Dwight Baugher’s sun-dappled orchard is an hour’s drive and a world away from the congestion of northern Virginia, where tar-ribboned exit ramps and windowless warehouses make up what is known as “Data Center Alley.”
There, in that concrete expanse, Data Center Alley houses what is casually referred to as “the cloud,” which isn’t a cloud at all, but regimented rows of interconnected computer servers, miles of fiber-optic cables, and a massive network of cooling pipes – the physical backbone of our digital lives.
At the farm, the focus is dirt. The Baughers make their living growing apples, blackberries, and other fruit. They also host a pick-your-own business that attracts customers from across the region.
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“The cloud” has revolutionized the way people communicate, work, and share information. But some worry that growth comes at the expense of communities and livelihoods.
For them, “innovation” is the new cut-your-own tulip field that should be ready for tourists this spring. “Future planning” is deciding how to split farm operations among Mr. Baugher’s children, each of whom is eager to become part of the fifth generation of this family to tend these rolling, irrigated hills.
So it came as a shock when Mr. Baugher learned last summer just how tied he was to the rapidly expanding data center industry, two counties over.
It’s not that Mr. Baugher is isolated, or some “hillbilly in the Montana mountains,” as he puts it. He has a smartphone and “about 1 billion” junk emails he’s never deleted. His business, with its online presence, is the sort of data-based farming operation that modern agriculture requires. He knows he, too, is connected to the cloud.
Still, “I chose farming because I wanted dirty hands, a clean mind, and a simple, prehistoric kind of lifestyle,” he says.
But Data Center Alley now needs a giant 70-mile-long, 500,000-volt extension cord, and the preferred route runs right through his 150-year-old family-owned farm.
A New Jersey-based power company is asking Maryland’s Public Service Commission, which regulates utilities here, to let it build high-voltage transmission lines and towers to send electricity from Pennsylvania to the Maryland-Virginia border. Its proposal is at the request of the regional grid operator, PJM, which says the new lines are necessary to ensure power stability in the region. And the data centers, grid managers say, need more electricity.
After he heard about the plan this past July, Mr. Baugher called Jack Reese, a grain farmer across Maryland Route 140, to see if he knew anything about the proposed lines, which were also slated to cross Mr. Reese’s land.
Mr. Reese called his neighbors. They called their state and local leaders. Within months, meetings about the power lines were attracting more than 1,000 residents – a huge crowd in rural Carroll County. At the beginning of this year, residents had joined a growing, national debate around the United States’ energy-ravenous technological revolution.
Northern Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. In terms of megawatts, it is more than twice the size of the next-largest market, Beijing, according to data reported by Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate firm.
In fact, the state warehouses 13% of all reported data center capacity around the globe, and one-fourth of the capacity throughout North and South America, according to a recent state report.
But more data centers are sprouting up outside Chicago; Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin; and Social Circle, Georgia. They are also being built in Springfield, Nebraska; in Phoenix; all across Texas; and of course in Silicon Valley in California.
And they will need electricity. A lot of it.
Back home where encroaching data centers loom
I know this part of Maryland well. It is where my father grew up, where my grandparents had their farm, and where I still spend Christmas. My aunt and cousin still grow food and keep bees in Carroll County. Not much happens here that makes the news, and that’s how folks here like it.
So the fact that the breathtaking speed of data center expansion is impacting this region says a lot. Indeed, travel from the Baughers’ orchards, across data center-saturated Loudoun County, and down Interstate 95 into horse country, and what becomes clear is that the controversies surrounding these encroaching centers are not just about energy and industry.
They are about what we decide is progress, and how we imagine our future.
When I was growing up in Baltimore in the 1980s and ’90s, the highways around Dulles Airport in northern Virginia felt like a no-man’s-land. The drive there was long and boring, I remember, a landscape of office parks and nondescript industrial sites.
But there was a revolution taking place under that tan-and-gray suburban sprawl. The U.S. Department of Defense was already creating early digital infrastructure to connect the military with research institutions in the area.
Then, at the beginning of the 1990s, the dawn of the digital age, network providers took advantage of those fiber-optic cables to build one of the country’s first physical “on-ramps” for the new World Wide Web.
The biggest of the early internet companies, most notably America Online, now AOL, set up headquarters there in the mid-1990s. One tech company brought in another, which created a snowball effect of more infrastructure, faster connections, and more companies.
