GAINESVILLE, Virginia — In July, Prince William County supervisor Bob Weir died from colon cancer. Weir, who had served on the board of supervisors for two years, was from Gainesville, the area of the county with the most data centers, and he had advocated regulating the supercomputing warehouses. The facilities have sprouted up in this Virginia county at a dizzying speed: Thirty-three campuses have already been built here, and 31 more have received local approval.
When he took office in February 2023, Weir championed the creation of an advisory panel to weigh in on issues of data center growth and noise. When he died, the group was putting the finishing touches on a proposed noise ordinance cracking down on round-the-clock low frequency sounds from data centers.
But in October, before an election for his successor had been held, Weir’s former colleagues on the eight-member board of supervisors held a surprise vote and disbanded that panel, undoing Weir’s legacy and gutting years of work residents had put in to mitigate the impacts of the supercomputing boom. The vote took place without a single member of the advisory group present.
What was supposed to be a run-of-the-mill board meeting turned into a contentious back-and-forth featuring allegations of deceit and the exploitation of Weir’s open seat.
“I do feel that’s cowardly,” Board Chair Deshundra Jefferson said to Supervisor Victor Angry about the vote, which he had unexpectedly brought to the floor. “I do feel like you want to get rid of this group, but you don’t want them here to defend themselves or say anything.”
“I don’t talk to them, they don’t have input in this,” Angry replied. “This is our decision.”
But two weeks after supervisors disbanded the group, the board voted on a noise ordinance Supervisor Kenny Boddye had drafted himself, without consulting the acoustical experts under contract with the county who had worked on the advisory panel’s recommendations. Boddye’s version was notably weaker than the advisory group’s version; it increased noise limits and jettisoned a more sensitive method for measuring sound. It was approved over the objections of Jefferson and dozens of residents attending the meeting. Weir’s 70,000 former constituents still did not have a supervisor on the board representing their interests.
“It feels like we wasted three years,” resident and former advisory committee member Dale Browne said in an interview. “It’s not a fair fight. It’s regular people fighting Amazon, and the fight was thrown away because of political chicanery in our county.”
The votes for Boddye’s noise ordinance were applauded by local economic development and data center-boosting groups like the Data Center Coalition, which counts Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft as members.
“We are proud of the work our partners at the Data Center Coalition have done to ensure the county adopted a fair, workable and bipartisan solution to this issue,” Chamber of Commerce Chair Ross Snare said after the votes, calling them “important milestones for our business community.”
The story of Prince William County foreshadows what could happen in communities across the country as the data center industry balloons beyond its historic hubs in Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley. It’s one example of how local politics, so far, is struggling to bring to heel an industry that is impacting residents’ health and peace of mind.
The fast-growing industry helmed by the richest corporations on the planet — Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft — brings with it immense amounts of cash for land deals, local taxes and campaign contributions that can prove irresistible to local officials.
Angry and Boddye have together received more than $313,600 in campaign donations since 2023 from data center developers and land owners contracted to sell to the industry, according to a POLITICO review of campaign donation disclosures filed with the state.
Angry did not respond to requests for comment. Boddye said accusations that he acted at the behest of industry are untrue. “They didn’t want any new noise ordinance at all,” he said. “If I were bought by the data center industry, I would have voted everything down and not put forward anything new.”
The web of connections between lawmakers and the data center industry goes deeper than campaign contributions, though: One former supervisor in the county was forced to resign a few years ago after his property was included in the footprint of a proposed supercomputing campus. He had collaborated with neighbors to sell their homes to the data center developers, creating what the commonwealth attorney ruled was a conflict of interest. He later joined a data center lobbying firm, which also now employs a current member of the county school board. That body has been under fire for remaining silent as data centers are built next to schools. A former chair of the board of supervisors is an attorney representing landowners interested in selling their properties to data center developers.
