Life next to 199 data centres
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B059'57.6%22N+77%C2%...
"'I never thought they'd build a 200th data center,' says woman who lives in county with 199 data centers."
I think this is dangerously close to NIMBY territory. People who bought homes in the cheapest land possible in areas with ample available farmland are upset that someone else bought some other land.
It’s quite easy to avoid that if you aren’t just buying on pure dollars per square foot like so many suburban buyers seem to be doing.
When it comes to vibrant urban core you actually benefit by having a lot of different things nearby “in my backyard.” As an added bonus, businesses looking for cheap land for factories and data centers tend to stay away.
But if we live in the city we’ll be “on top of each other” and I won’t have a walk-in closet to store all my clothes I don’t wear, and I won’t have a garage to store the car that I’m required to own to get around because nothing is nearby me, and I need a shed for my lawn mower because I can’t just share with my neighbors and I need my own yard because the public park is too far away, etc etc.
You can see how few work there when you compare the size of the data centre and the size of the car park.
I'm not saying that anyone should want data centers to take over their city/county, but there isn't a strong economic argument against them in Louden County. The people there are the richest in the US and they're getting great economic benefits from it. The question isn't economic. The question is whether that's the community they want to live in: rich and making lots of money off data centers or an area where they don't have as much money and don't have to look at the data centers.
Also the county west of loudoun (Clarke), which has no data centers, has even lower taxes than loudoun. If you compare tax rate in loudoun in 2006 versus 2025 it's 1 percentage point lower now.
Indeed, and it is not a place for average people to live. Loudon county is dominated by the rich and the legacy of the beltway bandits. It's a sad place centered around commuting to Washington D.C. or serving those who do.
Whatever benefits there are have to be weighted against the very real costs. Residential power bills spiking is a hugely regressive burden for many struggling households.
Ashburn, which is where the majority of the data centers are in Louden County, is up 56% so even when you look at a smaller area around the data centers, it doesn't seem to have harmed property values.
Even if you look at mansions on an acre of land a couple houses down from a data center, it looks like they've gone up in value at least as fast the average for both Louden County or Ashburn (https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/44335-Oldetowne-Pl-Ashbur... this place I randomly looked up is up around 70% according to Zillow).
It doesn't look like it's impacted housing prices negatively. That doesn't mean it doesn't impact how some people care about their homes. Some people might prefer to pay higher taxes than look at a data center across the street. But it isn't economically hurting residents. Their property taxes are very low, they have the highest median income in the US, and their property values are going up faster than most.
Also, those same people have the most ability to live wherever they want, and can leave. This isn't mountaintop removal in coal country. This is wealthy DC lobbyists being a little annoyed about a hum.
The fact that there's even an article about it is evidence of the fact that the affected are wealthy. The article is their voice. The wealth that allows them to live in Loudoun County is their voice.
> But while most locals the BBC spoke to opposed the data centres, the industry has many powerful proponents, including US President Donald Trump.
Also moving isn't something to take lightly.
> "I never thought that a data centre would be built across the street from my house," she said. "I would not have bought this house if I had known what was going in across the street."
and let this be a lesson to anyone looking to buy with vacant land within whatever radius you want to apply. if you think you might be upset by something that could be developed in the future, you can do some basic research on what zoning the lot(s) have, if they are owned by someone/thing that is discernible and not a shell company (if it is a shell company that's probably an indication you won't like what's coming), etc. sure, the ultimate developer of the think you won't like might only purchase the lot just before they are ready to build (specifically to avoid this), ultimately they will have to file for plans. it's possible those plans have already been filed, but if you don't look into it, it's really on you since you have the problem with it.
In 2021/2022 before it was built:
* Here is what that lot looked like [1]. To assume something wouldn't be built there is optimistic at best. (And there was precedent for data centers at the time - there was already a data center less than half mile away on Vantage Data Plz across the street from Tart Lumber.)
* If you look across the street, ie if the video would have panned to the left, you would have seen the "US Customs and Border Patrol" building - not winning any architectural design awards [2].
For someone who bought their house decades ago, then yes - the area has transformed drastically. But grouping someone who purchased recently with someone who purchased decades ago is a bit muddled.
[1]: https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9991758,-77.4300191,3a,75y,1...
[2]: https://www.google.com/maps/place/IAD146/@38.9981504,-77.428...
We mostly don't like them, we mostly do feel disenfranchised, and people are trying to mobilize more political awareness of which politicians are cozying up to data-centers.
One of the biggest complaints isn't the data-centers themselves, but that they use so much electricity that these heinously ugly power-lines have to get put up in what is one of the most beautiful nature areas of the country (i.e. "blue ridge mountains / Shennandoah river / country roads").
> Also, those same people have the most ability to live wherever they want, and can leave.
That's a ludicrous suggestion. The tax alone on selling your house is at a minimum 10%, aside from every other cost, that's basically a 6 figure loss plus all your close family and friends.
> This is wealthy DC lobbyists being a little annoyed about a hum.
No. It's mostly the residents who predate the datacenters who are the most opposed. Western Loudoun was actually mostly farmland one generation ago, and actually had a bit of hippie / homeschooler energy.
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Instead datacenters should be required by law to build underground with noise limits, and required by law to not increase electricity prices and not drain the grid around them. If they can't be profitable without negative externalities then they aren't worth having.
Requiring data centers to be built underground would dramatically increase the cost. Imagine if we made the same requirement for roads, which are much louder and more dangerous!
