The Data Centers Are Coming: Ep. 1 – Planting a Flag

Reggie Rucker: [00:00:00] All right. I can’t even look. I’m having a hard time like sort of wrapping my mind around. These are just…

Elena Schlossberg: And look through that way. I mean, they just, it’s endless action.

Danny Caine: Oh my god. That’s a cemetery right here.

Elena Schlossberg: That’s what I mean. Yes. This is, this is what I mean.

Danny Caine: This parking lot is filled with like barricades and construction dudes and electric vans and then wow. Whoa.

Elena Schlossberg: I mean, this is totally representative of what is — you have real death and then you have environmental death. It’s like, I’m really honestly surprised that more people are not — that when people understand it, they don’t just give up, because it would be easy to just ’cause, like, how do you fight this? But you know, I mean, from my perspective, we’ve come a long way.

 

INTRODUCTION: THE DATA CENTERS ARE COMING

Danny Caine: Welcome to Building Local Power, “The Data Centers Are Coming.” I’m your host, Danny Caine. In this six-part series, we’re reporting to you directly from the front lines of a fight consuming countless communities across the United States: the question of data centers and where to build them, what kinds of resources they’ll use, and who gets to make those decisions. These are not decisions in the abstract. The questions of where, when, and why to build data centers are questions that weigh heavily on everyday people’s lives in numerous ways. We’re here to tell that story and to search for some answers about how to do it right.

It’s worth saying off the bat that I am a proud AI skeptic. Of course, I’m aware that what we call AI refers to a broad range of technologies, some of which I used in the creation of this very podcast, namely things like automated transcriptions of interviews and spell check. But what has come to be known as generative AI is much more troubling to me. I’m an author, and I recently learned that one of my books, How to Resist Amazon and Why, was used to train Claude, Anthropic’s AI interface, without consent from me or my publisher. Here’s a technology that claims to be able to write, illustrate, design, and even think on its own, ostensibly replacing the labor of human writers and artists using my human writing to develop skills that could eventually replace the work I’m so passionate about.

Ethical questions about generative AI are worthwhile and important, but they’re for another podcast. In the process of learning more about this technology, I found another compelling story, one with immediate and concrete local consequences. While I feel lost and powerless when thinking about what to do about generative AI in general, this other story is all about immediate local action: what’s happening with data centers?

The massively popular technology of generative AI requires staggering amounts of computational power, a need that’s only exacerbated by AI companies’ relentless pursuit of scale at all costs. The power needs of this technology are so vast that few Americans at this point have been spared the consequences of the race for resources to power the tech, whether they use or care about the technology at all.

I have felt hopeless more times over the past few years than I really care to admit. The blatant, in-the-daylight rise of corporate power and political authoritarianism have left me feeling like there’s nothing I can do to fight back. What better metaphor for the rise of corporate power than a physical manifestation of a corporation? A huge warehouse with unprecedented thirst for electricity, water, land, and other resources. Talk about corporate power.

Many people are facing structural manifestations of corporate power — power in multiple senses, mind you — in their own backyards. I include myself in that, of course. In late 2025, my colleague at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Ron Knox, published a galvanizing article in The Nation about the wave of populist anger directed at data center development.

At the top of the article was a picture of a hulking, bland, apocalyptic looking building called the Cologix COL4 AI-ready data center. The caption said COL4 was located on a seven acre campus in Columbus, Ohio. I, too am located in Columbus, Ohio. Consulting Google Maps, I discovered that COL4 was less than two miles from my house on the north side of the metro. It’s across the street from my dentist. I drove up there to see it. It took me less than five minutes, less than the time it takes me to drive my son to his piano lessons in the same area.

Standing on an abandoned sidewalk looking at this huge facility, I felt an urgent need to learn more. So I hit the road. I wanted to see the heart of Data Center Alley, a corner of Northern [00:05:00] Virginia that’s known as the worldwide capital of data centers. I wanted to learn what it was like when data center development grows unchecked. I wanted to see what Big Tech’s dream for the American landscape looked like when these corporations were given a blank check. So I hopped in the car and pointed myself east.

An early stop on my journey was the home of Greg Pirio. A longtime resident of Sterling, Virginia, Greg lives in the heart of Data Center Alley. He’s heavily involved in neighborhood organizing efforts to hold a corporation called Vantage accountable for their data center’s noise and the lies they told about it.

