I’ve spent 35+ years designing, architecting and operating IT systems inside data centers of every size, from wiring closets and bespoke labs through multi-cloud hyperscale, at GDIT, Oracle, Accenture, EDS, NTT DATA and Quantum Sky, for customers from DHS and NASA to the city of Washington DC, AWS and the USPS. Customers providing critical data science, transportation, healthcare, retail, energy and so many other solutions the US economy and national security depend upon. The outside view came from serving on the Loudoun Economic Development Advisory Commission (EDAC) through the build-up – watching and using data centers being constructed right in my back yard.
Here’s a somewhat hidden number, from the Northern Virginia Chamber’s (NVC) data center briefing this past June. Data centers occupy less than 3% of Loudoun’s land and hold 75% of the county’s entire commercial property value, $42.4 billion worth. In FY24 they paid $875 million in taxes, which was $35 million more than the county’s whole operating budget that year. The residential tax rate has fallen every year for a decade, from $1.145 per $100 down to $0.805, while the county kept opening schools and fire stations. Take that revenue away and NVTC calculates Loudoun’s rate would need to climb 91% just to hold services level.
The standard pushback is that a finished data center employs about 50 people. That figure gets quoted constantly and almost never with the rest of the sentence attached. NVTC’s biennial report finds every job inside a Virginia data center supports another 2.1 to 3.5 jobs elsewhere in the state, excluding construction entirely. Concretely, that’s IBEW electricians and mechanical trades, generator and switchgear and cooling manufacturers, fiber crews, commissioning engineers, and the security and facilities contractors servicing these sites for decades. Part of that estimate is consumer spending by those workers, which is the softer half, so weigh it conservatively.
What isn’t soft is the manufacturing – for example, Siemens and Jabil are putting $30 million and 350 jobs into a switchgear plant in Prince George County, Eaton is investing $50M+ in Henrico for 200 more, and CEL Critical Power opened its first US facility in James City County with 250 jobs headed to 500 by 2030. That’s Virginia broadly rather than Northern Virginia specifically, and it’s worth saying so plainly.
The community concerns are legitimate, and most of them are also describing a building from 2014 rather than one proposed in 2026. Closed-loop air-chilled cooling uses essentially zero drinking water, and Loudoun Water’s recycled system delivered over 750 million gallons last year that households never had to give up. Setbacks past 200 feet, acoustic testing at three stages, buried distribution lines and Tier 4 generators can all be written into legally binding proffers. On rates, the finding is that data centers have been paying their full cost of service. JLARC’s independent study found no historic cost shifting. What’s coming is different, so the SCC created a separate large-load class ahead of the problem rather than after it, requiring users over 25 MW to pay for at least 85% of the transmission and distribution they reserve starting in 2027. Meanwhile Atlanta out-leased us for the first time in 2024, 705.8 megawatts to our 451.7, and the largest projects now in development are in Texas, Pennsylvania and other states. Turning down capacity here doesn’t reduce demand for it. It relocates it, along with the tax base.
Other JLARC findings of note: A Northern Virginia electrical workers union told JLARC its apprenticeship program grew from 300 apprentices per training course to 500 in recent years because of data center demand. Wages: data center employees and contractors average about $100,000 per year. Journeyman electricians around $56 an hour. Water: JLARC concluded data center water use is currently sustainable, and most data centers use about the same amount of water or less than an average large office building. Generators: in Northern Virginia they account for less than 4% of regional nitrogen oxide emissions and 0.1% or less of carbon monoxide and particulates.
Virginia doesn’t currently seem to be rejecting this industry, rather, pricing and conditioning it. Existing investment agreements seem to be honored, while adding an energy consumption tax, new generator and noise rules, and an SCC order making data centers pay for transmission built solely to serve them. New York, by contrast, has paused large data center permitting statewide, and fourteen states are weighing something similar. Conditions can be designed and built to – a “pause” just moves your project somewhere else (a moratorium here would have so many unforeseen, negative ripples, all the way to Atlanta).
Here’s a new hypothesis developing, and not yet a settled case. This region was built on federal spending and the professional services around it. That base is contracting, and AI is compressing much of the analytical and back-office contract work that filled the rest. What holds up is work driven by originality, judgment, direction and production quality, done by people using these tools rather than being replaced by them. We call this the “creative innovation economy.” At commercial scale, that work is compute-hungry, and the firms doing it can’t finance infrastructure themselves. They rent from the data center industry. This isn’t only my read of it.
JLARC’s 2024 study found that clustering data centers in a region produces knock-on effects, indirectly attracting other technology businesses and helping build a well-trained regional IT workforce (a significant emphasis of the WestXDC initiative, across the academic community), which in turn makes the region more attractive to further businesses in technology and other sectors. The same chapter classifies data centers as a tradable sector with a high employment multiplier, meaning the industry brings in revenue from outside Virginia rather than recirculating what’s already here. A legislative audit commission wrote that, not an industry group. We also know the pattern works because we’ve watched it happen once already. Compu Dynamics started in 2002 as a small contractor, acquired Loudoun Electric, grew up alongside Ashburn, and now runs national operations out of Chantilly, where I used to live, while putting more than $200,000 back into NOVA’s engineering technology programs. Local company, local careers, local money, all of it downstream of infrastructure someone else built here.
The hypothesis is now being tested with actual data science at WestXDC.com, mapping where the next round of those companies is clustering across five corridors from Route 28 and Dulles out to Prince William and I-95. JLARC identified the mechanism in general terms. The open question is which corridors it’s actually reaching, and where it isn’t. We have the fiber, the power, the engineering talent, and a large, highly educated workforce currently being displaced. Very few places have all four. The data centers already built here, and frankly anywhere else, are the ingredient that makes the next economy possible. Stalling them or pushing them out costs more than tax revenue. It costs us what we need to rebuild on, and with it our economic competitiveness.