On second thought, this negative externality thing really should be applied to roads, especially in cities. Guess I'm on board.
https://www.loudoun.gov/FAQ.aspx?QID=1793
> said, noting the humming or buzzing noise the centre emits scares away a lot of wildlife from his area
I imagine trees and fields that have been cleared and the roads paved probably play a good part as well.
Relevant Wikipedia entry-point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East
“Although it initially had no single central nexus, one eventually formed in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.[3]”
I love how this sentence is written like some sci-fi premise. The source is much more clinical about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20050214071013/http://www.wolfso...
“The décor of the machine room is unmarred by ornament. The room was created by walling off an area of the underground parking garage of a suburban Virginia office tower. The ceiling is low; harsh light pours out of fluorescent tubes; the air is filled with the white noise of a hundred computer cooling fans and a hint of battery fumes. Standing in this crowded space, surrounded by hard-working and very slightly grungy machinery, gives an interesting perspective and sense of scale, which is exactly what I was looking for in coming here. The room is no bigger than a two-car garage, and yet by some estimates more than half the traffic on the Internet passes through here.”
It's was super easy to measure using a Sensirion Differential Pressure sensor. They have a few extremely sensitive models that have a 100Hz sampling rate (50Hz useable after Nyquist) - also: you can sense washing machines (from vibrating buildings) with it 2 blocks away.
The product listing says something about a manifold, it looks like a raw component with 4 pins or so.
SDP600-25Pa --- I2C ---> ESP32 --- UDP over Wifi --> Linux Host with simple Python recording script
Very rough pin-pointing is possible: plastic kitchen funnel which is attached to the sensor using a short hose.
AI datacenters have much larger cooling needs and often use generators
Ahem.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
And you'd need an insane amount of solar panels to actually recharge those batteries in any kind of reasonable time too, so you expose yourself to a massive risk if you had two out of power events within say 12 hours. So you'd probably build all of those batteries and solar panels but you'd still need to have emergency generators ready to go anyway.
Critical loads require generators, batteries don’t cut it. Data centers want the most reliable backup power they can with the longest runtime. Battery storage density is not high enough to back up a 500MW+ data center for any length of time without a comical amount of batteries.
When the NEC allows critical, equipment, and life safety branch at hospitals to be backed up with batteries and solar panels, battery storage will be at a point where battery backup of data centers is feasible. Right now it isn’t.
It goes way beyond normal building HVAC levels, AI has pushed many DC's from 8 kW to 17 kW a rack in just a few years.
IIRC the average medium office building pulls about 22 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per square foot of floorspace per year. So their cooling needs are tiny.
17 kW per rack for AI/ML HPC was workable >5 years ago. If you're not budgeting for double or triple that number nowadays you're not capacity planning properly.
It'd be nice to have some hard data on it though. Sometimes the hum is "god damn, that is annoying!" and other times it's someone saying "20 miles that way they built a DC and now it makes the cell phone tower effects twice as bad in this area" when reality was it doesn't show up as audible a half mile away.
For example,
I'm fairly surprised that there aren't zoning laws that prevents datacenters from being built where people live. When we built a fairly small datacenter we had to place it in an industrial area with no housing and no offices.
If that's surprising, you should look into how infamous the city of Houston's lack of zoning laws has made it.
Another fact is just the sheer power density of those problematic north virginia datacenters. I'd bet us-east-1 is not an issue (old building and lower power density), but the newer AI ones are. Just take a look at how much AI clusters eat: a single DGX H200 box with 8 GPUs is 10kW. Most facilities provide 10kW for a whole rack, not 8Us. You're looking at 60kW racks, which is a mental power density: a single aisle trivially gets over the MW threshold. You used to feed rooms with megawatts. Heck, DC5 has 24MW of power, that's only 20000 H200 (again, think hyperscaler scale).
Still about cooling, the load profile is even different. DC5 is a general purpose datacenter, where the load is not full blast. Your AI datacenter has the GPU clusters full blast all the time. That's a LOT of power.
I happen to know pretty well the Scaleway infra and visited others of their datacenters. You can stand centimeters from the noise-dampening wall surrounding the dry coolers and not hear a thing; while almost needing noise protection within the wall.
There's going to be variation based on how the data center is constructed.
The ones I've seen (which is certainly not all of them, so take it with a grain of salt) in the geographic area that this particular article is about are closed buildings that should be pretty well noise regulated individually, but that's not always the case -- some companies (like Marathon/MARA) have data centers using what are effectively open air designs that don't contain sound very well at all and can easily generate significant noise pollution around them.
And some companies (eg. xAI/grok) are a bit of a hybrid where the main part of the data center is enclosed but they park many loud methane turbines outside of the building for power and those make a lot of noise (and air pollutants).
The basic TL;DR is that it is possible to build data centers that aren't an absolute nuisance to the population around them, but there are plenty of data centers out there that don't meet that goal. And the more these companies try to scale up quickly to meet their perceived "AI" needs, the worse things are getting in terms of noise pollution, air pollution and competing for resources (like water and energy) with local residents, etc.
All around it looks like sparsely built countryside. I wonder what was the risk analysis that was done for the data centers. I guess the better places without the noise have people living there so datacenters went to the low value land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
It just seems to me that in Virginia in the United States, the externalities of building a massive data centre in an existing residential zone are either not being considered or not being acted upon.
I'd hate it if a company built a massive data centre right next to where I sleep. Low noise pollution is vitally important to quality of life.
I'd like to live in a society that treated me fairly, and at least purchased my property off me before building the data centre.
By all means, build the infrastructure. But please look after your people. It's not that arduous to purchase a few properties in exchange for a massive amount of profit.