LOUDOUN COUNTY, VA and WAYNE COUNTY, PA — Driving through eastern Loudoun County feels very little like driving around Wayne County, very little like exploring much of Northeast PA. 

Eastern Loudoun County has seen decades of concerted development. It’s the part of the county that’s been deemed “data center alley”; the county as a whole has over 250 data centers, and most of them are clustered along its built-up eastern half. The entire built environment centers on data, there, with huge, boxy buildings of neutral blues or grays surrounded by suburbia and strip malls. 

But that’s not all there is to Loudoun County. Drive west, and, as a NEPA visitor, you’ll find yourself somewhere that feels much more like home. Two-lane highways turn into gravel roads almost without warning, ducking down hillsides under the branches of overhanging trees. Small-town Main Streets boast barber shops, hardware stores and fashionable boutiques. 

That’s rural, western Loudoun County—and, just as in NEPA, keeping it rural in the face of data centers’ encroachment poses a challenge for the county’s decision makers.

Development, encroachment

The split between east and west Loudoun hasn’t happened by chance. It’s a combination of geography and policy that’s concentrated development on the county’s eastern half. 

Loudoun County sits in northern Virginia, on the outer edge of the Washington D.C. metropolitan area. It takes a little over an hour to drive from the center of Loudoun to the center of D.C., according to Google Maps. That fact of geography means urbanization spreading from D.C. hits the eastern part of Loudoun County first. 

Trinity Mills works as the conservation advocacy coordinator for the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy, a nonprofit focused on protecting and restoring wildlife habitat in the county. She told the River Reporter the county exemplifies the shift that happens during the transition from an urban area to one more rural. 

Loudoun’s eastern municipalities are still considered suburbs of D.C., she said; the D.C. metro train line has its last stop in Ashburn, with connections to Leesburg after that. However, she said, “Once you get east of Leesburg, you hit farmland pretty quickly.”

Loudoun County Supervisor Juli Briskman knows that transition point well. She told the River Reporter that, back in the ‘90s, she would see stickers reading, “Don’t Fairfax Loudoun.” Fairfax sits between Loudoun and D.C., and has a much denser housing base. 

Briskman didn’t think much about the stickers at the time—“I’m like, ‘Oh, these are just NIMBYs; they don’t want housing in Loudoun County,” she said. But everything changed when data centers arrived. “We didn’t Fairfax Loudoun,” she said. “We industrialized Loudoun.”

Scenes from rural Loudoun County, VI.

Scenes from rural Loudoun County, VI.

Scenes from rural Loudoun County, VI.

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The transitional policy area

Geography isn’t the only reason development (of data centers and otherwise) has clustered in the eastern half of Loudoun County. 

In Loudoun, zoning and land-use planning generally gets handled by county government. (That sets Loudoun apart from most communities in Northeast PA, where those decisions get made by townships, boroughs or other smaller municipalities.) In 2019, Loudoun County developed a comprehensive plan for the county’s land use and development that established four “policy areas”: urban, suburban, rural and “transition.” 

The urban, suburban and rural policy areas aim to encourage urban, suburban and rural development, respectively. The transition policy area (TPA) does something more specialized. It’s a thin strip of the county, placed around areas of particularly dense development, that acts as a buffer zone between urban and rural areas, helping stop development from crowding into the rural parts of the county. 

The TPA has helped keep development where the county wants it. However, it has its challenges—and challengers. 

“We have seen that transition policy area really picked apart and decreased dramatically because of the amount of data center applications that have been processed with the TPA,” said Mills. To make matters worse, according to Mills, data center applications within the TPA usually result in building on areas that were previously green space, with nature being cut down and paved over to make room for data centers. 

The county has been successful at keeping industrial uses out of rural areas, said Briskman. However, that’s been becoming more and more difficult as more and more data centers have been built. 

A data center that gets built in an urban area might not have a direct impact on rural life, but that data center occupies land that could have been used for other types of development, like warehouses or housing. When data centers come in—and, says Briskman, they offer $4 to $6 million per acre for developable land—they crowd out other uses, which then go looking for land elsewhere. 

The county has just seen a warehousing project out near Purcellville, said Briskman. That’s a rural town with a population of 9,000 and (as of this reporter’s visit) a charming, quiet Main Street feel. “That is not a[n] appropriate use for a rural area, to have a warehousing development there, but [the developers] can’t afford anymore to buy land where [the warehouse] should be.”

Growth, yes, but endless growth?

The word “revenue” comes up frequently in conversations about data centers in Loudoun County. Data centers have brought a huge amount of wealth to Loudoun’s government coffers and to its communities, and it shows, from the shining new firehouses to the mid-construction fields of McMansions. But the word gets brought up paired with a note of hesitation: the money’s great, say Loudoun residents, but data centers bring other considerations to think about, too. 

