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The Dirty Energy Fueling Amazon’s Data Gold Rush [1]

['Ella Fanger', 'Wendy Brown', 'Steve Phillips', 'Kevin Lozano', 'Eric Foner', 'Mark Hertsgaard', 'Nikole Rajgor', 'Lucy Tobier', 'Amber X. Chen', 'Jeet Heer']

Date: 2024-02-22 10:00:00+00:00

Environment / The Dirty Energy Fueling Amazon’s Data Gold Rush Northern Virginia is grappling with the environmental effects of a booming data-center empire.

Amazon data centers loom over houses at the edge of the Loudoun Meadows neighborhood on January 20, 2023, in Aldie, Va. Microsoft is in the process of building data-center structures in the background, top right. (Jahi Chikwendiu / The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Amazon doesn’t allow visitors to their data centers, but they offer a “virtual tour” of a generic facility. The website displays an aerial view of a digital mock-up of a building surrounded by farmland tinted a green too sickly to be bucolic. Miniaturized power lines, their cables like floss, curve around the building’s perimeter. Inside, neat rows of whirring servers form a layer cake of blinking lights and air conditioners. This 250,000-square-foot box of concrete, steel, and plastic is “the cloud”—where data from Internet activity ranging from consumer tracking to generative AI to the virtual tour itself is stored and processed.

This image of a building, of course, exists only in the cloud. But for the residents of northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, “the cloud” is not some abstract omnipresence or a crisp virtual model; it is the hulking buildings powered by heavy transmission lines that criss-cross farmlands and ferry power generated by natural gas.

Northern Virginia has the largest concentration of data centers in the world, with over 25 million square feet in operation and much more in development. Amazon is one of the biggest players in the industry, having recently announced an additional $35 billion investment in Virginia, but companies like Google and Microsoft also have major hubs in the region. New facilities continue to crop up along the area’s Loudoun County Parkway. “When you’re driving down the street, it feels like there’s two walls on either side of you,” said Loudoun resident Julie Borneman. Her husband, Chris, agreed: “We’re turning into concrete out here.”

The energy demands of this data empire are massive. The power capacity used by data centers in the region was nearly 2.7 GW in 2022, more than Seattle’s entire power grid. A recent Business Insider investigation found that Amazon’s plans for expansion in the region could bring the company’s usage alone to at least 2.7 GW. Local environmental groups estimate that the total capacity needs for approved-but-unbuilt data centers amount to 23.4 GW, the equivalent of 5.8 million homes (more than the total number of households in the state). Based on regional energy operator PJM’s forecasting, that will contribute to a doubling of the area’s peak energy demand by 2040 and will require a state grid with the same capacity as France’s.

Capitalizing on the AI boom, Amazon and other companies are pushing through plans in Virginia for millions more square feet of data centers, which are being approved by municipalities faster than community groups and regulators can evaluate their impact. Electricity providers scrambling to meet industry demand are proposing new fossil fuel plants and to keep online coal plants that are due to be retired. Many of the costs of this infrastructure will be borne not by the data industry but by local communities, both through environmental impacts and their monthly utility bills.

How did northern Virginia, nearly 3,000 miles from Silicon Valley, become the hub of the data industry? Loudoun County, the municipality that hosts Data Center Alley, has made investment attractive for the industry by allowing by-right development, a fast-tracked permitting process. The state has also granted more than $980 million in tax exemptions to the data industry. “I have yet to see a data center with an end user like Amazon or Microsoft be denied anywhere in the state,” said Julie Bolthouse, the director of land use for the Piedmont Environmental Council, at a recent community meeting hosted by the group to discuss data-center growth.

Data centers contribute revenue through taxes on real estate and equipment. Loudoun County takes in nearly $600 million annually in data-center tax revenue, which covers the county’s entire operating budget. As Bolthouse told me, “That basically makes us a company town.”

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/data-centers-virginia-amazon-environment/

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