CHESAPEAKE, Va. — The two dozen or so nondescript gray, white and blue buildings lining Virginia State Route 625 could be large warehouses.
But community activist Elena Schlossberg can identify them literally a mile away by their telltale rows of backup diesel generators. The buildings are data centers.
"We're sort of that model of how not to do this kind of development," says Schlossberg.
All internet data goes through facilities like these: massive, sometimes multistoried warehouses filled with servers where every webpage and shred of data lives. Demand for these centers has skyrocketed in the last two years as artificial intelligence usage has gone mainstream.
Virginia is a data hot spot. It has the world's highest concentration of data centers — nearly 600 facilities of varying sizes, including roughly 150 of the largest kind, known as hyperscale data centers. Not all residents are happy about that.
A demand for power and water
As data centers have cropped up alongside residential developments, they have become synonymous with intensive power and water consumption, as well as round-the-clock noise from cooling systems.
A decade ago, Schlossberg learned Amazon Web Services was building a huge data center, the equivalent of more than seven football fields, next to her home in Northern Virginia, and she threw herself into stopping it — unsuccessfully.
"And the data industry came and crushed us," she said.
Amazon is one of several companies that have made Northern Virginia an epicenter for data: 13% of the world's data center operational capacity is here.
And the demand for data is growing with the proliferation of AI applications like ChatGPT. There are plans for 70 more data centers in Virginia, many the size of multiple football fields.
If built, they'll consume so much power that the state's main utility company, Dominion, is contracted to build 40 gigawatts of new energy capacity for these new centers — that's nearly three times the state's current maximum power production.
"To increase it by 40 gigawatts is to almost triple our entire grid for one industry … and to do that for one industry is absolutely unprecedented," said Julie Bolthouse of the Piedmont Environmental Council, a Virginia environment nonprofit.
Dan Diorio, the vice president for state policy at the national Data Center Coalition, a trade group that represents developers and operators behind the centers, said the centers support everything people do online, from the banking app on your phone to storing electronic medical records to running 911 call centers. And the need for them is only growing.
"The data center industry is building out as quickly as they can to meet that growth and provide the digital services that we all rely on every day. And so far, we're still behind," Diorio said.
Diorio said regulation of future data centers should balance residents' worries with the economic impact of development — $24 billion in capital investments in Virginia just last year.
"Not every project is the same, but I think as an industry we're responsive and responsible members of the community when proposing these projects [and] working to address those community concerns," Diorio said.
The rise of a NIMBY movement
Concerns about power and land use, as well as the cost of these data centers, have galvanized not just those worried about the environment but also a widespread not-in-my-backyard movement against them.
And Schlossberg has become the go-to person for how to organize. She reels off the places she has gotten calls from: "I've talked to people in Boardman, Oregon; Peculiar, Missouri; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Maryland; Georgia."
One of those places is Chesapeake, in Virginia's coastal southeast. Residents of this city of 250,000 learned of a proposed data center project just weeks ago, and they were concerned.
Helen Messer's Chesapeake house backs up to a small water-retention pond. On the other side of that pond, a couple of hundred feet away, is the proposed data center site.
She's most worried about the possibility of constant noise from the center's cooling systems, which typically run around the clock to keep servers from overheating.
"How am I going to relax with something buzzing at me 24/7?" she asked.
Within days of the proposal going public, Chesapeake residents held a meeting at a church social hall to prepare their resistance. A representative from the state's Sierra Club chapter answered questions about data centers elsewhere as residents worried over water usage, pollution and, of course, noise.
The developer behind the data project, Doug Fuller, also showed up.
He got a less-than-warm welcome from residents, including Messer.
"Why can't we move the data center to your neighborhood?" she shouted, to a smattering of applause.
Fuller pushed back, arguing the facility would be a net positive for Chesapeake.
"As a developer, I'll create an asset for our city. Tax revenues will be in the millions of dollars," he told an unconvinced crowd.
Fuller also said his effort would help capitalize on a major government investment. For the last couple of decades, cities and counties in southeastern Virginia have struggled to diversify their economies away from tourism and shipbuilding. In the last couple of years, several of these municipalities got together and spent tens of millions of dollars on high-speed fiber-optic networks in hopes of attracting high-tech businesses like data centers.
Still, hundreds of Chesapeake residents implored local leaders by email and in person to deny the proposal.
Resident Lee D'Amore, who lives a few blocks from where the data center was proposed, put up red "No Data Center" signs around his neighborhood ahead of a City Council meeting in June.
"Once they're built, there's nothing you can do. There's nothing you can do. If they violate the decibels, what are you going to do? Fine them $1,000? That'd be like me asking you for a penny. Seriously, once this thing is built, it's all over but the crying," D'Amore said.
D'Amore and the rest of the anti-data center opposition showed up in force to the council meeting, speaking one after the other against the data center for more than two hours.
"I think there are viable areas this could go in our city and could flourish in our city, but I don't think anything near a residential area is [viable]," Chesapeake City Council Member Amanda Newins said ahead of the vote.
When the tallying board lit up to show a unanimous vote blocking the data center, the council chamber erupted with cheers.
Messer and her neighbors were giddy as they poured out of city hall.
"I'll sleep better than I have for a month," she said.
As resistance has mounted nationwide, more data center projects are being delayed or outright rejected — 16 projects nationally between May of last year and this past March, according to a study by Data Center Watch, a research project run by 10aLabs, an AI intelligence company.
But a central tension remains: The use of AI applications is skyrocketing. And the data centers to handle all of that have to go somewhere.
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