For Jefferson, the current board of supervisors chair who took office two years ago after campaigning against data centers, the lack of progress regulating the supercomputing hubs here has been frustrating.
“The data center industry is very powerful, and they certainly have been flexing their muscle, but not all money is good money,” she said in an interview. “Right now, we have one community that is really impacted, and I worry as more data centers come online, here and in other communities, we will see more of these negative impacts.”
Prince William County residents I spoke to attested to feeling plenty of those impacts already — the constant low hum of industrial-size fans that keep their children awake at night, for one, and the health risks associated with the data centers’ frequent generator use, for another. One recent study from researchers at the California Institute of Technology and University of California Riverside found that if diesel generators at Virginia data centers emit just 10 percent of what their pollution permits allow, costs from asthma and other respiratory diseases will total $50 million annually, affecting communities as far away as Florida.
“It’s one thing to want to win the AI war with China,” Jefferson continued, “but you need to think about the human impact on communities.”
Northern Virginia has been home to data centers almost since the dawn of the internet.
Technology companies were first attracted to Prince William County’s neighbor, Loudoun, after a Department of Defense program in the late 1990s helped install super-fast internet cables underground in Ashburn, near Dulles Airport.
Located an hour outside of Washington, D.C., Prince William County was largely a bedroom community for the nation’s capital. It wasn’t attracting the same caliber of economic development projects targeted at communities inside the beltway.
In an attempt to change its fate, Prince William County officials instituted a Data Center Overlay District in 2016 meant to incentivize development in areas with the electric and fiber-optic infrastructure the industry needed. Data centers could be built there “by right,” without any special permits or hearings from the local government. Building plans would be fast-tracked for review by county staff. The changes were meant to make the county “a serious player in the market,” Christina Winn, county executive director of economic development and tourism said at an October board of supervisors meeting.
But from the beginning, the overlay district included not just land zoned as industrial but also pockets meant for businesses or mixed-use development. Many of its borders ran right up against residential areas.
The plan worked. Just three years after its creation, much of the readily developable land in the overlay district was taken by data centers. In addition, when projects have been proposed outside the overlay district, it hasn’t stopped planning officials and the board of supervisors from eagerly approving required special permits and rezoning requests.
That trend only accelerated during the Covid-19 shutdowns, when the nation’s reliance on cloud computing surged as video streaming and video calling ballooned, and as an economic downturn tanked planned housing developments in the western part of the county. Data center developers nabbed the land for so-called “hyperscale” hubs with multiple towering buildings to house thousands of racks of supercomputer chips that support tech companies as they perfect generative AI models and continue to grow their cloud computing businesses.
Dan Diorio, Virginia policy director at the Data Center Coalition, acknowledged that data centers have become larger and more industrialized over the past few years, but put the onus on local governments to ensure their zoning rules keep up: “It’s important to remember that data centers are only going to build and develop where they are legally allowed to do so,” he said.
Today, Prince William County is the fastest-growing data center market in the country, on target to outpace Loudoun. The 80-foot tall buildings tower over townhomes and span multiple football fields each. The 33 completed data centers here cover 6.8 million square feet. Once the rest of the approved data centers are built, they will cover another 9.8 million square feet. Some of those data centers are right next door to or across the street from elementary schools and retirement communities, after county officials approved applications that rezoned residential parcels as industrial.
Most data centers are in the western part of the region, near crucial electric infrastructure in Gainesville and Manassas. There, developers have bought out local businesses for exorbitant amounts. Last month, a popular Gainesville garden center closed its doors after a data center development firm paid $4.2 million per acre for the 38-acre property, totalling $160 million.
As data centers’ size grows, so do their noise and pollution. The computer chips behind AI and other types of computing that are housed in the facilities can overheat easily, just like any laptop. To prevent that from happening, the warehouse-sized data centers are topped by industrial-sized fans and HVAC systems, which can be incredibly loud. The buildings also each have dozens of industrial-sized generators to keep computer chips online even when they can’t draw power from the electric grid. A handful of data centers in Prince William County have more than 90 diesel generators onsite, according to state permit records reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News.
