Northern Virginia is home to 35% of the world’s data centers. These massive warehouse-like buildings house computers and networking equipment that store and send data — and feed our ever-growing demand for apps, artificial intelligence and cloud storage.
Now they’re coming to Southside.
They bring with them concerns about viewsheds, traffic, noise and energy capacity — but also the potential for transformational tax revenue and job creation.
Cardinal News reporters Grace Mamon and Tad Dickens talked with local officials, residents, energy providers, environmental experts and others about what communities in our region can expect as these developments spread southward.
Read all of our coverage:
Rolling farmland stretches almost as far as the eye can see behind Mill Creek Community Church in Pittsylvania County. Beyond it, a line of trees stands bare on an early March morning, looking small from such a distance, as pastor Darrell Campbell stands outside of his church.
“People choose this,” he said — both living in Pittsylvania County and attending Mill Creek.
Folks travel from outside of the Mill Creek community, past churches that are closer to them, to attend his services. The church’s congregation, today about 100 people, has existed since 1883.
Campbell officiates funerals and oversees picnics and Easter egg hunts on the church grounds, with the farmland as a backdrop. 
“It’s not like we have no choices,” he said. “I mean, we have options. We could all live somewhere more progressive, but this is what we choose.”
The view from the Mill Creek church could soon be very different.
The Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to vote April 15 on a rezoning application that would allow a data center project to move forward. The land behind Campbell’s church may soon be home to 12 data center buildings across a 740-acre campus.
This is only the second data center proposal Pittsylvania County has seen. The first was approved unanimously in 2024, with the current proposal facing more intense resident opposition.
County residents are not alone in their desire to protect farmland and natural resources.
Interrupting the rolling rural landscape with large industrial buildings is one of the most repeated environmental concerns from residents in communities where data centers exist or are planned.
Even in more developed areas like Northern Virginia, residents don’t like to look at data centers.
Other environmental impacts that come with data center development include water usage, air quality, noise and light pollution, tech waste and effects on wildlife.
All large developments face environmental concerns. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality says that data centers are not disproportionately impacting the environment.
“Any development could impact our environment if a developer does not adhere to applicable environmental laws, regulations and best practices,” said Irina Calos, spokesperson for DEQ.
But the Piedmont Environmental Council of Virginia, a Warrenton-based environmental nonprofit, disagrees. According to PECVA, data centers are more prone to negative environmental effects than other developments because of their massive scale. 
From a main street store to a Walmart Supercenter
When data centers first began popping up in Northern Virginia about three decades ago, they were usually the size of office buildings. Now, immense data center campuses, called hyperscale facilities, are more common.
Hyperscale projects have millions of square feet of data center space across multiple buildings, backup diesel generators and sometimes even onsite power production.
“It’s a totally different level of scale and [DEQ] is not actually looking at the cumulative impact,” said Julie Bolthouse with PECVA. “It’s like going from a Main Street store to a Walmart Supercenter. That’s what’s happened with data centers.”
The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission investigated environmental impacts in its December report on data centers in Virginia.
It found that some of the most significant environmental impacts of data centers come from the industry’s energy demands, which likely cannot be met without continued reliance on non-renewable energy sources.
“It could be especially challenging to meet [energy] demand while also fully meeting [the Virginia Clean Economy Act] renewable requirements,” the JLARC report found.
VCEA was enacted in 2020, and requires Virginia to phase out carbon-emitting energy generation by 2050.
There is currently no regulatory body to enforce or incentivize sustainable practices for data centers, and the industry prides itself on self-regulation.
At public hearings in Pittsylvania County, where a final vote on the current data center proposal has been postponed twice, residents have repeatedly raised environmental concerns to the county board.
And in Northern Virginia, where data centers are far more prevalent, residents are already living with some of these environmental impacts. 
‘Everything you can see as far as you can see’
On a Friday morning in January, the farms, yards and forests on either side of Pageland Lane in Prince William County were covered in snow.
The 4-mile stretch is in one of the more rural pockets of Prince William, a county that resident Elena Schlossburg says has an advantageous mix of development and countryside.
It also has its fair share of data centers, many of them existing outside the data center overlay district that was created to house them, instead sharing borders with neighborhoods, schools, main thoroughfares and historic cemeteries.
Soon, a data center may encompass Pageland Lane, too.
