The Town That Said No to Amazon’s Data Center

A neighborhood in Virginia just made Amazon back down. Here is how a four-hundred-million-dollar data center plan fell apart.

Ashburn sits in Loudoun County, about thirty miles from Washington. People call the area Data Center Alley. More of the world’s internet traffic passes through here than almost anywhere else on earth.

Early this year, Amazon bought the old George Washington University science campus in Ashburn. About one hundred twenty acres. Reports put the price at around four hundred twenty-seven million dollars.

The plan was four buildings, roughly eight hundred thousand square feet of data center. That is about fourteen football fields of servers.

Then the neighbors pushed back. Residents and students showed up at county meetings. They talked about noise, about the diesel backup generators, about the power lines, and about what the land could be instead.

Data centers use enormous amounts of electricity. In Loudoun, the county board had been growing more skeptical of new ones, and the question of who pays for new power lines, the companies or everyone’s electric bill, kept coming up.

On October twentieth, the county board chair, Phyllis Randall, announced a deal she called Project Potomac Promise. Amazon would withdraw its application. No data centers on the site.

Instead, Amazon agreed to give the county about twenty-five acres for a community arts center and an indoor sports facility, and to donate five million dollars to the county’s housing fund. The rest of the land would be rezoned for homes and mixed use, with data centers written out.

Amazon’s development chief reportedly said that, in hindsight, the company probably would not have bought the property for that purpose. The company also agreed not to take the county to court over it.

To be fair to the other side: data centers pay a large share of Loudoun’s taxes, which keeps residents’ property taxes low, and the industry says it is building its own power and cutting noise. The county is not saying no to all of them. It said no to this one, here.

Across the country, communities are having this same argument as the A I boom drives a data center building spree. Ashburn shows that showing up at the meeting still works. So the question for your town is simple: who decides what gets built next door?