He lives in a row of attached town homes in a sleepy alcove of this outer ring, Washington D.C. suburb. I’d call it quiet, but it’s not. Greg’s modest town home is in the literal shadow of a huge Vantage data center.

 

GREG PIRIO: AT HOME IN THE SHADOW OF A DATA CENTER

Greg Pirio: Well, our, our major impact is all the noise that it makes. This is the only data center in Loudoun County that has its own power plant. It’s not connected to the grid. It has gas turbine engines that make a lot of noise. Today is relatively quiet, but some days at my doorstep there are 70 decibels, which is in far excess of the county code for that. And then in addition to that, they have backup diesel generators that go on occasionally and make even more noise. Okay. It’s almost like having a couple of jet planes going off all the time near your house. And the, and, and the facility is only 150 yards from my front door.

Danny Caine: The data center noise causes all kinds of headaches for Greg and his

neighbors. Not only political nuisances, but actual health impacts.

Greg Pirio: People don’t hang out in front of their house as much anymore. Neighbors have

complained to me about headaches. At one time, I was taking care of my daughter’s dog and I

went for a walk, and I got a headache from the noise a quarter mile away. There’s somebody

who’s put mattresses up against his bedroom window.

And now he’s bought plexiglass inside his house that he puts up, which costs him $250 per

window so at night he can sleep easier. Some of the neighbors with kids whose bedroom

windows are near have complained their kids having a hard time to sleep. There’s one woman

who has come to our meeting who has had brain surgery, and she says, this gives her terrible

headaches.

Danny Caine: Greg mentioned that people don’t hang out outside anymore, which got me

thinking about how that impacts the community feel of the neighborhood. Not to mention the

potential for organizing.

Danny Caine: Like I’m thinking about, especially in terms of what you said about the power

and importance of neighborhood organizing.

If you have less people on their front porches, all

Danny Caine: of a sudden that work becomes more complicated and difficult. Right, because

so much of the fabric of a neighborhood is just like running into each other outside.

Greg Pirio: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Danny Caine: And so like the data center, it’s like in a way preventing neighbors from even

meeting or talking to yourself, right?

Greg Pirio: And then the sound blows it. You know, there are people who live half a mile

away who have showing up to meetings because it’s hard to predict how the sound flows.

That area is predominantly Hispanic, and now we have. Hispanics, many of them whom are

recent immigrants or children of recent immigrants, and now with all the anti-immigrant

policies of the federal government, it’s hard to get them to go to meetings. And they’re fearful.

They’re fearful. That’s an important dynamic that we have to solve too.

Danny Caine: Yeah, and that’s the government decisions. Limiting community engagement

on several levels. ’cause you’ve got the federal integration policies and then you’ve got the

local people building the data center.

When I asked Greg about how this loud data center ended up in his front yard in the first

place, he told me about a planning process that he claims was full of misinformation based on

what he heard. He says the data center was never supposed to be this loud.

Greg Pirio: We’re asking for our county supervisor, Sains and the at large Phyllis Randall to

have a meeting with us with representatives of Vantage, because we are hearing also that

Vantage says that they were gonna be connected now within three years to the grid.

But we don’t trust them at all. I reached out to our state, my state senator and his office, tried

to find out from Dominion Energy when that would occur and. They said, oh, we can’t

discuss that because it’s private. Between Dominion Energy, which is the electrical supplier

here, and with our client Vantage, they didn’t tell us that they were gonna have a power plant

[00:10:00] on site.

They showed us a building of which much smaller and that there were only diesel engines on

the far side of it within a few months. They got approved a much bigger one, and it has diesel

engines on both sides and has a power plant. It feels like bait and switch.

Danny Caine: This will come up again and again in our investigation.

The planning processes for these data centers is often opaque and designed to exclude the

public shell companies. Unpublicized meetings, corporate misstatements and misleading

claims are all common elements of people’s stories about fighting data centers. I wonder if

this will become even more common as opposition to data center projects grows across the

country. To Greg, this is all even more reason to get it right.

Greg Pirio: I grew up in Southern California when we regularly had smog alerts. I lived in a

town that had a steel mill. I know people who died from air pollution, who had asthma and all

that sort of thing. The thing about data center, it sounds all great, all this stuff that can be

done, but this is almost like a second industrial revolution. And so we really need to be able

to regulate how this happens and make sure that human values are in place.