The Prince William Digital Gateway project was approved by the county but is currently tied up in lawsuits filed by neighbors. If it prevails, it will be the biggest planned data center campus in the world, spanning 2,100 acres and 23 million square feet of data center space.
“Everything you can see as far as you can see would be Digital Gateway,” said Bill Wright, another county resident, as he and Schlossberg drove Pageland Lane on that snowy Friday.
Homes, agricultural land, horses and streams lay still and silent under their snow blankets as Wright drove by. “In this neighborhood, you wouldn’t think you’re in Northern Virginia,” he said.
“Imagine all these trees gone, the land razed and then packed down to allow for this kind of development and 12 substations,” Schlossberg said.
Other neighborhoods in the county, even retirement communities, are in the same situation. Data centers also border public schools, main thoroughfares, shopping centers and historic communities.
“One data center backs up to Gainesville High School, so literally, from the football field, you’re looking at the diesel generator boards,” Wright said.
Though Pittsylvania County is closer to North Carolina than it is to Prince William, the residents of the two localities are in the same boat when it comes to concerns about the landscape.
“It’s going to be even more of a shock [in Pittsylvania],” Wright said. “It’s going to be more of an extreme change.” 
Finding enough water for a small city — or a large data center
Data centers are known not only for their massive energy usage, but also for their water consumption. The industry either uses water or electricity to cool servers, with water being the more common technique.
A large data center could use as much water in a day as a town of 10,000 or a city of 50,000 people, according to a 2023 Washington Post article. That’s anywhere between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water.
This water usage is consumptive, said Bolthouse, meaning that the water is used up, evaporating while cooling the hot servers.
Data centers need potable water for this process, said Landon Marston, a Virginia Tech professor who has researched data center water usage.
Other industries, like steel production or manufacturing, can pull water directly from a river or aquifer because they don’t have as stringent water quality requirements, Marston said.
“For data centers, because they use it for cooling and they need it to be fairly pristine, it needs to be treated water,” he said.
Untreated water can clog data center cooling apparatuses with scale, or a chalk-like buildup.
It’s common for a data center to partner with or purchase water from a local utility, much like a regular business would, Marston said, though data centers will likely use significantly more water than other developments.
Often, data centers will locate just outside major cities, in more rural areas, and end up constituting a “fairly sizable portion” of the overall water demand, he said.
“For small water utilities, it ends up being a lot of water, relative to their total distribution,” Marston said. “That can have implications for infrastructure. It might reach near capacity or maybe exceed the capacity of the current utility.”
That can cause the need for expansion, which is “very, very costly,” Marston said. In some cases, data centers will partner with a utility and help with expansion requirements, he said.
In response to concerns about the industry’s water use, some data center companies like Google have pledged to prioritize optimization of water and to enhance water infrastructure.
Corporate pledges about sustainability, “while laudable, are not enforceable,” according to a 2022 article by anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, who has studied the data center industry for over five years.
“Nor do they appear to be feasible given the explosive growth expected in data storage infrastructures over the next decade, a tripling by some estimates,” the article says.
Balico, the Herndon-based company that wants to bring a data center to Pittsylvania, plans to partner with the town of Hurt to supply its water, should the rezoning request be approved by the county board.
The town and the company have entered into a “working agreement” about the water sale, in which Balico agreed to build a new water membrane treatment plant in Hurt to draw water from the Staunton River.
Hurt currently purchases its water from nearby Altavista and resells it to residents. The town agreed to supply at least 2 million gallons of water a day to Balico, via the new water plant.
A pipeline to transport the water from Hurt to the data center campus, about 20 miles south, would also need to be built.
Hurt, which has seen increasing water costs for years, hopes to see water rates decrease for residents with Balico as a customer.
Some data centers get around the high water demand by using waterless cooling, Marston said.
“There are trade-offs there, because [waterless cooling] ends up consuming a lot more energy,” he said. “Then you’ve got increased carbon emissions associated with that.”
There are also indirect water usages associated with data centers, if there is onsite power in the form of a thermoelectric or natural gas power plants. The latter is included in the Balico proposal for Pittsylvania.
These types of power plants need water to generate electricity, adding to the water needed for cooling.
There are emerging technologies to improve efficiency in the data center industry and therefore reduce the amount of water needed, Marston said.
A potential way to alleviate the issue of water strain in communities near data centers is to invest in solar and wind energy, which use significantly less water than other forms of electricity generation, he said. 
Massive generators, minimal pollutants?
