Loudoun was super wealthy before the data centers started springing up. It was where old VA money had their horse farms and wineries. What changed was a huge influx of very well paid tech and natsec jobs after 9/11. And as you say, data centers breed data centers. But they do not require a lot of people. A few dozen people for thousands of servers. KC is not mopping up the 5000 employees from, say, the former Sprint's headquarters with one or two data centers.

There’s a place in Loudoun county where I used to get on a trail to bike into the office. There was a beautiful meadow there full of blackbirds and cat tails. I remember one morning sitting there watching the sun come up as the fog sat down on the meadow.

That meadow was torn up and replaced with a random ugly concrete data center full of useless servers probably used mostly for ad tracking. Loudoun is full of the damn things. It’s atrocious.

When you sign into the AWS console they should show a picture of the meadows that were torn up so you could spin up your EMR cluster to analyze “big data”. Maybe then people would realize that the cloud is just someone else’s server sitting in what used to be an actual cloud.

Loudoun County had the highest median income in the country long before it became data center central. A combination of old money in the rural part of the county, high income professionals in the eastern part (traditionally driven by the economy surrounding the federal government but more diverse these days) and a relatively small low income population.

While the county gives tax breaks to the data centers themselves to encourage their development they are greatly out weighed by the property tax revenue generated by the data centers. In 2021 Loudoun County brought in $424 million in property taxes on the equipment in data centers. The county considers the lack of associated employment another feature of the data centers because the number of county residents needing services doesn't significantly increase offsetting the property tax revenue. When your FY22 school system operating budget is $1.493 billion you don't want a lot of people with kids moving in.