Danny Caine: The view from Greg Pirio’s front stoop is dominated by that vantage data

center. Even on a quiet day, there was a deep industrial hum in the air. When I was walking

around out there in that corner of Sterling, it was always clear that I was very close to

massive and powerful industrial facilities.

It felt like standing near an airport. I knew there were many places like this in Loudoun

County, Virginia, which has fast gained a reputation for being the data center capital of the

world. A combination of factors including proximity to Washington DC, high capacity

electric grid infrastructure and local politicians in deep throttle of big tech in the data industry

have led to a huge change in the landscape of Loudoun County.

What was once semi-rural, far-flung suburbs of the nation’s capital have become heavily

developed industrial land. The building local power team wanted to see it firsthand. So we

enlisted the help of local activist Elena Schlossberg.

 

A DRIVING TOUR OF DATA CENTER ALLEY

Elena Schlossberg: So I have been on many an adventure in Data Center Alley. Okay. So,

uh, you’ll get the flavor of it.

Danny Caine: Elena is ready to talk data centers to whoever will listen deeply passionate

about the issue. She founded the advocacy Group Coalition to protect Prince William County

in 2014, aiming to prevent Loudoun County’s data center boom, from spreading to adjacent

rural Prince William. In the decade plus since Elena has become central to the data center

fight in Northern Virginia, along with my producers Ilana Nevins and Reggie Rucker.

I met Elena on a breezy day in January, 2026 in an Aldi parking lot in Haymarket, Virginia.

We climbed into her Ford Explorer and off we went for the Elena Schlossberg tour of Data

Center Alley.

Elena Schlossberg: When my husband and I bought our property in 2000, none of this

was here. There was a gas station and a McDonald’s, and that was it. This all appeared years

later, so it was much more rural, uh, which is why we bought here. So Prince William

County. Serves as a critical resource for a drinking water supply for about a million people in

Fairfax, Eastern Prince William Alexandria. And that’s because Prince William County is

very swampy, which I think is why it sort of got a reputation of being less than maybe

because it started out nobody wanted to live here.

Danny Caine: Our first stop on the tour was an Amazon web services facility in its

associated electric infrastructure. A campus that galvanized an early part of Elena’s activism

and organizing.

Elena Schlossberg: What we are about to drive by is the beginning of how we discovered

the kind of power that data centers required. To your left is a substation, and that substation

was built for an Amazon campus, which was hidden from the community, the application.

And you see that still today, that NDAs, non-disclosure agreements are. Utilized by your

planning staff, by local government, by state government, and it’s a way for the data centers

to stay hidden. This is the Amazon web services campus that triggered a massive extension

cord. That’s what we called it, because that’s what it was.

And you see how close these homes are to this AWS campus on Rose Lane.

Danny Caine: It’s hard to explain to you, listener, just how much these buildings dominate

the surrounding areas, standing on the sidewalk in front of people’s homes. The only way to

describe this Amazon complex was that it was looming over us, and it’s not even one of the

big ones.

These older data centers could be built like this [00:15:00] because the tech companies took

advantage of how unprecedented the technology was and the fact that municipalities and their

residents weren’t ready to define or contain them.

Elena Schlossberg: Data centers had no definition, so they were the same as like a Best

Buy computer store, so they could build anywhere basically with little to no oversight.

Danny Caine:Of course, it’s now widely known that data centers require exponentially more

resources than a Best Buy, and they’re only getting bigger. The current generation of data

centers are much, much larger than this, already huge AWS facility, and they’re sprouting up

everywhere across data center Alley. Later in our tour, Elena drove us by one of those huge

construction sites, all cranes and workers and buzzing activity. The site already had patriotic

decorations.

Elena Schlossberg: Okay, so I want you to take a look. See that American flag? Yeah.

Okay. Because data centers are patriotic and what you will see when we go through data

Center Alley, this is the antithesis of democracy, what we are experiencing. Just wanna say

that. And when we go through Data Center Alley, now, they all have them

Danny Caine:Later in the drive Reggie brought up a question about jobs. The question is

more than relevant, data center projects often pull massive tax breaks from local

governments, ostensibly, based on the promise that these projects create jobs.

Reggie Rucker: Say more about what that looks like and like why it’s a problem. There are a

lot of people that’d be, oh, well, isn’t there something about the age of industry that was good

for us?

Elena Schlossberg: I don’t know. Look at Pennsylvania and look at the industrial era of

the steel mills. How did that work out? These are robber barons on ster, like, hold my beer,

20th century robber barons. Let me show you how you absorb entire public utilities, local

government, state government, federal government. So once you understand and what this

industry is actually doing, then you cannot unsee it.

