The civil war in Data Centre Alley

On a cool, cloudy Virginia morning two weeks before Christmas 2023, hundreds of people massed in a grey-walled room to begin a fight over artificial intelligence that would rage for more than one full day and night. They were the supporters and opponents of what was at the time one of the world’s largest planned data-centre campuses, in Northern Virginia’s Prince William County. Many suspected they were attending a show trial.

The debate over the Prince William Digital Gateway, as it was named by its proponents, had already produced years of bitter recrimination in the county’s halls of power, as well as shouting in parking lots and supermarkets and eggs thrown at homes. In favour were an assortment of local landowners, developers backed by two private-capital giants, and union members. Opposed were a crew of American civil war preservationists and environmentalists, a separate contingent of local landowners and a canny politician.

In the late morning, the day after the meeting began, the board of county supervisors would finally vote on rezoning resolutions, which covered digital factories spread across 2,000 acres. The record of this 26-hour, 46-minute, 47-second meeting is a founding document of a defining and existential modern American fight. When the meeting broke off, its attendees stumbled out into a newly factionalised, angry community.

Today, politicians from both parties appear on talk shows to declare their vehement opposition to data-centre construction in their constituencies. In southern towns, rolling Midwestern landscapes, western deserts and exurbs of the East Coast, local populations decry the humming, windowless behemoths. Over the past decade, Northern Virginia has become home to one of the hummingest, most windowless places in the world — Data Centre Alley.

But before the national clamour began there were just a few disparate community figures here arguing among themselves: an urbane environmentalist, a walrus-mustachioed union man, a technocrat with a steely edge. This summer, we travelled to find out what exactly took place when they collided.

The battlefield

As we drive out of Washington DC, the American Battlefield Trust’s senior communications associate, Jared Herr, emphasises that he is not the fount of historical knowledge that his boss, David Duncan, is. Weaving between glittering cars on the many-laned highway that connects DC to its suburbs, he deposits us at Manassas National Battlefield Park with the trust’s president.

Herr has not undersold him. Duncan talks about the battlefield with the ease of someone who has spent years carrying its contours around in his head. On a baking-hot July day, we huddle under the shade of an oak tree beside a white wooden farmhouse, on a green sloping hill overlooking the fields where Union and Confederate forces clashed at the Battles of Bull Run, which the South called Manassas. Duncan hands us each a small bottle of water, which we gulp down, then he casts us back to the 19th century. “It doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to put yourself back in 1862,” he says. “Fortunately, no one’s shooting at us today.”

He tells us, two non-Americans, about the First Battle of Bull Run. Thirty-five thousand Union soldiers arrived in the fields north of Manassas to root out Confederate forces camped nearby. But after the Union initially gained the upper hand, Southern reinforcements arrived and turned the tide. Lincoln’s men panicked and scattered. It was at that moment that the country understood it had stumbled into a war far bloodier and more complex than it had imagined.

More than 160 years later, the technology companies descending on Prince William County made a different version of the same miscalculation, woefully underestimating the fightback that their plan to build a massive, multibillion-dollar data centre would cause.

Duncan is a mild-mannered happy warrior, sporting a grey-blond side part and moustache and a crisp blue shirt with his organisation’s Gatling gun logo on its chest. Raised by a history teacher father, who warned his son not to follow in his footsteps, Duncan worked as a political fundraiser in DC after graduation. But in a later-life act of genteel rebellion, he joined the American Battlefield Trust. The move took him “from the dark side to the light”. His organisation buys up and preserves lands that were the sites of clashes in the civil war.

Herr hands Duncan a hardback map of the local area, and we gather around him as he points out patches of land shaded green (owned by the Park Service), blue (land that the trust has “saved”) and grey (land that could yet be lost). One patch of grey is a cemetery, which Duncan says he’s not worried about, as surely no one would try and build a data centre on a graveyard. He grimaces at his own naivety: “Well, you never know.”

Duncan has sparred with would-be developers of new shopping malls, highways, housing and an infamous and never-built Disney theme park. But after the pandemic, as the digital world took over modern life, the threats transmorphed into online-shopping warehouses and data centres.