Those generators are one cause of serious concern for residents here. There are no rules about how close to homes the schoolbus-sized generators can be, despite the fact that diesel is a notoriously dirty fuel, categorized by the EPA as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” When diesel burns, it releases cancer-causing pollutants, as well as soot and smog-forming nitrogen oxides, which can cause and exacerbate lung and heart conditions.
Pollution from diesel generators is just one reason, along with noise, why state auditors at the Joint Legislative Audit Review Commission, known as JLARC,called data centers “largely incompatible with residential uses” in a 134-page report released in 2024 examining the industry’s impact in Virginia.
Yet data centers could soon be relying on their diesel generators more often due to policy changes at the federal and state levels. The EPA this spring updated its guidance allowing the dirtiest diesel generators, which don’t come equipped with pollution controls, to run not just during blackouts but also to help avoid them during times of peak demand on the grid. Separately, Virginia environmental regulators issued new guidance in January expanding the times when dirtier diesel generators can operate. The agency changed its definition of a “sudden and reasonably unforeseeable” emergency to include “scheduled” or “planned” outages where data centers get up to 14 days’ notice that their electricity will be cut off.
The 2024 JLARC report found that more than one third of data centers in the state were located within 500 feet of residentially zoned areas due to “inadequate local planning and zoning.” Auditors specifically pointed to Prince William County’s Great Oak neighborhood as an example of poor zoning and land use, noting that the data center was allowed next door to the residential area, despite local land-use principals stating industrial areas should be separated from neighborhoods by buffers like commercial zones.
Both the noise and these pollution concerns have pushed residents here in Prince William County to organize, first by talking with data center operators, like Amazon, and then by pushing the board of supervisors and state representatives to act.
The Great Oak subdivision of nearly 300 homes had been a quiet neighborhood when Carlos Yanes moved in right before the Covid-19 shutdown. He knew Amazon was constructing something beyond the trees behind his house, but imagined it might be an order fulfillment center bringing jobs to the area.
But it was a three-building data center that brought far fewer jobs. The JLARC report found that a 250,000-square foot data center may only employ 50 full-time workers. When the facility turned on in 2022, Yanes could hear it on his patio, and even more loudly inside his home, as the low-frequency sounds vibrated the walls and amplified the problem. He and his wife moved their one-year-old’s crib to the basement to protect him from the noise. But they had no space to move the bedroom for their then-five-year-old, who would jolt awake in the middle of the night crying from recurring nightmares, imagining the loud droning was really aliens hovering over the house in a UFO. The walls still vibrated even after Yanes spent $20,000 replacing the windows of his home.
The noise is worst when the data center’s nearly 100 backup diesel generators turn on. They are tested for 15 minutes each month, but have run for an extended period of time at least twice that Yanes can remember. During one of those this summer, he could smell the fumes inside his house, too. But Yanes is stuck, unable to afford to move, and worried about how much worse the problems will get when the other 14 data center complexes within a half-mile of his home come online.
“I just don’t know what we are going to do,” he said. “As a father, it’s very disappointing to know that I can do nothing.”
Arianne Govoni-Young’s townhome is even closer to a different Amazon data center. The Village Place townhomes are just 100 feet away from the supercomputing hub, which currently sits dormant, awaiting connection to the electric grid. Data centers were “not something I was worried about” when she moved in nearly 20 years ago. Back in 2007, the area beyond her balcony was empty but zoned for commercial uses, and residents heard about developers with plans to build a shopping center next door.
By the time Govoni-Young realized the area had been rezoned as industrial during the pandemic, it felt “like there was nothing we could do to stop it.”
She asked local officials how they would mitigate noise and pollution; they responded that Amazon would build a tree buffer on the property line. Today, the buffer is a gap-tooth smile of saplings that barely reach midway up the walls of the complex.