The first generation of these centers tended to be integrated into business parks, explains Julie Bolthouse, director of land use for the Piedmont Environmental Council in Virginia, a group that works on sustainable development. Banks and other institutions generally maintained their own data centers, as they did the boiler system or the HVAC plant.
About 15 years ago, however, computing began to take up increasing amounts of space and electricity, says Jon Hukill, spokesperson for the Data Center Coalition, an industry membership association. Businesses started to “colocate” their internet operations, renting space from third parties to house their servers and other equipment.
By the late 2010s, this sort of third-party data center was expanding rapidly in northern Virginia. New companies built warehouse after warehouse of what were essentially high-tech computer hotels.
It’s important to pause here to recognize the magnitude of that evolution. Think about every shopping website you’ve visited this week. Think about every credit card app, online banking account, food ordering service, smart appliance, and navigation system you may have used. Indeed, try to think of something you did that wasn’t connected, in some way, to the digital world.
This is how the 21st-century economy works, Mr. Hukill says. Yet those of us scrolling on our phones or sending emails or streaming Netflix or asking ChatGPT to write a term paper often forget that the digital world is also physical. The information behind the pixels lighting up our screens does not simply manifest from the ephemeral.
“We’re seeing more and more digitization of the economy, and all that increased data goes somewhere,” Mr. Hukill says.
There has not been a single day in 14 years that a data center has not been under construction in Virginia’s Loudoun County, says Michael Turner, an elected district supervisor. Today, data centers consume more than 25% of the power the state of Virginia needs every year. “At this point, there’s just so much fiber connectivity that it’s the most interconnected spot for the internet in the world,” Ms. Bolthouse says. “It’s the Wall Street of the data center market.”
Seeking retirement quietude, finding plans for extensive power lines
Bill Wright felt these ripples of expansion soon after he moved into his retirement home – a sweet, gray-sided bungalow in an “active adults” age-55-and-up community in Gainesville, Virginia.
The Navy veteran had worked as a data analyst for the Department of Homeland Security for 17 years, and he had done his homework before picking this lot in Prince William County. The 750-acre Heritage Hunt community, with its walking trails and landscaped cul-de-sacs, was bordered by a national park, the Manassas National Battlefield, and the Conway Robinson State Forest, along with homes and horse farms.
“I’m an educated consumer,” he says. But “There’s no way I could have predicted that 102 individual homeowners would get together and sell their lands to become a data center. Nobody had ever heard of that.”
He’s been flabbergasted by what’s happened since 2021. First, a dozen neighbors who lived near his community got together and agreed to sell a combined 800 acres to a land-seeking data center developer. Then, another 90 neighbors joined in what is known as an assemblage, or a legally bound-together group of properties, to sell their combined land.
Some told reporters that they were motivated by the asking price of nearly $1 million an acre. Others said they didn’t want to be left holding ruined property values as up to 27 million square feet of data centers went up around them.
Developers, meanwhile, saw opportunity – and progress. This was a chance to create a new hub for tech innovation, and it would be the largest concentration of data centers in the country, with some 37 centers spread across some 2,100 acres – more than twice the size of New York’s Central Park.
The developers promised local officials huge revenues. Overall, the data center industry provides $5.5 billion in labor income and $9.1 billion to Virginia’s gross domestic product annually, according to a recent report.
The Digital Gateway project would be a relatively new sort of data center: a “hyperscale facility,” or massive data center designed for cloud computing and the next frontier of our technological revolution – artificial intelligence. Hyperscalers are typically owned and operated by the leading cloud providers and tech giants, like Amazon, Meta, and Google. Proponents say their economy of scale helps both with technological needs and with energy efficiency. But they still have the energy needs of a small city.
The power requirements for the proposed Digital Gateway site, for instance, are estimated to be about the equivalent of the needs of 500,000 households. (Prince William County had around 160,000 households in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.)
Mr. Wright could not believe so many homeowners agreed to do anything like this together. Or that the local board of supervisors approved such a project in what is known as Virginia’s “rural crescent.”
And this wasn’t the only data center project near him, Mr. Wright realized. Dozens were being approved and constructed in Prince William County. They were replacing wooded lots left and right. They were built behind townhomes, where residents told Mr. Wright they had to sleep in their basements because of the noise. They were planned within a stone’s throw of a school for children with disabilities.