It’s like coming out of the matrix. So. The jobs, what jobs? Construction jobs. I’ve been in

land use almost 25 years. The jobs that economic development talked about historically were

the jobs on site, like Target will provide onsite hundreds of jobs.

You look in a data center for such massive buildings. Why are the parking lots so small?

Well, they’re all computerized. The people that are in the data centers are just, you know,

watching the computers, making sure that the air conditioning is correct, that the humidity is

correct, that the servers are operating.

So maybe a campus of 500,000 for each building might have, you know, like that campus

over in Haymarket. Those are, that’s a small campus. Maybe each building has 10 workers.

They don’t bring jobs and construction jobs are temporary jobs. You’ll see when we get into

data center alley buses that all like literally say construction.

They bring their teams with them. They have got it down to a science. They build the walls

on site, or they bring them, they’re all prefabricated. That’s the danger of also putting all your

eggs in this one basket is what happens. When this industry changes, how do you repurpose

these behemoth buildings?

So they’re not the jobs. And what you are hearing about now are all these college graduates

who are struggling to get jobs. They’re not bringing the jobs, people are losing jobs.

Danny Caine: Data centers are well known for their power needs. These huge and powerful

computers not only use a lot of electricity themselves, they require constant cooling in order

to function.

If power ever goes off, the machines overheat and the whole thing shuts down. I’ll pause right

here to share a thought. The whole dialogue around data centers and electricity hinges on the

idea that they can never, ever shut down. If you ask big tech companies, it’s absolutely

verboten for these to turn off ever.

I feel like I don’t hear the same urgency around power needs for say, hospitals, but is it really

more important for chat GPT to have more reliable electricity than ventilators? The amount

of electricity needed is truly wild. Later in this series, we’ll talk about Memphis, where Elon

Musk is planning the world’s largest data center.

The plan facility will use two gigawatts of power. That’s enough to power 1.5 million homes.

That’s enough to power all the households in the city of Memphis almost six times over.

[00:20:00] The consequences of hyperscale data center power demands are enormous. One

such consequence is that the electric grid in Loudoun County is oversubscribed, and any

added capacity is already claimed for years to come. That means data centers and the

corporations that build them have to get creative. Much to the detriment of the communities

these data centers are in.

Elena Schlossberg: So we’re gonna drive by a vantage campus that doesn’t wanna wait for

power. ’cause now it’s a seven year wait to get connected to the grid. And so what data centers

are doing is they’re creating these like bridges of micro grids using gas turbines, which are

akin to a jet engine.

Imagine living next to that. And so. Okay. Maybe you don’t care. Maybe you’re willing to

sacrifice somebody else’s quality of life ’cause it doesn’t affect you personally. But you know

what? When the utility bills are doubling and tripling, maybe then you’ll care.

Danny Caine: The data center in Greg Pirio’s front yard didn’t want to wait for grid power and

that’s why it’s generators are noisy enough to give Greg and his neighbors chronic headaches.

It’s worth noting why exactly. Data centers need so much power. The internet runs on data

centers, of course, and has done so for years. But new AI technology requires exponentially

more computing capacity, often referred to as simply compute. And the need for evermore

compute has led to the invention of new data centers called hyperscalers.

Why the demand for all this compute? A few of the biggest AI companies, anthropic open ai,

Google and the like, are currently in an arms race to build the most powerful large language

model AI systems. These companies are perhaps better known by their products. Open AI

makes chat. GPT Andro runs Claude and Google has incorporated Gemini into basically all

of its products.

At least for now, these companies have decided that the best way to build a more powerful

model is simply to build bigger models. LLMs are powered by huge data sets that are

analyzed for patterns and outputs. Like Claude or Chat GPT are based on that pattern

analysis. The bigger the data sets, the more powerful the model.

So the companies need more and more computing power to handle ever larger data sets. Not

only are the data sets larger, they’re also sloppier. According to Karen Hao’s definitive book,

Empire of AI earlier, AI data sets like the one Anthropic built in part by stealing my book,

were focused on curated high quality data.

As the AI scale race heated up the luxury of curating data disappeared in AI models.

Basically ate the whole internet according to how OpenAI built chat GPT on articles and

websites that had been shared on Reddit and received at least three up votes on the platform.

