Mar 28, 2026
Homeowners in a Virginia neighborhood are pondering the potential of a high-stakes offer: Should they sell their homes to a data center developer for $4 million each?
The 143 homes in question are located in The Regency, an Ashburn subdivision within Loudon County’s ‘data center corridor.’ The homes here are already squeezed on two sides by data centers.
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While there’s “currently no offer to purchase the Regency homes for data center development,” according to a statement to NBC4 from Regency HOA president Kevin McCaughey, the proposal is food for thought (1).
While data centers can create jobs and generate tax revenue, they also bring problems, like noise pollution and heavy utility usage. For current homeowners, an offer could give them an ‘out’ to leave a community that has changed dramatically over the years.
But there’s a major hurdle: the land is zoned as residential. To build a data center on that land, each of the 143 homeowners would have to agree to sell their home, and the developer would then have to wait for zoning approval — which may or may not happen.
The rise of the data center
Worldwide, there are more than 11,100 data centers in 174 countries. And the U.S. houses a substantial portion of those, with 4,088 data centers nationwide — Virginia alone is home to 579 (2,3). Virginia’s Loudon County is now considered a global data center hub, with more than 200 facilities in the area.
“Virginia, often described as ‘the data center capital of the world,’ hosts the largest number of facilities, followed by Texas and California. Together, the top 10 states account for roughly 60% of all data centers nationwide,” according to the World Resources Institute (4).
And, thanks to increasing demand for AI and cloud applications, more data centers are in the works.
But it also means that data centers are increasingly encroaching on residential zones, creating friction between homeowners — who have to deal with 24x7 noise, ongoing construction and high resource consumption — and developers who provide jobs and tax revenue (5).
About one-third of data centers in the state are located near residential areas, “and industry
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trends make future residential impacts more likely,” according to the 2024 Virginia Joint Legislative Audit Review Commission report (6).
“Inadequate local planning and zoning have allowed some data centers to be located near residential areas, which sometimes causes impacts on those residents,” the report says. In some cases, this is because local zoning ordinances “did not consider data centers to be an industrial use” (6).
The way different local governments classify data centers is still a bit of a grey area. Some permit them in areas that are zoned for ‘light industrial’ activity, meaning they could encroach on residential areas. Others zone them differently because of their high energy consumption, which could strain local utilities.
Consider that a single AI data center can consume as much power as 100,000 homes, though “many of the larger ones now being built are expected to consume up to 20 times that amount,” according to a report by the International Energy Agency (7).
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Finding solutions
Residents of The Regency told NBC4 that their quality of life isn’t the same as when they bought their dream home 20 or 30 years ago (1). So it’s easy to see how an offer of $4 million for each home would be tempting.
Even if everyone were to agree to such a proposal — which would be a gargantuan task — county leaders would have to approve a rezoning request for a standalone data center or a mixed-use development with higher-density housing.
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But rezoning for mixed-use development wouldn’t address the issues that current homeowners have now: constant noise, a strain on local utilities and the unaesthetic nature of data centers that takes away a community’s character.
“I cannot even slightly imagine voting for a mixed-use development with a data center, and certainly not a data center standalone,” Loudoun County board chair Phyllis Randall told DC News Now (8).
Local governments will also need to evaluate whether their local grid and water systems can support the demands that data centers would place on their infrastructure (especially aging infrastructure).
Residents of The Regency aren’t the only ones dealing with this issue — and they won’t be the last. Data centers are being built at an unprecedented pace in the U.S., with construction starts reaching $77.7 billion in 2025 (9).
But there are potential solutions. For example, data center sites could be expanded in existing industrial zones or tech parks that are already set away from residential areas and can handle heavy utility use. Another option is to situate them near wind and solar farms, which could support growing energy needs.
For residents of The Regency, however, that’s a moot point.
Article sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
NBC Washington (1); Data Center Map (2), (3); World Resources Institute (4); Environmental and Energy Study Institute (5); Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (6); International Energy Agency (7); DC News Now (8); ConstructConnect (9)
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Vawn Himmelsbach is a veteran journalist who has been covering tech, business, finance and travel for the past three decades. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, National Post, Metro News, Canadian Geographic, Zoomer, CAA Magazine, Travelweek, Explore Magazine, Flare and Consumer Reports, to name a few.
