(via The Laws That Stop A Data Center From Coming To Your Town (or State))
Helen Messer found out a few weeks before the vote, when a developer announced plans to drop a 350,000-square-foot data center onto a 22-acre lot in Chesapeake, Virginia, a couple of hundred feet from her back yard on the other side of a small retention pond. The project would have been the first major data center in Hampton Roads, and Messer and her neighbors did not have a lobbyist, but they had each other and a church social hall where they met to organize within days of learning about the proposal.
They turned up at the planning commission, which voted six to one against the project after hearing nearly fifty residents testify against it, and then they turned up again at the city council, where the vote was seven to zero to reject the rezoning on June 17, 2025.
When the board lit up showing the unanimous vote, the chamber erupted, and Messer walked out and told a reporter she would sleep better than she had in a month. The model works, and this article explains how to do it where you live.
A data center is a warehouse full of computers that swallows millions of gallons of fresh water a day, burns through electricity at the rate of a mid-sized city, and dumps the heat, the noise, and the diesel exhaust onto whatever neighborhood happens to sit next door.
One facility can consume up to five million gallons of water every day, pulled straight from the same drinking water reservoirs that serve the surrounding towns, in a country where the Colorado River is running dry and entire counties are rationing what comes out of the tap.
The power demand is worse, because data centers are now the single fastest-growing source of new electricity consumption in the United States, and most of that electricity still comes from coal and natural gas, which means every new facility is a new commitment to burning fossil fuels for decades.
Diesel backup generators sit on site and run on the worst days, throwing particulate matter into the air that nearby residents breathe, pollution that the medical literature ties to heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. Cooling systems run twenty-four hours a day, and one Loudoun County resident measured the noise at 70 decibels on his front porch, equivalent to a vacuum cleaner that never turns off.
Julie Bolthouse at the Piedmont Environmental Council, who has spent years studying these facilities and the harms they generate, put it plainly when a Winchester resident asked her what setback distance would protect a home: “Based on everything I’ve seen from data centers, what I’ve continued to reckon is that they shouldn’t be next to homes at all.”
All of this is so a handful of companies can sell AI services that, by the admission of the people building them, may never turn a profit.
