Virginia is for … data centers? Residents are increasingly saying no

CHESAPEAKE, Va. — The two dozen or so nondescript gray, white and blue buildings lining Virginia State Route 625 could be large warehouses.
But community activist Elena Schlossberg can identify them literally a mile away by their telltale rows of backup diesel generators. The buildings are data centers.
“We’re sort of that model of how not to do this kind of development,” says Schlossberg.
All internet data goes through facilities like these: massive, sometimes multistoried warehouses filled with servers where every webpage and shred of data lives. Demand for these centers has skyrocketed in the last two years as artificial intelligence usage has gone mainstream.
Virginia is a data hot spot. It has the world’s highest concentration of data centers — nearly 600 facilities of varying sizes, including roughly 150 of the largest kind, known as hyperscale data centers. Not all residents are happy about that.