Mr. Wright joined a group of other concerned residents to fight the industry’s expansion. He started making spreadsheets of the zoning authorizations, property values, and who was making new, large donations to local politicians.
He also supported a group of residents that sued to stop the Digital Gateway project. That case is still going through the court system, but meanwhile, construction on other data centers is ongoing.
“There’s nothing like a lot of outrage and a lot of free time,” he says.
Data centers: massive, power-hungry – and essential
Mark Gribbin is the chief legislative analyst for Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, a mouthful of a department that is known by its acronym, JLARC. His job is to conduct deep-dive research, as requested by lawmakers, into complicated topics in front of Virginia’s legislature. This might mean K-12 educational funding or gun violence. In 2023, it was data centers. At the time, lawmakers were fielding increasing numbers of calls as they considered a slew of new bills that would either regulate or support the data center industry. And many of their constituents were upset.
“Instead of them being in Data Center Alley around Dulles Airport, where nobody was bothered by them, they started building out into new places and butting up against housing developments,” Mr. Gribbin says. “They also started building a lot of transmission infrastructure.”
This past December, his team published a comprehensive report about data centers in Virginia, the conclusion of a year’s worth of study. They conducted hundreds of interviews, worked with economic modelers, and reviewed multiple policy scenarios. He says his findings didn’t make anyone completely happy.
Data centers have an “essential role in daily life, business and the economy,” his report found, and are a “critical part of the world’s digital infrastructure.” They also had the potential to bring huge amounts of money to local communities.
But “The industrial scale of data centers makes them largely incompatible with residential uses.” His researchers found that a third of data centers were now located near homes. “And industry trends make future residential impacts more likely.”
Data centers also regularly use water for their cooling systems. (Think about what happens when your laptop overheats and multiply that by about a million – that’s what these centers need to manage.)
Although the current situation is manageable, the report found, the water use for data centers is expected to grow – and environmentalists point out the watersheds of these states are already under stress.
Meanwhile, according to the JLARC report, the demand for electricity in Virginia will likely double in the next decade, mostly because of data centers.
“It’s not like a steel mill where you could get a lot of byproducts coming directly out of that mill, like toxins,” says Brent Hunsinger, a river steward with the Friends of the Rappahannock, an environmental organization in Fredericksburg, Virginia, about an hour south of Mr. Wright’s home. Mr. Hunsinger is worried about new and growing data center expansion here, as well.
“With data centers, the effects are more distributed,” he says. “There’s water; there’s the electricity demand, also the transmission lines.”
Leveling sycamores and disrupting streams in rural Maryland
Betsy and Michael McFarland live where the road stops and the woods begin in a part of Frederick County that policymakers have decided should remain rural.
They bought their home 20 years ago in this pastoral part of Maryland after they decided to leave the crowded Washington suburbs. It is not only their sanctuary, Ms. McFarland tells me, but also their primary financial investment.
She still has a hard time believing that Public Service Enterprise Group, the New Jersey power company planning the high-voltage transmission lines through rural Maryland, can just take it from her.
“To suddenly see this outside company from New Jersey basically being able to come in and just propose a plan, and one that completely overrides any of the planning of the county or the state – I just didn’t think that could happen,” she says.
The proposed Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project, the name for the power line proposal, would run directly behind her deck. The giant sycamores and towering pines would be leveled. The concrete footings for some of the planned 150 towers would plunge into a streambed by her property.
Officials for PJM, the regional transmission organization that manages the local grid, say the lines are necessary for overall energy stability in the region.
A lack of energy production is, indeed, an issue in Maryland. But a primary need listed in PJM’s bid for the power line project was Virginia’s data centers and their growing need for energy.
“If there weren’t data centers in northern Virginia, they wouldn’t be building this line,” says Chris Tomlinson, a Maryland state delegate from Carroll County, who is a Republican. “This line is getting built because northern Virginia desperately needs power to keep up with data center growth.”
According to a recent Deloitte report, the average American has 21 devices connected to the internet, from stoves to phones to televisions. But, Ms. McFarland asks, is the only answer a spaghetti of high-voltage transmission across the country?
“I’m not anti-technology,” she says. “I get that there’s progress. But the more I learn about data centers, the more I wonder, ‘Are we being thoughtful, as a nation, about our growth?’”