Air quality concerns around data centers stem mostly from the industry’s use of diesel generators. Data center servers run constantly, so diesel generators are kept on-site in case of a power outage.
JLARC found that “data center backup generators emit pollutants, but their use is minimal, and existing regulations largely curb adverse impacts.”
Outages are uncommon, JLARC found, with most data center operators seeing zero to two minor outages per site in the last two years. These outages typically only last a few hours, according to the report.
That means that diesel generators at data centers are usually only turned on for routine maintenance.
These diesel generators emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter, but they are “a relatively small contributor to regional air pollution,” JLARC found.
“In Northern Virginia, they make up less than 4% of regional emissions of nitrogen oxides and 0.1% or less of carbon monoxide and particulate matter emissions,” the report says.
DEQ limits when these generators can run, how long they can run and a maximum amount of emissions annually for each site.
Even with those limits, Bolthouse said, no other industry relies on this quantity of diesel generators.
Data center generators range in size between 600 kilowatts and 3,500 kilowatts, which are much larger than a typical household generator, which is usually between 10 kilowatts and 26 kilowatts.
“We’re talking generators the size of train cars, and every single one of these hyperscale data centers has them,” Bolthouse said. “What are the cumulative impacts on our region of all these generators?”
An additional — and “often overlooked” — air quality impact, according to a 2024 Forbes article, is server production.
Each server creates about 1,300 kilograms of carbon dioxide during manufacturing, says the article, and servers only have a lifecycle of a few years.
This is equivalent to driving 3,311 miles in an average gas-powered passenger vehicle, or 1,444 pounds of coal burned, according to the EPA’s greenhouse gas equivalences calculator.
“These emissions are typically not accounted for, even though they significantly contribute to total emissions,” the article says.
Brighter lights, louder sounds in rural areas
Constant sound permeates the air in the Great Oak neighborhood of Prince William County. The low rumbling noise vibrates, moving between the single-family homes, across backyards, through walls, along streets.
“It’s a sort of cross between a plane and a train,” said Dale Browne, who has lived in the neighborhood for 31 years.
The sound originates from an Amazon data center campus called Tanner Way, 500 feet from the closest Great Oak homes.
Large fans that cool the servers create this noise all night and all day without pause. Sometimes, the data center’s backup diesel generators kick on, causing a louder noise.
The other side of the neighborhood, where Browne lives, borders a different data center run by a company called CloudHQ.
Though Great Oak is sandwiched between these two facilities, one has proved noisier than the other.
CloudHQ is a relatively quiet data center, Browne said, despite it being only about 600 feet from some of the Great Oak homes.
“CloudHQ has done things right,” Browne said. “They’ve been good about transparency, and they even looked at the noise profile and reversed the design of the building. They turned it 180 degrees, so more noise would go toward the [Manassas Regional] airport, and no one would care about that.”
There has yet to be a noise complaint from the side of the neighborhood that borders CloudHQ, Browne said.
“I try to tout them as a good example,” he said.
On the other side of the neighborhood, residents have complained about the noise coming from Tanner Way since April 2022, shortly after the building was constructed, Browne said.
When the noise first started, it was much worse than it is today. This is because neighbors have consistently complained to Amazon, Browne said.
In the beginning, Browne could hear the noise all the way on his side of Great Oak. And he heard a host of anecdotes from his neighbors who lived even closer.
“One guy, he said his headboard was vibrating, and he couldn’t sleep at night,” Browne said.
Another neighbor had to move his children’s bedrooms into the basement because the noise kept them up, he said. Still others were bombarded with noise during construction and have cracks in their drywall, patios and house foundations that they blame on the nearby blasting.
Amazon met with Great Oak residents a few months after the complaints started, in July 2022, Browne said. The company agreed to modify their fans, fan motors and louvers to try to mitigate the sound.
The noise has gotten better, but it’s still there, said Browne, who takes decibel readings outside his house several times a day.
He measures both dB(A) noise, which is how sound is perceived by the human ear, and dB(C) noise, which includes lower-frequency sounds, like heavy machinery, that can be heard and felt.
During a noise spike overnight in mid-January, Browne recorded higher-than-normal levels between 2:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m.
The dB(A) readings ranged from 48.6 to 51.2 decibels, and the dB(C) readings ranged from 62 to 70.5 decibels.
These readings don’t sound high initially — a normal conversation is between 60 and 70 decibels, according to a chart by Yale Environmental Health and Safety — but the noise is disruptive primarily because it is constant, Browne said.
