Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of data center reporting. I'm David Imel. Today we're talking to Lauren Feiner, who's been spending the last few months reporting on the rapidly developing data center buildout in Loudoun County. Lauren just published a massive piece detailing the community response to the fast-moving industry, which is especially notable in a county that's been home to data centers since the early dot-com era. Today I want to talk to Lauren about what she's learned from her reporting and what it might tell us about what we can expect in counties across the US. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.
I'm Travis Larch and this is 90 seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026. Google avoided an attempt to break up its online advertising monopoly. Today, a federal judge declined the Justice Department's request to force Google to sell off parts of its adtech business. Instead, the judge accepted milder changes proposed by Google and the Justice Department, but the exact details of those have not been made public yet. Next up, New York City banned generative AI use in public schools. This is for this school year so far. There are some exceptions to the policy, but for the most part, generative AI is prohibited for K through 8th grade students. High schoolers are going to be allowed AI use in some limited contexts and classes. Teachers can still use AI to plan lessons, but they cannot use it to grade assignments. This all comes on the heels of last year's statewide ban of smartphones in New York schools. Finally, it's John Turnis' second day as Apple CEO, and let's take a look back at his legacy so far. Yesterday, Apple Maps capitulated to the Trump administration and renamed Lake Ontario to Lake America, just like Google did. Listen, we all know this is stupid. We all know why Google and Apple are really doing this. But come on, Apple. I know you can be brave. You're the company that was courageous enough to remove the headphone jack. But it really comes down to one word: courage. You can read more about these stories at theverge.com. That's 90 seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026.
Lauren Feiner, welcome to the Vergecast. Tell us a little about Loudoun County, Virginia, and how it became Data Center Alley.
Yeah, so Loudoun County is an area of Northern Virginia that's about 45 minutes to an hour outside of DC. It's near Dulles Airport, which is the big international airport here. And it basically is, you know, a kind of normal suburban type of town or area in Virginia, except that it has the world's largest concentration of data centers. And that's something that's come about because it used to be home to the AOL headquarters, and because it's just so close to DC and has access to a lot of the things that are helpful for data centers, it's really become this kind of data center hometown.
Just to give people a very basic primer, because I think they've heard the phrase data center being thrown around a lot. Can you explain exactly what a data center is?
Yeah. So data centers are, it's really pretty simple. They're kind of these big buildings that store racks and racks of servers. And those could be servers for one company or servers for many different companies. And maybe the data center company is renting out space to companies that need to store their servers somewhere.
So, you mentioned in the piece that a ton of internet traffic used to go through Loudoun County. What were those data centers like back then, and how is it different now?
Yeah, so they're not entirely different, but I'll say what is different is just the size and scale of the data center. So, you know, when Loudoun County began courting data centers, a lot of them had to do with the cloud. You know, think about all of the information that you store on the cloud. All of that is being stored in a data center. When it comes down to it, the cloud basically is data centers. So essentially now what's changed is that AI also needs data centers, and because they require so much compute, they need more and more capacity than cloud did in the past. So I think what's different is just there's just more of them and they're bigger.
Can you explain how these early dot-com data centers were beneficial to Loudoun County? Because I read in your piece that a lot of people were actually happy with the early data center buildouts.
In the early days, the data centers brought in a lot of tax revenue for the county. They still bring in a lot of tax revenue for the county. And because of that, that means that the county has to rely less on residential tax income. So that means that property taxes can go down. Real estate values have still gone up at the same time. So it's provided a lot of extra money for the county to use for building out schools, you know, paving nice roads. So it's really something that has allowed the county to do these public works that might be more of a strain for other communities.
What is changing so rapidly that's making the residents of this county upset with the buildout?
Yeah, I think for some residents in Loudoun County who were aware that data centers were a big thing in the area, they, you know, might have had a positive or generally positive to neutral view of them. But I think really what happened for a lot of them was many people just didn't even realize that they were there, or they had a vague understanding that, you know, oh, these big buildings that I drive by on the highway are data centers, but maybe didn't think about it too deeply because it wasn't really having that big of an impact on their day-to-day lives. I think what's changed now is that there's just so many, and what residents have told me is they kind of feel like they've reached this tipping point where it's becoming harder to ignore or just kind of view in the background of their daily lives because the kind of second-order effects of the data centers are becoming more impossible to ignore.
Right. What exactly are those second-order effects?
As Loudoun has expanded just the footprint of data centers that require all of this energy, the local utilities have had to figure out how do we supply enough energy not only to the data centers but also to our residents who also need energy. So, what you're seeing is things like energy companies coming in and proposing transmission lines going through people's backyards, or telling data centers that were approved for construction that we're actually not going to be able to hook you up to the main grid until maybe years later. And then those data centers have to go and figure out another solution, and it might be much noisier.
Interesting. So, you mentioned the noise. What exactly, what kind of noise do these data centers create, and how far away from them do you have to be to hear it?
So, it can really vary. I think for some of them they are pretty quiet. You know, I drove by a bunch of them and found that some of them it's really hard to hear, or just kind of like ambient noise. I wouldn't really be able to tell like, oh wow, I'm right next to a data center. But I do think it varies throughout the day or throughout the type of data center. Some people would complain that they're constantly hearing noise from their deck or from inside their home occasionally. Other people say actually it's pretty quiet. So, I think it really can vary. But then you have some outliers. So, one of those, really the main one that I found in Loudoun County, was a site called the Vantage VA2 facility. And that's a site that, like I was kind of mentioning, was told after they'd already, you know, made these deals with customers of like, we're going to have you in our new data center, that they weren't going to be able to hook up to the main energy grid. And so they decided that until they are able to hook up to the grid, they're going to self-generate, which meant using natural gas turbines to run the facility, and when they need to, backing up onto diesel generators, which a lot of them do. So that really creates a different noise and different kind of environmental considerations than most of the data centers in Loudoun County and elsewhere.
In your piece you mentioned that there are some by-right pieces of land where the companies can just build things out without approval from the county. Can you explain what that is? How are these companies able to just come in and do whatever they want?
Right. So that term by-right is something that is kind of specific to Loudoun, and I think is kind of left over from the fact that Loudoun was the first to really do this huge data center buildout. You know, when they were starting to do this, it wasn't something that people were up in arms about. It was just like, okay, like this seems fine. So it was in 2000 that a county administrator basically said, you know what, we have land that's zoned for office parks, and data centers look pretty similar to office parks. So we're going to just let them, you know, if someone wants to come and develop a data center in an area that's zoned for an office park, they can do that by right. And that meant that they don't have to go through this extra set of steps to get approval to build on that land. They could basically just do it with kind of minimal process up to that point. So for a while that didn't seem like that big of a deal because there were only so many data centers coming in. And you know, they had a lot of space. It wasn't really impeding on people's lives. But I think as we got, you know, further down the road and people were starting to notice the effects, that became more of a problem because sometimes the county might have actually wanted to stop a data center from moving into a particular location, but the data center was able to technically move there by right, and so that was something that was an issue really only in the recent past.
Right. Do you think that that's been super hyper-accelerated by generative AI, or was this like a progressive we-are-building-more-data-centers basically since the dot-com era, or is it like the last three to five years where it's just been super rapid expansion?
I think in Loudoun that it's really just that they've reached this level of concentration of data centers that at some point just became impossible to ignore. I think it's possible that the AI expansion played a role in that, but I think for Loudoun it might be different than other communities where they had so many already. And so just like the fact that they had to keep adding and adding, I think it was just reaching that tipping point that really did it.
Yeah. How is it that these companies can just come in and build transmission lines in their backyard? Is that something that is just allowed for these companies to do?