There could be other options for fueling technological advancements, she says – a point also made by some researchers who study data center energy consumption.
Doug Vine, director of energy analysis at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, says there is innovation around everything from locating smaller, next-generation nuclear power plants by data centers to improving the electricity transmission capability of existing lines. Data centers could be located in places like the Great Plains, he says, where there is plentiful wind energy.
Mike Jacobs, who leads the climate and energy program at the national nonprofit Union of Concerned Scientists, says that sometimes, from an engineering perspective, transmission lines are the simplest solution – although few residents want them.
Data centers are now using up 20% to 25% of Virginia’s electricity, he says. There can’t be growth in consumption without finding ways to fuel it.
But he agrees that there is a need to rethink the entire energy system, which was designed to move energy to individual users, not to industrial sites using the power of a metropolis.
“For folks in the industry, this is the new thing that we’re trying to fit into our old ways of doing things,” he says.
“My grandfather wanted the land to always be used for farming”
In the early 1990s, as tech revolutionaries were building the foundations of our present digital world, my grandparents decided to put their 300-acre farm in Carroll County into an agricultural preservation trust.
This designation meant that the farm, with its rolling, pastel fields, would be productive, food-growing land forever.
The resale value plummeted, of course, since developers looking to build aluminum-sided townhomes pay more than commodities farmers.
The designation also meant there would be tight restrictions on what could be built on the land. There could be no cell towers, no solar arrays, no new houses for anyone other than my father and his siblings. Each of them was allowed to claim 1 acre on the property to build their own homes.
But my grandfather wanted the land to always be used for farming. And my grandmother, who was passionate about the environment and open spaces, wanted to keep the land surrounding her 1800s brick farmhouse beautiful. Their children, like many others here, agreed.
Carroll County has one of the highest numbers of acres of preserved farmland in the country – a fact that locals repeat with pride. But the proposed transmission lines are slated to cross many of these properties.
When my grandparents died, we spread their ashes on these fields and gardens. My dad and his siblings sold most of the property to the neighboring farmers my family called the “Reese boys.” That meant Jack Reese and his brother, who are around my father’s age. Jack’s sons, Eric and Josh, also farm.
They had been leasing my grandfather’s property for years. My cousin and my aunt, who use regenerative practices to grow greens and other vegetables on the adjacent property, approved of the Reese boys’ farming practices and declared them “good people.” So the family gave them the first chance to purchase the farm. That was worth more than trying to maximize profit on the open market.
I went to see the Reeses on this reporting trip. The new high-voltage transmission lines would cross their original home farm, down the road from my grandparents’ old property.
The towers would rise higher than the American flag that flies over their grain bin. They do not like it. They’re worried about what the voltage will do to their equipment, and they, too, believe it’s wrong that an out-of-state company can just take the land that Jack and his brother’s grandfather owned before them.
But they are stoic, too. Things happen – deadly tractor incidents, grain price plunges, droughts, floods, and, yes, transmission lines.
That, of course, is why stewarding land is so important. Land is the constant. Nobody can make any more of it.
There’s something about that farmer’s understanding of finitude that puts a particular lens on the data center industry.
Data centers are the physical manifestation of our ideals of perpetual growth and expansion, our desire for more technological capability, higher stock values, faster processing, more data, more ease.
There are powerful companies that make mind-boggling profits from our want of digital more. But even that cannot be separated from us. You might be reading this story online. I used the internet for my research. I used Google Maps to drive through Data Center Alley and to the homes of the people I interviewed.
And indeed, few of those individuals said they were anti-data center. They just wanted a different approach, something that felt more aligned with other, less commercial principles. They wanted a recognition that some things exist in another value system, one that recognizes that land and history and ecosystems are worth protecting and tending not because they grow, but because they are.
Like Ms. McFarland in Frederick County. “It’s a moment to just pause for a second, given the ramifications of the decisions we’re about to make,” she says. “You can’t undo what’s about to happen if they do this.
“It would mean some of our best farmland in Maryland is gone,” she continues. “It means this beautiful space that is protecting that creek down there, that feeds the Monocacy River, that whole ecosystem, is gone. So, then, is that the right decision? Maybe we need to pause a little bit and make sure we’re thinking through how this is going to work.”