“It’s about balancing priorities,” said Buddy Rizer, executive director of the Loudoun County Department of Economic Development, speaking with a group of Wayne County officials and community members during a trip they took down to Loudoun County on July 22. “Gosh, the revenue’s great for us… but how do you balance that? How do you balance having the best school system in the country against additional power lines?”

“Years ago, a lot more people [bought] into the rhetoric that was being fed, of data centers decreasing our taxes and serving us economically,” said Mills, the Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy Conservation Advocacy Coordinator. “And they do, cannot underscore that enough… but I think, lately, people have really started to kind of turn around on that and push back on the continued approval and the continued out-of-control growth of the industry.”

Recognizing the state of play, Loudoun County’s government has spent years tapping the brakes on the county-wide growth of data centers. In 2019, as part of the creation of the county’s comprehensive plan, it created a map showing where data centers should and should not go. That map didn’t get adopted; but after Briskman got elected supervisor, she tried to start a comprehensive remapping project in 2021. 

As she was knocking on doors during her first campaign in 2019, Briskman said, “Folks were saying to me, ‘Hey, can we stop building these really ugly buildings?’ ‘Why, now, when I drive through Ashburn, this is all I see?’ ‘Isn’t there something else we can build?’” Briskman was first elected in 2019 to represent Loudoun’s Algonkian District, and won re-election in 2023. 

Briskman’s efforts to reintroduce the data centers map turned into the Loudoun County Data Center Standards and Locations initiative, which kicked off in earnest on February 6, 2024. Phase 1, which concluded on March 18, 2025, removed data centers as a “by-right” use in many zoning areas; now, rather than going through a routine approval process in those areas, data center developers had to apply for special exceptions. Phase 2 is ongoing; that phase focuses on establishing new policies and zoning standards for data centers and utility substations. 

Briskman, who calls the standards and practices initiative a “bureaucratic nightmare,” has pushed for the process to go faster. She’s also pushed for it to go farther. Within the past few months, she’s tried to put in place a pause on data center applications (a.k.a., a moratorium) until the county finishes the standards and locations process. She’s also attempting to undo a set of 2025 grandfathering exceptions that allow some applications submitted prior to February 12, 2025 to forgo the special exception process. 

“I don’t think it’s too late,” she said. “We have not built every inch of our developable land yet. But we need to stop, like, tomorrow. Tomorrow.”

Scenes from Purcellville, Loudoun County, VI.

Scenes from Purcellville, Loudoun County, VI.

Scenes from Purcellville, Loudoun County, VI.

Scenes from Purcellville, Loudoun County, VI.

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Community character

When Wayne County leaders visited Loudoun County, they got the chance to talk with Michael Whitlock, a general manager of a Sabey Data Centers campus. During that conversation, Honesdale Borough Council member James Hamill asked about the character of the community. 

A lot of the Wayne County residents on the trip “look at what we have where we live as tried and true community, with hospitals and infrastructure like that,” said Hamill. “This is a different type of community, I would say. [It] sounds like more of a corporate community, supported by people who may have pre-existed here or have moved here to benefit from that corporate and commercial industry.”

Whitlock disagreed. “I think you’re looking at it wrong,” he said. “This is a neighborhood. It just happens to have a booming business in it. But the cultural value of it is still there.” And a data center could be a good neighbor, according to Whitlock: he emphasized the opportunity data center jobs provided for upward mobility, the schools built with the taxes they provided. 

At the same time, Whitlock said, he didn’t care how many data centers there were in Loudoun: “We’re visitors. Because the residents were here first.”

Briskman has lived in Loudoun County since 1999. She’s watched the county grow and change from around 100,000 residents to almost 450,000, from the start of the data center boom circa 2006 to the present day. 

Have data centers changed the community character of Loudoun County? One thousand percent, she said. 

“We used to always be called a bucolic hamlet by the Washington Post. ‘Oh, the bucolic hamlet of Loudoun County.’ We are no longer a bucolic hamlet. We are, in my mind—we have industrialized the eastern half of the county,” she said. 

The bucolic character of Loudoun County can still be felt in its rural western half. Loudoun County may be known as data center alley, but it’s also Washington D.C.’s wine county. The Loudoun Wineries and Winegrowers Association counts almost 50 members; poke around Purcellville, and you’ll find a sign boasting of that distinction. 

The Loudoun Wildlife Conservancy relies a lot on grassroots efforts to protect the county’s greenspace, said Mills. The roots of that grass run deep; “We’re really lucky in Loudoun County having a population that has largely a lot of time and passion to dedicate to these kinds of things, and there’s a lot of people that really care about protecting these natural areas,” she said. 

“The community is screaming bloody murder,” said Briskman. “The community is done.”

Next installment: Some concerns have come up repeatedly in Wayne County conversations on data centers, including water use and noise. What concerns do Loudoun County residents have? And what have Loudoun County residents seen result from data centers’ construction?