Is this the future of America?

Buddy Rizer came into Loudoun County government in 2007 with an urgent job and a weird résumé: he’d been a radio DJ, and then he was told to help the county survive the housing crash. At the time, more than 80 percent of Loudoun’s revenue came from residential property. The county wanted to push its commercial share from about 19 percent to roughly 23 percent. Instead, it ended up remaking itself around data centers.

That shift started with leftovers from an earlier tech boom. Loudoun had already been home to AOL’s headquarters, a major internet exchange point, and the kind of infrastructure that made the county a natural hub for traffic, fiber, and power. When the dot-com bust and AOL’s collapse left empty buildings and buried cable behind, Rizer saw a market. He pushed the county to attract data centers, and the pitch worked. Today, about 250 data centers sit in a relatively small part of Loudoun’s roughly 515 square miles, making it the densest concentration in the world.

The money changed the place fast. The county says it has built 22 new schools in the last 15 years, cut residents’ real property tax rate from about $1.29 to 80 cents per $100 of assessed value since 2008, and collected enough data center tax revenue in 2024 to exceed the county’s operational budget by $35 million. That prosperity was easy to like when the buildings were mostly background noise. People noticed the road work, the schools, the lower taxes. They didn’t have to think much about the servers.

Now they do. Loudoun residents describe humming from their decks, transmission towers near green space, and surprise calls from the utility about towers going up nearby. Rizer says he has never seen the level of “vitriol” aimed at these projects before, even though opposition has always existed. And Loudoun isn’t alone anymore. The national boom in data centers, driven in part by generative AI, has already put 3,000 facilities into operation around the US, with 1,500 more in development, and the backlash is spreading just as fast.

That is why Loudoun matters. It isn’t just a rich county with a lot of server farms. It is a preview of the trade America keeps trying to make: local revenue now, noise, power strain, and political blowback later. The nice part of the bill has already been spent.