America's feverish AI buildout has a dress rehearsal, and it's in a Virginia suburb that's been living the "data center future" for two decades. "Is this the future of America?" reads the headline above a deep dive into the issue by Lauren Feiner at the Verge. Feiner traces how Loudoun County near DC used to be onetime home base of AOL and the "physical manifestation of the internet," the place where most US internet traffic got routed through. Then came the dot-com bust of 2000 and the question of what to do with all those all big empty buildings and miles of fiber-optic cable. Solution? Turn them into data centers. Today, Loudon is known as "Data Center Alley," packing some 250 server farms into a slice of its 515 square miles and transforming the local budget in the process. The new AI boom has communities elsewhere pondering whether to follow suit.
In Loudon, data centers now throw off so much tax revenue that they more than cover the county's operating budget, have helped fund 22 schools in 15 years, and pushed homeowners' tax rates down even as property values soared. But the boom's side effects are now impossible to tune out: constant low-frequency noise, diesel generators that shouldn't be running on bad-air days, transmission towers slated for backyards and near schools, and escalating fights over where new lines and facilities should go. Feiner speaks with Loudon residents and sums up their takeaway for communities considering data centers: "Know what you're getting into. That means making sure existing laws and ordinances will apply to data centers, that local utilities have a plan to ensure enough capacity for the expected buildout, and that neither data centers nor the infrastructure needed to power them can be built too close to homes or schools." Read the full story.
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