CHESAPEAKE, Va. — The two dozen or so nondescript gray, white and blue buildings lining Virginia State Route 625 could be large warehouses.
But community activist Elena Schlossberg can identify them literally a mile away by their telltale rows of backup diesel generators. The buildings are data centers.
“We’re sort of that model of how not to do this kind of development,” says Schlossberg.
All internet data goes through facilities like these: massive, sometimes multistoried warehouses filled with servers where every webpage and shred of data lives. Demand for these centers has skyrocketed in the last two years as artificial intelligence usage has gone mainstream.
Virginia is a data hot spot. It has the world’s highest concentration of data centers — nearly 600 facilities of varying sizes, including roughly 150 of the largest kind, known as hyperscale data centers. Not all residents are happy about that.
A demand for power and water
As data centers have cropped up alongside residential developments, they have become synonymous with intensive power and water consumption, as well as round-the-clock noise from cooling systems.
A decade ago, Schlossberg learned Amazon Web Services was building a huge data center, the equivalent of more than seven football fields, next to her home in Northern Virginia, and she threw herself into stopping it — unsuccessfully.
“And the data industry came and crushed us,” she said.