“Chronic environmental noise causes a wide variety of adverse health effects, including sleep disturbance, annoyance, noise-induced hearing loss, cardiovascular disease, endocrine effects, and increased incidence of diabetes,” according to an article published by the National Institutes of Health in 2014.
Continuous exposure to more than 70 dBA over 24 hours can cause risk of hearing loss, the article says.
Developers with data center proposals in Pittsylvania County have promised to comply with the county’s noise ordinance and adhere to a 65 decibel limit at the parcel’s property line.
Tanner Way is also supposed to comply with county noise ordinances, Browne said, but there are challenges with enforcement.
“The police are the enforcers,” Browne said. “I feel bad, because police shouldn’t have that responsibility. And if they write a citation, do they take it to the guard [at Tanner Way] and hand it to him? Do they hand it to the janitor? There’s nobody over there, so how do they enforce it, what do they do?”
Light pollution has been less of an issue in Great Oak — the neighborhood is already near other brightly lit developments like the Manassas Regional Airport. But in rural areas like Pittsylvania, where there is less development, the night sky is generally darker overall.
Pittsylvania resident Bill Bennett, who worked in data centers across Virginia from 2000 to 2024, described data center light pollution as “easily seen for miles.”
“[Data centers] glow at night like a giant city of lights,” Bennett said. “The night sky is glowing like a meteorite just crashed into the woods … humming, pulsating, glowing. The activity never stops.”
The JLARC report does not linger on light pollution, except to say that it is one reason data centers are incompatible with residential areas because they often “deploy bright security lighting.”
Few comprehensive studies have been done on data center light pollution.
Where does it go when it’s gone?
One of the more unknown impacts of data centers involves tech waste. The JLARC report found that electronic waste faces little regulation in Virginia.
“Data centers are packed full of thousands of servers, and these servers are replaced every three to five years,” the report said. “Servers can contain rare and toxic materials. The process to procure these materials for use in servers can be environmentally harmful, as can improper disposal of the toxic materials.”
Recycling or reusing servers and parts of servers can mitigate any negative environmental effects. But neither federal nor state law requires data centers, or any other business for that matter, to reuse or recycle tech waste.
Still, “many data center companies have sustainability goals related to electronic waste” and will recycle, reuse or donate old servers on their own.
Bennett said equipment becomes obsolete and needs to be replaced very often.
“The interval between when you install the equipment and when you’re taking it out is getting shorter and shorter,” he said. “The things we put in three years ago are being pulled off, and there’s nothing wrong with them, except they don’t carry enough bandwidth.”
This quick turnover of equipment also raises the question of data center longevity as technology continues to evolve rapidly, said Sarah Parmelee with PECVA.
“How long lived are these facilities going to be?” she said. “Are we going to need all these data centers in five to 10 years, or are we just going to have a whole bunch of empty buildings and crumbling infrastructure?” 
The birds and the bees
State Sen. Danica Roem, D-Prince William County, has been through eight General Assembly sessions as a legislator. She has voiced her opposition to data centers for years, usually taking a logical approach, she said.
But lately, she’s started to try to appeal to the emotions of other legislators by bringing up something she is passionate about: wildlife, which Roem says is harmed by data center development.
Pittsylvania residents are also concerned about wildlife, specifically birds, bees and livestock.
The JLARC report does not mention wildlife, but clearcutting trees for data centers destroys wildlife habitats, Roem said.
“We are accelerating climate change, we are killing off wildlife, we’re clearcutting the woods and we’re driving up your energy bill, so that people who are interested in cryptomining can have faster computing speeds,” Roem said. “Give me a break.”
Her impassioned perspective is something Pittsylvania County residents also understand.
Faced with the possibility of losing the agricultural landscape behind Mill Creek Church, which is home to wildlife and livestock alike, it’s easy to get angry, Campbell said.
Anger can be useful, and just because he’s a Christian doesn’t mean he has to back down from adversaries, he said.
“I’m not trying to be a preacher about this,” Campbell said, cracking a smile and using his regular voice — not the voice he projects from the pulpit. Outside of the church, he’s another resident of Pittsylvania County who doesn’t want to see his community change.
“I pray and read my scriptures, but that doesn’t mean you have to lay down and let someone roll over you,” he said. “Jesus turned the tables over in the temple. … Scripture says ‘Be angry and sin not.’”
