Virginia is for… data centers? Residents say more and more not: NPR

Chesapeake, go. – THE about two dozen Indefinite gray, white and blue buildings border 625 from the state of Virginia could be large warehouses.

But community activist Elena Schlossberg can literally identify them with one kilometer by their rows revealing generators of emergency diesel. Buildings are data centers.

“We are in a way this model of the way of not doing this type of development,” explains Schlossberg.

All Internet data go through installations like these: massive warehouses, sometimes on several floors, filled with servers where each web page and data data degreeage. The demand for these centers has skyrocketed in the past two years, as the use of artificial intelligence has become a dominant current.

Virginia is a hot point of the data. It has the highest global concentration of data centers – nearly 600 installations of variable sizes, including around 150 of the largest, known as hyperscal data centers. Not all residents are satisfied with this.

A demand for energy and water

While the data centers have appeared as well as residential developments, they have become synonymous with intensive power and water consumption, as well as round noise of cooling systems.

Ten years ago, Schlossberg learned that Amazon Web Services was building a huge data center, the equivalent of more than seven football fields, next to her house in northern Virginia, and she launched her to stop – without success.

“And the data industry came to crush us,” she said.

Amazon is one of the many companies that have made northern virginia an epicenter for data: 13% of the operational capacity of the world data center is here.

And the demand for data increases with the proliferation of AI applications as a chatgpt. There are plans for 70 additional data centers in Virginia, a lot of the size of several football fields.

If they are built, they will consume so much power that the main public service company in the State, Dominion, is contracted to build 40 new energy -capacity gigawatts for these new centers – almost three times the current maximum power production of the state.

“Increasing it from 40 gigawatts is almost triple our whole network for an industry … And doing this for an industry is absolutely unprecedented,” said Julie Bolthouse of the Piedmont Environmental Council, a non -profit organization by Virginia Environnement.

Dan Diorio, Vice-President of State Policy at the National Data Center Coalition, a commercial group that represents developers and operators behind the centers, said that centers support everything that people do online, from the banking application to your phone to storage electronic medical files to the management of call centers of 911. And their need is only growing.

“The data center is developed as quickly as possible to respond to this growth and provide digital services on which we all count every day. And so far, we are still late,” said Diorio.

Diorio said that the regulation of future data centers should balance residents’ concerns with the economic impact of development – 24 billion dollars in capital investments in Virginia last year.

“Not all projects are the same, but I think that as it is indistinguishable, we are reactive and responsible members of the community when we propose these projects (and) working to respond to these concerns of the community,” said Diorio.

The rise of a Nimby movement

The concerns concerning the power and the use of land, as well as the cost of these data centers, have galvanized not only those who are worried about the environment, but also an unwavering movement without my share.

And Schlossberg has become the essential person for the organization. She destroys the places of which she has received calls: “I spoke to people of Boardman, Oregon; Individual, Missouri; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Maryland; Georgia.”

One of these places is Chesapeake, in the southeast coastal of Virginia. Residents of this 250,000 city learned a data center project project just a few weeks ago, and they were affected.

Helen Messer’s Chesapeake house is backwards to a small water retention basin. On the other side of this pond, a few hundred meters away, is the site of the data center offered.

It is the most worried about the possibility of a constant noise of the center cooling systems, which generally run 24 hours a day to prevent servers from overheating.

“How will I relax with something that buzzes over 24/7?” She asked.

A few days following the proposal to become a public, the residents of Chesapeake held a meeting in a social hall of the church to prepare their resistance. A representative of the chapter of the Sierra Club of the State answered questions about the data centers elsewhere while the residents were concerned about water consumption, pollution and, of course, noise.

The developer behind the data project, Doug Fuller, also presented himself.

He obtained a welcome less than the baguette of the residents, including Messer.

“Why can’t we move the data center in your neighborhood?” She shouted, with a handful of applause.

Fuller rejected, arguing that installation would be a net positive for Chesapeake.

“As a developer, I will create an asset for our city. Tax revenues will be in millions of dollars,” he told an unconvinced crowd.

Fuller has also said that his efforts would help capitalize on a major public investment. Over the past two decades, the cities and counties in southeast virginia have struggled to diversify their savings in tourism and naval construction. Over the past two years, several of these municipalities I gathered and spent tens of millions of dollars for high -speed optical fiber networks in the hope of attracting high -tech companies such as data centers.

Lee Damore, a resident of Chesapeake, helped to carry out the accusation against a proposed data center, in particular by covering the nearby districts in the courtyard “without data center”.

Ryan Murphy / Whro

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Ryan Murphy / Whro

However, hundreds of residents of Chesapeake implored local leaders by email and in person to deny the proposal.

The resident Lee Damore, who lives at a few blocks from the proposal of the data center, has set up red panels “without data center” around his neighborhood before a meeting of the municipal council in June.

“Once they are built, there is nothing you can do.

Damore and the rest of the opposition from the anti-dressed center appeared in force at the meeting of the Council, speaking one after the other against the data center for more than two hours.

“I think there are viable areas that it could go in our city and could flourish in our city, but I do not think that something near a residential area is (viable),” said Amanda Newins, member of the Chesapeake municipal council, before the vote.

Dozens of opponents of the data center offered in Chesapeake have packaged a city council meeting in June. Meg Lemaster, one of the organizers of the Resistance, shows stickers opposing the project.

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When the Accounting Committee has enlightened to show a unanimous vote blocking the data center, the council chamber broke out with cheers.

Messer and his neighbors were dizzy when they left the town hall.

“I’m going to sleep better than I have done for a month,” she said.

While the resistance rose to the national level, more projects of data centers are delayed or rejected squarely – 16 projects at the national level between May of last year and last March, according to a study carried out by Watch Data Center for non -profit.

But a central voltage remains: the use of AI applications soar. And the data centers to manage all of this must go somewhere.