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LOUDOUN COUNTY, VA and WAYNE COUNTY, PA — Mid way through their trip to Loudoun County, Virginia, a group of Wayne County elected officials, business leaders and community representatives sat in a crisp conference room in a Sabey Data Centers facility, attempting to explain the rural character of Northeast Pennsylvania. 

At one point, Jocelyn Cramer, a Wayne County Commissioner, stood up from the conference room table and pulled up a picture of Wayne County on her phone. She showed it to Michael Whitlock, the Sabey campus’ general manager, who was leading the discussion. 

“It’s too beautiful to be building on anyway,” Whitlock said, seeing the photo. “You’re going to get a lot of money for it, I’m going to be honest with you, but some of this stuff just is not worth it.”

Both Whitlock and Buddy Rizer, the executive director of the Loudoun County Department of Economic Development, made similar points during their discussions with Wayne County’s leaders. Data centers can be an immensely profitable industry, they said—but it’s an industry with tradeoffs, and a community looking to welcome that industry in should do so with its eyes wide open. 

Data center alley

Loudoun County has a self-proclaimed identity as ‘data center alley.’ There’s over 250 data centers in the county, clustered along its county’s built-up eastern half, the physical ‘alley’ itself. As early as 2016 (according to Rizer), Loudoun County had become the largest data center market in the world. 

Rizer, who joined Loudoun County in 2007, met Wayne County leaders in a conference room in the upper floors of Center Loudoun Station, an upscale shopping development in the heart of the county’s data center-fueled build out. When he joined the county, he told the assembled crowd, the data center industry appealed as its path toward a brighter economic future. 

“I don’t think we were hoodwinked,” said Rizer. “We proactively went to try and make this happen: because we were broke; because we couldn’t have full day kindergarten; because our employees were paid well below the average wage, and because we were short on everything. We couldn’t afford to build new schools. So it was proactive.”

Twenty years of development later, and that bet has paid off. When Rizer joined Loudoun County, 81 percent of its property tax burden fell on residential properties; today, that’s 49 percent, and the valuation of the county’s homes has skyrocketed during that time. Data centers generate 45 percent of the county’s general fund revenue while occupying less than three percent of its land. 

The growth of data centers in Loudoun County has had knock-on effects on its economy. Rizer counts 52,640 jobs in the county’s economy that depend on data centers; while roughly a third of those jobs are temporary construction jobs, due to the pace of construction in the county, the workers in those fields can hop from site to site while staying continuously employed. 

The growth of the county’s economy—and of its tax revenue—has allowed the county to re-invest in its community. 

“What has it allowed us to do?” Rizer asked. “Well, in addition to building 32 new schools…15 fire stations, six libraries, miles of new roads, [and] over a thousand acres of parks and recreation, we were able to greatly increase the number of county employees to meet the needs of a growing community and give them a raise to get them to the average of this region. We put a penny of our tax rate to transportation and we put a penny of our tax rate to affordable housing. And we did all that at the same time that we lowered the tax rate on our citizens by 48 cents on the dollar.”

That all sounds incredible. Right?

Data centers abound in Loudoun County.

RR photo by Liam Mayo

County comparisons

Eastern Loudoun County feels nothing like rural Northeast Pennsylvania. The scenery that passed by the windows of the tour bus (as Wayne County’s expeditionary force was shown around data center alley) had three features of note, repeated in sequence with only minor variations: clean, upscale strip malls; trees and greenery arranged as if planted intentionally to work around humanity’s impact on the landscape; and data center buildings, imposing, rectangular structures in various shades of corporate grey and blue. 

It’s not unpleasant, inherently. “You can see, I mean, as the trees start to mature and the [berm] comes in, it’s not the dystopian world that Atlantic Magazine wanted you to think it was,” Rizer said, talking over the tour bus’ crackling PA system. (Earlier in the day, he’d shown the party an article from Atlantic titled, “Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers;” the article leads off with a grim, grey-scale picture of the Ten Mile Island nuclear power plant, and calls Rizer “the architect of this labyrinth.”) Still, it’s not Wayne County—nothing like it. 

Twenty years of data center development have reshaped Loudoun County’s built environment as well as its economy. While one data center, as is proposed in Clinton Township, PA, wouldn’t necessarily cause that level of change, it’s another story with the 51 data center buildings proposed for Archbald Borough, PA (the number taken from a March Spotlight PA article). 

Both Rizer and Whitlock stayed realistic about the impact of data centers on a community. The money they bring in can be great, but it’s not a universal positive; whether data center development is right for a community is that community’s choice to make. 

“I think the communities that are in the best place are the ones that are prepared and are setting the table, [saying,] ‘We need to define our own opportunity. Do we want them? Question one. If we do, where do we want them?’ And you want to put them in a place where they’re not impactful to residents; you want to put them in a place where you don’t have to build a lot of infrastructure, where power lines exist and sewers and those kinds of things,” Rizer said. 

Loudoun County chose data centers—but even so, there were impacts it failed to anticipate, impacts it’s just now starting to work with. The rise in property values helped homeowners and the county coffers, but it made things hard for people just trying to live in the county. 

“Most of our [county] employees can’t afford to live in Loudoun,” said Rizer. “That’s the reality.” The county has pivoted, diverting a penny in every dollar it collects in tax to funding affordable housing, but that pivot is a recent shift: “You can’t correct 15 years of not doing housing in a short period of time,” he said. 

Whether it’s impacts to housing or environmental implications or any of the other questions that data centers ask, a community’s ability to consider them and forsee them is important. Rizer meets with tour groups like the one from Wayne County frequently; he told the group he holds such meetings two to three times per week. He holds those meetings, he said, because Loudoun County had to learn how to become the data center capital of the world first hand; it had no one to look to as it navigated that process. 

“Twenty years ago, I would have loved to be able to go to somebody and say, ‘Hey, I need to learn from what you’ve done,’” said Rizer. “But we were the first, so we didn’t really have the opportunity to do that. So now I try to make myself as available as possible.”

Next installment: Loudoun County officials emphasize that communities should have the ability to choose in encouraging data center development. But what happens when that choice is out of a community’s hands? And what tools does Loudoun County have available that Northeast Pennsylvania might not?