“The plants don’t even block the view, so how will they block the rest?” she said. “Those skinny trees can’t do anything.”
Amazon spokesperson Nicole Morales said the company has worked to reduce noise impacts in Great Oak by installing new equipment to reduce overall sound levels and low-frequency noise. The company said it has been “helping the businesses that supply our data centers to redesign their products to significantly reduce sound levels received at properties adjoining data center facilities.”
Yanes tried calling the police once when the data center got too loud; there wasn’t much they could do, they told him. When the county’s advisory panel was putting together its noise proposal, he helped take sound measurements.
When the board of supervisors killed the noise ordinance, Yanes said, “it was heartbreaking.”
“Just knowing that there are so many families in the county now that are at the beginning phase where I was when the data center turned on, and understanding that they are now going to have this major negative life change and there is nothing to give them or us a little quality of life back,” he said.
“We’re committed to being good neighbors and will engage with residents to address concerns,” Morales said.
The 2024 JLARC report outlined specific recommendations for state and local officials to take to minimize data centers’ impact on residents. But state officials have shied away from taking action, saying data-center zoning is a local issue.
Gov. Abigail Spanberger (D) has broadly been supportive of efforts to ensure data centers don’t drive up electricity prices and do rely on clean energy, but she has explicitly said she does not believe the commonwealth should crack down on what she sees as more local issues.
“I feel it is about ensuring that localities have the tools they need to make good decisions,” she said at a POLITICO-hosted event in December.
General assembly members from across the commonwealth have similarly taken interest in data centers’ driving up electricity prices due to their immense power needs, but few state lawmakers have been interested in looking at more local pressure points such as quality-of-life and health issues for residents.
In the 2025 session, most of the 33 bills addressing data centers introduced didn’t even receive a hearing.
As a result, much of the burden for regulating data center growth in Prince William County has fallen to local government, but this is also the level of government where governing on the issue is most difficult because of competing interests.
Virginia law prohibits local governments from placing restrictions on pollution or power consumption from data centers. But there are two primary ways that local governments such as Prince William County can restrict the growth of data centers: zoning rules and board votes to approve individual data centers.
In Prince William County, residents say geography is partly to blame for the local government’s failure to rein in development. Most data centers are in the western part of the region, near Gainesville and Manassas. Yet they have been approved with only the support from supervisors representing larger eastern parts of the county whose constituents won’t be impacted because those areas aren’t as close to critical electrical and fiber-optic infrastructure.
But financial incentives have become a bigger problem in Prince William County’s efforts to restrict the growth of data centers, too. As the number of the facilities increased, so did financial ties between developers, landowners in the county looking to sell their land for a hefty price tag and current and former county officials.
It started with a project called the Digital Gateway, a more than 2,000-acre campus that would put some 37 data centers on land abutting not just homes but also Manassas Battlefield National Park. Compass Data Centers and QTS jointly proposed the project in an area of the county then reserved by zoning rules as a “rural crescent” where industrial, urban and commercial projects would not be allowed. If built, the project would become the largest data center corridor in the world.
Shortly after it was proposed in 2021, then-board of supervisors member Peter Candland announced he was collaborating with local landowners to jointly sell properties, including his own, to the project’s developers. Property owners in the group stand to make approximately $1 million per acre if the deal goes through, according to local news reports. Candland resigned from office in December 2022 after the commonwealth attorney said his potential financial gain from the massive data center amounted to a conflict of interest for all votes related to any supercomputing facilities.
“I felt like I couldn’t represent my constituents if I couldn’t vote on any data center projects,” he said in an interview.
Days after Candland resigned, his former colleagues on the board of supervisors dismantled the county’s rural crescent protections that would have otherwise prevented data center development.
In spring 2023, as the remaining supervisors were considering the actual vote to approve or deny the Digital Gateway project, three members received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from landowners in the same agreement as Candland to sell their property to Digital Gateway.
