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The Accidental Activists of Data Center Alley

These would-be rebels in Northern Virginia joined the fight against data centers mostly to stop the encroachment on their homes and exclusive private communities.

I am hiking on a nature park that cuts through 45 miles of Northern Virginia, crisscrossing grassy terrain, wetlands, wooden bridges, and goldenrod, and then a dozen promontories offering the most unnatural of sights—windowless, hulking block-long data centers and their attendant transmission lines and substations. I heard “the hum” of the centers before I saw them; their sound resembled a horde of cicadas on meth. I felt nervous, and somewhat overwhelmed, as I counted roughly 20 of them in just the two miles I walked on the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad Trail in Loudoun County.

Here is the country’s thickest concentration of data centers—233 centers in all, over 3 percent of the county’s overall land mass. Data Center Alley, as it’s called, is a harbinger of what is to come in this country if tech hyper-scaling continues unchecked. But Loudoun County is not only an example of tech infrastructure running amuck. It’s also an example of a semi-successful battle to press pause.

The week I visited in September, local activists had just secured a significant victory when the county’s Board of Supervisors voted 7-1-1 to impose a 12-month pause on board action for data centers and electrical substations. It was one win for the broader opposition, who were cross-partisan, unlikely dissidents in their 50s and 60s, who joined the fight mostly to protect their own homes and exclusive private communities. Some of them even refused to say a bad word about AI, claiming the fear of data centers in popular imagination was “overblown,” even though they themselves had been organizing against them as they encroached on their homes.

One of these accidental activists is Jessica Medeiros, 55. I met her in front of her home, in the Oak Trail Square development in Sterling. She works with juvenile offenders by day, as a pretrial officer in nearby Prince William County. In her off hours, she is just another empty nester of two grown children, hanging with her boyfriend, enjoying frequent outdoor runs in the area and five-times-a-day walks with her dog. Well, that was before the gargantuan blue Vantage VA2 data center at the end of her street, four city blocks long and wide, rose up.

That Vantage VA2 center happens to be one of the worst ones out there. For one thing, it isn’t connected to the electrical grid, meaning its energy comes from on-site or nearby power plants. These plants are primarily powered by natural gas; the VA2 center uses gas turbines and backup emergency diesel generators. This reliance means that such hubs risk being louder than normal, filthier than normal, and ultimately worse for the environment than normal. As a case in point, on the morning we met, Medeiros pointed out where the soot from the day usually falls.

More and more developers have sought power plant equipment like turbines and generators to elide regional power grids, which are now stressed under data center electricity requirements.

To me, these data centers are physical embodiment of both the decline of the rule of law and the rise of the tech oligarchs. They are, of course, part the national conversation around AI and have become a center of the activism against it. In the first half of 2026, the Data Center Watch project by AI security company 10a Labs, found that at least 75 data center projects worth $130 billion were disrupted by local groups in the first quarter and at least 45 projects worth $68 billion in the second. The Data Center Opposition Report found that 640,000 people are in anti-data center Facebook groups in the US. Gen Zers have joined groups like New Jersey’s Climate Revolution Action Network, or CRAN.

“To me, this center…is just indicative of what is happening in our country, because the money and the power are taking over the lives of citizens,” says Medeiros, a petite blonde who describes herself as having the energy of a puppy, with the swift gait of a runner, despite a recent foot injury. She was rapidly walking around the perimeter of a building that looks like a post-lobotomy IKEA. It has got the same cheerful cobalt exterior but no furniture, customers or meatballs inside, only racks........

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