When concerned citizens of Prince William County got wind of the Digital Gateway project, the trust was called to help. “We have a reputation,” Duncan tells us, beaming with pride. Eventually, they would file a civil action against the county and the developers, alleging they had failed to be fully transparent about the project and to consider its environmental impact. The developers responded that they had given residents sufficient opportunity to scrutinise the plans and that they had taken the necessary steps to alleviate environmental concerns.

Outsiders could mistake the trust for a ragtag bunch of history nerds, as Duncan playfully describes himself. But in fact it is run by veterans of the bruising world of DC politics, who are used to raising big sums of money for a fight, and know the rule book inside out.

Duncan is at pains to tell us he’s not a Nimby nor a Luddite. He says he doesn’t mind data centres being built in the county as long as they don’t impact his battlefields. But his voice rises with revulsion talking about the AI-generated videos he’s seen of civil war battles, which butcher the uniforms and present frightened, underfed soldiers as 6ft gym rats.

He fears the soul of the country is at stake, lamenting that as school history and civics test scores decline, keeping battlefields unsullied is vital for inspiring the next generation of Americans.

Covered in sweat, we amble back to the cars. Herr, with the enthusiasm of a newly blooded hunter, fills us in on their next legal fight in Orange County, Virginia, where another data centre mega-complex is being planned near Wilderness, where Ulysses S Grant battled Robert E Lee.

The homeowners

One arm of the opposition was driven by preservationist zeal. The other was more worried about the present.

Mac Haddow adjusts his silver-framed glasses while deciding which combination of eggs, hot cakes and hash browns he’s keen to breakfast on while we talk. It’s fairly early in the morning, and we are at a faux-country Bob Evans restaurant in Manassas, sitting in a striped booth with frosted glass windows separating us from other diners.

Haddow, the president of the Oak Valley Homeowners Association, a group of locals who had also filed a suit against the Digital Gateway, expounds on the social and environmental costs of the centres. He also offers a straightforward explanation for why he and fellow residents had kept at this particular fight for years.

“I mean, I have a home that was going to lose $300,000 in value because of what they were doing,” he says. “And every one of my fellow homeowners was in the same boat.” (A representative for QTS says the developer is “not aware” of any independent analyses of the impact on home values in the area.)

A voice comes from the table next to us. “Those data centres are ugly as sin,” it says. We swivel slowly to encounter a baby-faced man with wide eyes, inhaling his blueberry oatmeal between sentences. He introduces himself with handshakes all round. Ken. He goes on: He didn’t notice the monstrosities when they first started appearing, few and far between. But now? They’re popping up everywhere.

Ken leans in. He has a secret to share with us. “Luckily, there’s a new administration coming,” he says. “Jesus Christ will rule the Earth.” Haddow smiles distractedly and turns back to us.

On our way out, we chat with the smiley teenager at the till. He can’t totally articulate why but he’s not a fan of the data centres either. That makes us three for three on a well-off local campaigner, a Jehovah’s Witness from the next town over and an adolescent who are all clear that they don’t want those things being built. It’s time we met someone who does.

The union

Ever since a group of cotton weavers began destroying newly installed machinery in Nottinghamshire two centuries ago, there has been a general sense that technology may not always be the workers’ friend. These past few years, actors’ unions have fought to prevent studios from using AI to generate their likenesses, while academics’ unions are battling to make sure the technology does not replace them in the lecture hall.

But for electricians and pipe-fitters across the country, the AI boom has been a godsend. In the gently air-conditioned confines of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ red-brick training centre in Manassas, we watch a young man walk in and ask something shyly of the security guard. The guard ushers him through. “Go talk to Kim,” he says, nodding towards the secretary in a room at the back. “She’ll get you a job.”

There are electrical jobs to be had at AI factory construction sites. In a nation where the average age of a first-time homebuyer has hit a record high, men in their mid-twenties are buying homes from the spoils of overtime shifts spent carefully wiring data-centre campuses.