Those donations came in largely through the Coalition for a Brighter PWC, a political action committee funded with donations from landowners who stand to financially benefit from the Gateway project, according to state disclosure forms. Boddye and Angry’s campaign funds received $7,500 from the group. A third supervisor received $2,500.
In April, the board approved the Digital Gateway, despite county planning staff’s recommendation to reject the project. Boddye abstained from the approval vote for the project. But he has voted for the county to continue spending money defending the vote in court, where it has been subject to litigation from neighbors alleging supervisors did not follow proper procedures in approving the project after a whirlwind 27-hour-long public meeting.
Mac Haddow, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said the Digital Gateway approval and subsequent legal fight is the most extreme example of “the cascading effect of a predatory industry that just wants to bully their way into deciding where they want to place a data center campus when they ought to be looking at where is the best place to do it.”
“There are plenty of places with space in Virginia and West Virginia where you wouldn’t have these same impacts, but they want to be near a transmission line and they are willing to spend the money — and our local officials are willing to run over residents to make it happen,” he said.
If Haddow and his neighbors win their legal challenge, it won’t kill the Digital Gateway Project. But it would require the board of supervisors to redo the vote that approved it. Continuing to defend the county in the lawsuit is expensive, Haddow said, but it helps supervisors avoid going back on record supporting a project that has made national headlines for its size and proximity to National Park lands.
“We think it’s politically driven, and that’s why they are just wasting taxpayer money and using it against their own citizens,” he said.
Other data center landowners and developers have donated to board members, too. Boddye has received more than $128,000 in campaign donations from them since 2023. Angry has received more than $185,600 from developers over the same timeframe, including more than $121,000 from groups associated with a single data center development known as Lexora Park, according to POLITICO’s analysis of campaign finance forms. The development has yet to be brought before the board for approval but is controversial because it would put some five supercomputing buildings next door to a retirement community.
Three other members of the board have collectively benefited from more than $70,000 in donations connected to another project called Mid-County, according to POLITICO’s analysis.
Sometimes, data center applications before the board are supported by current and former county officials who work for the industry.
Shortly after he resigned, Candland was hired by LSI Communications, a lobbying firm that advocates on behalf of residents selling land to data centers. Sitting school board member Erica Tredinnick also works for the firm. While the school board does not vote on land-use decisions, its members have come under fire for not speaking out against data centers located near schools and transmission lines serving data centers that cross school property.
Another former board of supervisors chair, Corey Stewart, works as an attorney representing landowners interested in rezoning their properties to cash in on data center land deals. Neither Tredinnick nor Stewart responded to requests for comment.
Candland did not want to talk about his work for LSI, saying, “I don’t want to get into the employment part of this.” He said he is no longer employed by the company and is “not part of that industry anymore,” though he acknowledged he stands to personally benefit if the Digital Gateway survives its court challenge.
Bill Wright, a former member of the advisory group, noted that Boddye has a history of accepting industry campaign cash. That includes two $20,000 donationsin December from two developers of data centers proposed in close proximity to schools and homes.
“It’s fair to ask whether the large donations he recently received from data center developers were a quid pro quo for his advocacy for a toothless noise ordinance,” Wright said.
In some ways, this is the oldest story in politics: Lobbying and campaign donations distort incentives and, many argue, put the public interest below that of corporations and wealthy individuals. But the data center problem is stickier.
First, these companies are nearly insatiable: As the number of data centers have grown, so, too, has their size and the amount of space they need, with many projects more accurately described as computing campuses with multiple buildings rather than just a single data center. Even older data centers are revamping to increase supercomputing capacity, which can mean they require more power, and more noisy chillers and polluting generators. That’s different from other types of developments where supply and demand help limit their numbers. A community can only sustain so many grocery stores. A single woodland can only support so many logging companies. But data centers are crowding around Prince William County’s preferable electric and fiber optic infrastructure to satiate an unending global demand.