By the time chat GPT-4 rolled around data needs were so much higher that OpenAI gobbled

up whatever they could find on the internet, scraping links shared on Twitter, transcribing

YouTube videos, and cobbling together a long tail of other content, including from niche

blogs, existing data dumps, and a text storage site called pastebin. That’s how you get issues

like Elon Musk’s grok, spitting out simulated child pornography.

Some of the biggest AI companies no longer care about the quality of data they feed their

models, motivating these corporations even more than simple market share, is the fact that

each wants to get to general artificial intelligence first. That’s a tricky term to define, but if

you ask them, it’s the endpoint of ai, a self-aware, truly intelligent machine. Each company

thinks they’re the only ones that can handle AGI Responsibly.

Each company thinks all the other companies will use a GI for nefarious means, and so

they’re each desperate to scale up until they’re the ones that reach whatever a GI means.

That’s how we get to a place where these companies can’t build data centers fast enough.

That’s how we get to a place where there’s not enough electricity in the world to power this

effort.

That’s how you get to a single industry completely remaking the landscape of Northern

Virginia. That’s how you get to what we saw as we dramatically climbed a Virginia Highway

off ramp into a landscape I can only describe as apocalyptic.

Elena Schlossberg: Okay, now we are entering. You wanna get your cameras out, we’re

going into the belly of the beast.

We are going into data center alley, where everything you will see is data centers. So when

you go over this overpass, everything in front of you is data centers. As far as the eye can see,

and this is 26 million square feet

data center development, and this is all joking aside, a mental health crisis for people that are

looking at this and thinking about their one investment and terrified that this is what is in

front of them. Noise. The constant noise. [00:25:00] It’s awful. The construction of data

center development, it’s the last thing…

Danny Caine: Everything is just covered in dust.

Elena Schlossberg: Yes.

Danny Caine: These cars are covered in orange dust, like a, like post nine 11, like ash. This

Elena Schlossberg: is like apocalyptic. So these are like getting to three story, two and

three stories. ’cause don’t forget, a data center story is 37 feet tall. So when they say, oh, we’re

only one story, it’s not really one story.

Danny Caine: Every bit of the landscape here is shaped by the data center boom, including

cemeteries. After circling around a data center alley for a few deeply unsettling miles, Elena

steers us towards Tippets Hill Cemetery.

 

TIPPETS HILL CEMETERY

Elena Schlossberg: When we talk about impacts, it goes from the beginning of when

people get married. These churches in Old Town, Manassas have an Amazon campus behind

them and it is awful. And then all the way to death, nothing is sacred.

I just lost my mom in January. I say just it feels like, just like an awful, always feel like just in

January of 2023, she’s buried. Not far from me. This beautiful cemetery that is surrounded by

two conservation easements. The second one is just recent, but I picked it because I knew

there would be no data centers and that she would love it.

And I tell you, not for everybody, but for me, and I’m sure other people when they go to visit

someone that they really loved, like it’s a sacred moment. It, it really is. And you’ll see the

best of the worst. And then the worst of the. So Tippets Hill is the best of the worst. It’s a

historical African American cemetery, but it also, um, is still active in that there are still

burials that occur.

There are people still bring flowers, and so that is the part of the Vantage Data Center

campus, and they’ve put up a s they kept a buffer around it, so it is. It is the best of of the

worst because when we get into Gainesville, you’ll see how atrocious it can be.

Danny Caine:This brings up a question for me. Big tech companies will often toss some

relatively small benefit towards the communities that they’re building in, like rehabbing a

public park or like Vantage building an obelisk in the parking lot at Tippe Hill Cemetery. I

ask Elena what her take on these deal sweeteners is.

Elena Schlossberg: vantage, I think. Understood. Definitely the industry is very conscious

of pretending to look like they care. We’ll give you a park, we’ll buy you computers for your

kids. At some we are gonna pollute their air and chat. GBT may want, you know, convince

them to, you know, jump off a second story window, but we’re gonna give you some tablets.

So, you know, there’s definitely an effort to. Do that. So Vantage, and it’s actually, for them,

it’s like cheap pr. They put up an obelisk and then they keep some trees. It’s like when you

hear the data center industry talk about, we pay our electricity, we pay our fair share. Well

like, do you pay your electric bills? I pay my electric bills. I don’t expect an award or a prize

and I don’t make anybody else pay for it.

