggest that as much as 70 percent of the planet’s internet traffic passed through Loudoun County.
But after the collapse of dot-com stocks in 2000, followed by AOL’s disastrous merger with Time Warner, much of that industry dried up, and Loudoun was left with hulking, empty buildings and miles of fiber optic cable already laid in the ground. Where some people saw abandoned infrastructure, Buddy Rizer saw opportunity: “And so I thought if we can fill those, that would be a good start,” he says. Rizer soon realized that the same factors that made Loudoun County attractive to AOL could once again make it a hot spot for technology. It still had an internet exchange point, lots of land, a government eager for investment, and a capable local electricity utility. “And so we came up with this plan to attract data centers.”
Today, Loudoun County has another moniker: Data Center Alley. Over just a small portion of its roughly 515 square miles, it’s home to about 250 data centers, the densest concentration in the world. For a long time, residents there recall only a passing understanding of this, if they realized it at all. The development of data centers in Loudoun was just something going on in the background of many residents’ lives. They noticed construction along main roads, paid an increasingly lower property tax rate, and sent their kids to coveted public schools.
The county’s data center boom arrived as tech companies expanded into the cloud, a sanitized name for the blocky buildings that house rows and rows of servers. And with that business came prosperity: 22 new schools built in just the last 15 years, tax revenue from data centers alone that exceeded the county’s operational budget by $35 million in 2024, and a decline in real property tax rate for residents from about $1.29 to 80 cents per $100 in assessed value since 2008.
Some longtime residents never heard of their county’s nickname until recently, when the effects of data centers on the community started to become impossible to ignore. What had been a relatively quiet boon locally was starting to foment a national backlash elsewhere, and starting to disturb daily life in Loudoun, too.
The current, massive US data center buildout has been accelerating thanks to the widespread adoption of generative AI, which has created a growing need for the physical infrastructure to run tremendous amounts of “compute” — the industry term for processing power. There are already 3,000 data centers in operation around the US, according to an April analysis by the Pew Research Center, with 1,500 more in development. When Rizer began recruiting companies to build data centers in Loudoun, he sat on conference panels for secondary markets. Now when he attends data center conferences, Loudoun is the biggest market there, and “there’s more economic developers than there are data center companies, because everybody sees the opportunity.”
Loudoun County residents are also starting to take notice. Within the past few years, data centers have been elevated from an unremarkable part of daily life in Loudoun to something that many residents now think about every day. For some, it’s the constant hum they hear from their decks; for others, it’s the transmission towers that loom over their favorite green space, or the surprise call from their energy utility that one of those towers could go up in their own backyard. While residents recognize that data centers have brought a lot of prosperity to the county, they’re beginning to wonder how much more they can take.
As communities around the country begin recognizing the potential opportunities of building data centers, the efforts have also faced immense pushback. Opposition to this development is shaping strange alliances across the political spectrum and has become a central issue in this year’s midterm elections. New York and Texas have begun pumping the brakes on new data center buildouts, worried about how their energy grids could support them without leaving residents stuck holding the bag if major tech players change plans. Local stories from around the country show that residents are coming out to community meetings in droves to oppose data centers. In at least one case, a violent attack on a local Indianapolis official appeared motivated by his support for data centers. And national polls show that many Americans do not want to live near them.
With its long history hosting data centers, Loudoun residents have more recently taken to calling it something new: the canary in the coal mine of data center development. Want to know what the country’s future looks like? Loudoun County’s past gives a strong glimpse of it.
Even in Loudoun, where the existence of data centers has been a fact of life for nearly two decades, Rizer says that in the last few years, community opposition has become more vocal. “Before then, people understood what we were doing,” he says. These days, residents seem more aware of the inconveniences.
Rizer is no stranger to this kind of response to his projects, but the tone of the pushback is different. Residents have always had myriad worries: economic, environmental, and aesthetic. That part isn’t new. “I’ve done $70 billion of deals here, and the only thing in common is that somebody’s been against every single one of them,” Rizer says. “I have never seen, in my entire career, the vitriol, the hate that is associated with this.” Asked to put his radio DJ hat on to choose a soundtrack for this moment, he chuckles and says the first one that jumps into his head is Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down.”
As Rizer and other officials in Loudoun field their own residents’ concerns about data centers, they’re also being flooded with calls from local officials across the country looking for their advice. Rizer is the first to admit that hosting a data center, let alone hundreds, is not the right choice for every community. He stands by the work he’s done to bring them to Loudoun, and still believes they’ve benefited the county on the whole. But data center expansion in Loudoun has recently taken on a life of its own, to the point that even Rizer no longer spends his time courting new facilities. “We don’t want more data centers here, but we want those that are here to be successful and continue to contribute to our community,” he says, diplomatically.