Second, residents are split; While many residents are opposed to the data centers because of quality of life issues, there are some who are hoping to sell their land to the companies behind the data centers, often turning a big profit in the process.
Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said data centers have been successful at wooing local officials across the country with increased tax revenue. Officials in rural communities, in particular, often support data centers as a means of expanding their tax base.
“Data centers are primarily extractive. … Just because you live near a data center doesn’t mean you have access to faster AI or internet, but it might mean you have more noise or pollution in your neighborhood,” she said. “Local officials may see gaps in tax revenue that they want to fill, but they have to compel their constituents to feel the same way, and in many places, they aren’t doing that.”
Some municipalities have quelled community opposition by securing “community benefit funds” from developers who promise millions of dollars that can be spent on local amenities, like new high school football fields. Such deals are an “emerging trend,” standing in stark contrast to Prince William County and the Digital Gateway lawsuit, she said.
She called the county a “cautionary tale” for other communities that might now be faced with proposals for new data centers.
“If data centers and local officials don’t engage local citizens in a proactive way and let people feel like they are actively involved in data center development and zoning, that’s when you see this resistance,” she said.
Boddye insists he is “absolutely not” influenced by the campaign donations. Rather, he said, he was initially drawn to data centers as a means to expand the county’s commercial tax base.
Indeed, in fiscal 2023, data centers accounted for 7 percent of Prince William County revenue, largely from business, personal property and real estate taxes. In Loudoun County, which had roughly double the number of data centers at the time, data center revenue accounted for 31 percent of county revenue. Taxes from data centers can be particularly attractive to localities because the supercomputing facilities don’t require as many public services as other developments of similar sizes.
While much of Prince William County is wealthy or middle class, Boddye noted, the area has a number of elementary schools where a majority of students receive federal food benefits and are on Medicaid.
“We have schools and social services that we need to catch up on funding, and we can’t keep going to residential taxes to pay for all the needs in our county,” he said. “Data centers, at least at the outset, were a lucrative way for growing our commercial tax base.”
Boddye says his thoughts on data centers have evolved, and noted that he directed the county’s planning board to revisit the overlay district as far back as 2021, though no changes have been made.
Still, Boddye has voted in favor of some of the county’s more controversial projects. That includes Devlin Technology Park, which was rezoned from a residential area to an industrial one, allowing it to be used by data centers despite being just 80 feet from a neighborhood and adjacent to a school. The project is among those mentioned in the JLARC audit as an example of data center approvals that contradict other local long-term plans to keep the same areas residential, or make them more walkable.
Now, thanks to those votes, the neighborhood of Amberleigh Station will soon be surrounded by data centers on three sides. Resident Elspeth McCormick said she feels like her home has become a sacrifice zone, with local officials “only interested in making a quick buck, enamored with the tax benefits while selling us out.”
“No one cares that our homes are our biggest financial investments, they only care about the data center investment,” she said.
McCormick has become increasingly concerned that her neighborhood will soon become unlivable. She remembers feeling hopeful when the board of supervisors created the advisory group to examine the county’s noise ordinance and zoning rules, and having those hopes dashed when the group was disbanded and its ordinance stripped down.
“If they cared about the citizens, they could adopt these new limits and try to make things right,” she said.
“Everyone says local jurisdictions should be able to do what they want, but they can’t because the industry comes in and kills the work of local citizens,” said Kathy Kulick, a member of the disbanded Prince William County advisory panel. Kulick’s home would be impacted by the Digital Gateway project.
She bristles at the idea that she and other members of the group are mere NIMBYs, saying opposing data centers located near neighborhoods is her “patriotic duty.”
“People say, ‘Well, you use AI on your phone, and you benefit from that stuff, so you’re just a NIMBY,’” she said. “But they don’t understand that these things are industrial. I have steel in my lawnmower, too. That doesn’t mean I want a smelter in my front yard.”