Danny Caine: Even though Tippets Hill represents allegedly the best case scenario for data

centers encroaching on sacred ground with Vantage’s minor upgrades to the site, it’s still

shocking to see a small historic cemetery in the middle of, well, all that.

Danny Caine: God, that’s a cemetery right here!

Elena Schlossberg: That’s what I mean. Yes, this is, this is what I mean.

Danny Caine: This parking lot is filled with like barricades and construction dudes and

electric fans and then Wow. Whoa. Runs the cemetery and like what was their reaction to,

Elena Schlossberg: I think this was the best they could get. And trust me, like you still

see, uh, some trees are out. I mean, but look at all the vines, all the like, they haven’t planted

new, it’s just full of brush and like these trees are dying. I mean this is totally representative of

you have real death.

And then you have environmental death. It’s like, I’m really honestly surprised that more

people are not, that when people understand it, they don’t just give up because like, how do

you fight this?

From my perspective, we’ve come a long way. Uh, you guys are here, right? And that’s what I

think, and that’s why I keep doing the tours because at some point [00:30:00] before it’s too

late,

Reggie Rucker: Of course, maybe outta the barn like here on this one. But to let this be a

cautionary tale, like don’t, like, don’t let your community be next.

Elena Schlossberg: Yeah, the cumulative impacts that all of this is having on everyone,

whether you live next to it or not, we’re all gonna feel it one way or another. And of course,

you know, people who were enslaved do not have actual markers. You’ll see very specifics.

Stones throughout here that are where people were buried.

Reggie Rucker: I was thinking about the gross disrespect, but like rest in peace. Oh. Like, I

mean, no, you don’t. You don’t get that. You will get no peace.

Elena Schlossberg: No, there’s no peace for the living. There’s no peace for the dead.

Yeah.

Danny Caine: Standing in that bizarre and frankly disturbing cemetery, it’s easy to feel

overwhelmed, but as widespread as data center construction is spreading in parallel is

resistance to ai corporation’s attempts to transform the American landscape. There’s some

evidence that this resistance has surprised people with that its strength and spread.

Elena Schlossberg: They miscalculated, they underestimated the level of anger that the

community was feeling watching their entire future be industrialized.

 

THE RISE OF THE RESISTANCE

Danny Caine: The anger against the spread of data centers has coalesced into a wave of

community organizing around the issue. Elena makes an interesting point in saying that the

coalitions forming around data centers are broad and effective because the issue is so new

that mainstream partisan talking points have yet to form, allowing people to make up their

own minds.

Elena Schlossberg: There was already a foundation for people to align on this issue, and

so that has been the superpower. I was in a meeting last year with a group that was definitely

progressive and they were just now coming to this issue and one of them said, you know, it’s

great because nobody’s party has told them what to think. Correct. And I was like, exactly.

And that’s where the data center industry missed the boat. They just miscalculated. Imagine

the wealthiest corporation in the world. Imagine they get to utilize your public utility to take

your property. It is a feeling that is hard to describe. It makes people really, really, really

pissed off because we work really hard, whether you own a quarter of an acre, whether you

own an eighth of an acre, whether you own 10 acres, it’s yours. You worked hard for it.

The property we bought was overgrown with brush and ivy and you couldn’t even walk

through it. My husband rehabilitated that property tree by tree by tree. It took him over five

years. Allergic to poison ivy. So he’d cut a vine and then he’d come back, bought this

50-year-old tractor, he labored, and we’re supposed to give that up for a transmission line. Oh,

no, no, no, no, no. Let me just put on the old Rambo makeup, like I’m there with him and I

am like, like a peacenik.

But I mean, we worked really hard. Nobody built that house. We built it. Me pregnant was on

top of, you know, like the second store. I mean, like my husband left for four months after

nine 11 to live in a tent and had an eight week old baby. He came back to that house and that

it was done. I had a bed in the living room, people are connected to their homes. This isn’t

just a house and people are fighting for it, whether you live in a town home and the

transmission light’s gonna back up so that you can almost hang your laundry line. Or you’re

on 10 acres or more. It’s everywhere in between. And then you have to pay for the

transmission line.

I mean, come on, nobody should be okay with that and then add in the diesel generators that

are gonna be kicking on. It’s all of it is so wrong, and that’s what people are fighting.

