My New Neighbors
What should a data center neighbor expect in return for hosting the infrastructure of the digital economy?
Every Monday, my son and I drive down Loudoun County Parkway through the heart of Data Center Alley on the way to piano lessons. It never looks the same. Over the past several years, massive boxy structures have cropped up amid transmission lines and substations. Half a dozen steel scaffolds and freshly scooped dirt mounds are regular features of the landscape. Over time, I’ve come to wonder how the physical landscape surrounding my home changed so quickly, and what it means for our community and others like us.
It’s a familiar question. I’ve asked it time and again over the course of my career, often as a third-party observer. Much of my time has been spent thinking about how investments in infrastructure, businesses and economic development translate, or fail to translate, into benefits in the communities that host them.
In the 1930s, when much of rural America was still without electricity, communities formed cooperatives to bring power to places investor-owned utilities weren't reaching. Today, those member-owned rural electric cooperatives still deliver power, and increasingly broadband, across much of the country.
Decades later, Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs, grew from a different challenge: getting capital into communities and businesses that conventional financial institutions weren't adequately serving. Today, they finance everything from small businesses and affordable housing to community infrastructure.
These models are very different, but both were built around an explicit relationship between investment and community value. By design, each model creates a structure that allows us to ask: Who benefits from investment? Who decides who receives investment? What can the community reasonably expect in return?
Driving through Data Center Alley, I wonder what the equivalent looks like here. Our increasingly digital economy depends on the infrastructure. Here in Loudoun County they generate enormous tax revenue. Across the country, companies have made voluntary investments in schools, STEM programs, nonprofts and civic institutions. Yet many communities remain concerned about air quality, land use, energy and water demand, noise and whether this infrastructure truly creates and sustains jobs?
Tax revenue, digital infrastructure and corporate investment can each create real value. But taken together with the costs and tradeoffs of hosting data centers, how do we know whether a community is getting a “good deal”? The timing of this question seems critical as more and more localities seem to be facing pressure to evaluate what development to welcome, what conditions to place on that development and what to turn away.
These questions are why I started Data Center Neighbor.
We do not start with a clear and tidy answer around what is a “good deal.” Data Center Neighbor exists to explore how we might evaluate the timing, transparency and full range of costs and benefits for communities hosting digital infrastructure.
We’ll learn from communities already navigating these decisions, from the companies building and operating these facilities and from people thinking about energy, land, water, economic development and community investment. I'm particularly interested in where those perspectives align, and where they don't.
We’re surfacing a starting point. The “Good Neighbor Framework” asks about transparency, energy demand, water, backup power and emissions, community benefits, land use and cumulative impacts. It also begins to explore what happens to these large-scale facilities over the long-term.
It is deliberately a starting framework that is intended to evolve as we learn from others who have been exploring these questions.
Over the coming months, we’ll look at how different communities are navigating data center development, dig into the data and surfacing perspectives from data center neighbors. We’ll ask when communities should be part of decisions about development, what information they need to participate meaningfully and what they should reasonably expect once a project becomes their neighbor.
We’ll also look beyond the usual debates over taxes, jobs, energy and water. What can we learn from communities trying something different? What happens to these facilities over the long-term? Could different approaches to design, technology or even the natural world, using concepts like biomimicry, change how data centers fit into the places that host them?
I expect some of these questions will lead to others. I hope they do.
On Monday, I'll drive past my neighbors along Loudoun County Parkway again. There will probably be another crane, another cleared parcel or another structure that wasn't there the week before. This time, they’ll be neighbors I’m getting to know better.