Danny Caine: The fact that this is all happening in Virginia brings up striking layers of

meaning and history. People have battled over this land since the United States. Were just an

idea. There’s the Battle of colonists stealing the land from indigenous people. There’s the

battle over [00:35:00] slavery and African Americans human rights standing in Tippet Hill

with its unmarked graves for enslaved people, it’s impossible not to think about the Civil War

battlefields a few short miles away.

The irony only stacks from there. In the 1990s in Haymarket, Disney was planning a civil war

themed amusement park called Get This, Disney’s America. Now some folks are working to

build data centers on that land. In Northern Virginia, not even history is safe from corporate

power. It’s as if tech companies are trying to steal land that was already stolen. American

flags hang from data center construction sites. The same story has been playing out for 250

years. But remember, the Boston Tea Party was an anti-monopoly protest. American history

has countless examples of land theft and corporate violence. Yes, but it also has countless

examples of localized uprisings against that corporate power, and those local uprisings can

turn national. Just ask Greg Pirio with the data center in his front yard.

Danny Caine: Do you see this kind of hyper-local neighborhood organizing as a step in that

direction? Is that the answer of how to start?

Greg Pirio: Oh, absolutely. I think what I’m discovering in this whole process is people don’t

know how to do this, like. In organizing the community, it’s like taking baby steps. They

haven’t been involved in the community and in government in this way. Mm-hmm. So getting

them out there and finding their voice is very important. It doesn’t happen overnight, but there

is a process of taking steps we’re trying to do is this petition and all this make progress, praise

those who are getting engaged, taking a stand and encourage them to encourage their

neighbors and all this. For me, it’s like a revitalization of, of democracy at the local level.

That is really key because in the United States we’ve lost so much of that over the years, and

especially with neoliberal ideology that the marketplace will solve everything.

We’re actually at a place where. It doesn’t. Mm-hmm. And so who’s gonna solve the problems

is a government responsive to the people. I’m that kind of person who says that every crisis is

an opportunity. And so it’s up to us to find that and to find our agency.

Danny Caine: So what’s the opportunity in this crisis?

Greg Pirio: Well, I think it is a revitalization of our democracy. It’s a lot of work, but it has to

be done. I’ve just seen throughout my lifetime, people standing up about the Vietnam War

ending that apartheid in South Africa. I mean, civil rights movement. I’m old enough to have

gone through that, and I see, you know, the kinds of positive changes that we can bring.

Danny Caine: What do you say to someone who. It’s like this isn’t Vietnam. This is a bunch

of data centers in one county in Virginia. How is this approach being equal importance with

those historical movements and events?

Greg Pirio: Let me quote, Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King. It was all about creating

a beloved community. Mm-hmm. And that’s a community where people look out for each

other, that they’re involved in politics for the greater common good. That’s done through

people getting involved. In community life and in politics and making alliances and moving

forward. That’s history and that’s how we move forward. What choice do we have? This is

where we, we can act.

Danny Caine: Elena takes the same long view that this moment is historic and to her history

will judge The local fighters is the heroes, not the tech billionaires.

Elena Schlossberg: I mean, really the real heroes of this entire saga that will be written

one day are the citizens just regular, everyday people who decided that something didn’t seem

right.

 

CONCLUSION: AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT?

Danny Caine: While Greg and Elena make fragile progress in the heart of data Center Alley,

lots of people are looking towards Loudoun County as an example. But the question is an

example of what some people see Loudoun County as an example of the power of local

organizing. Some see it as a worst case scenario, a cautionary tale. Others, however, view it

as an example of much needed new revenue for cash strapped local governments. An episode

two of the data centers are coming will head to a quiet corner of West Virginia, known for its

natural beauty and friendly small town life. Who will win? The people who want to preserve

the region’s unique character are the developers and politicians who see the data center boom

as a financial boon to one of the country’s poorest states.

Mayor Al Tomson: The revenue that would be potentially available through these microgrid

and data center processes is huge, and it [00:40:00] dwarfs the existing budget that the county

has right now. So it would be, uh, a tremendous. Uh, improvement in our financial situation.

Danny Caine:Stay tuned to hear about my time in Tucker County, West Virginia, an unlikely

yet feisty front in the data center wars building local power. The data centers are coming as a

project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This episode was produced by Reggie Rucker

and Ilana Nevins. It was written by me, Danny Kane, based on my travels to the region in

January, 2026. Many thanks to Greg Pirio and Elena Schlossberg for their contributions.

If you like what you heard, make sure to subscribe to Building Local Power wherever you get

your podcasts. Thank you for listening and see you next time.