“They call me Data Centre Don,” the IBEW Local 26’s political co-ordinator Don Slaiman tells us, as he thunders through the office in Manassas greeting colleagues. “It took 44 years in the labour movement to finally find this growth,” he continues. “I’ve seen the careers it’s created.”

Despite stints at the largest federation of American unions and as the International Trade Union Confederation’s Moscow director, this union man claims to have found true harmony with the tech bros of the country. Fresh from a meeting with Nvidia, Slaiman tenders his labour-movement philosophy to us in a small strip-lit office. “Globalisation and deindustrialisation atomised American society,” he says. “Now that’s why we have fascism. We destroyed our families.”

The collective huddle of union politics offers a reprieve, or even a solution, to those ills. And those union jobs are now being provided by the Blackstones and Brookfields of the world. As one IBEW worker says, “It’s nice to finally be on the side with power.” No pun intended.

The activists

Both allies and foes of Elena Schlossberg call her a force of nature. The founder of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, Schlossberg’s description of her home has a touch of the sacred to it. Her 10 acres are the burial ground of her “favourite animals, under the dogwood” and the birthplace of her daughter, a sanctuary where her husband cut away one by one the vines throttling the trees.

When we meet her at a coffee shop in upscale Haymarket, the organiser looks exhausted despite her bouncy hair and starched blouse. Schlossberg speaks at length about the environmental impact of data centres in the region, and the hit to electricity bills. Her civil war analogies are copious and her tales of more than two decades of activism are well rehearsed.

She made some unlikely allies along the way. One, an arch-conservative politician, had years earlier offended Schlossberg, a Jewish liberal, by, she says, comparing abortion doctors to the Nazi camp doctor of Auschwitz. But a shared horror at a planned transmission line that would reportedly serve an Amazon data centre brought the two together in 2014.

What the developers who wanted to build the Prince William Digital Gateway a decade later did not understand, Schlossberg says smilingly, is that “they came to the only place in the world where there had been a fight about a data-
centre complex”.

Not just a fight about a data-centre complex. The rolling hills of Manassas have witnessed many battles over development. Over the past 70 years, local activists have successfully fought off an interstate highway, two historical theme parks and a 1.2mn sq ft mall. Many in the area speak in hushed tones about Nimby visionary Annie Snyder, a local activist who died in 2002 after a lifetime of conservation efforts.

“There was no project during my first decade at Disney about which I felt more passionate than Disney’s America” — which would have been located a couple of miles from Manassas Battlefield Park — “and none that ran up against fiercer resistance,” Michael Eisner, the company’s then CEO, wrote in his 1998 memoir.

Snyder helped kill it. Awareness of that history crackles among the townspeople of Haymarket and Manassas.

“People rise to the threat to protect this area,” Schlossberg says on a Zoom call. Later, when we talk for hours through the languid Haymarket afternoon, she is particularly furious that Page, daughter of the late Snyder, was one of the landowners courting the data-centre developers.

There is little time for nostalgia, though, while the AI factories keep coming. “It’s like playing Whac-A-Mole,” Schlossberg says.

The landowners

Page Snyder and Mary Ann Ghadban’s fury pulses through our laptop screens. They are angry at Schlossberg, who they say has opinions about their land but doesn’t own it; at callous Manassas denizens who invoke Page’s mother’s conservationist legacy to scold her daughter; and at local papers they claim are owned by a regional environmental non-profit.

It is late August and we are on a Zoom call with two of the landowners who solicited data-centre developers to come to Prince William County, buy their land and raise an AI factory campus. Snyder, with her grey hair in a scraggly topknot, is pleasant and curious about our work. Ghadban is smiley too. The two have a familiar rapport, often barking instructions at each other.

“We’ve spent almost our entire lives trying to preserve this area, preserve our farms and it is never-ending,” Snyder, aged 76, says in a gravelly voice. “I’ve given up, I’m not willing to fight any more, I’m too old and too tired.” Her neighbour didn’t want to fight any more either. In fact, both wanted to leave the county.

Together, Snyder and Ghadban formed a coalition of landowners over months of what sounds like a real-estate-angled consciousness-raising exercise. Their land had already been sullied for decades anyway by large, looming transmission lines thrown up by a utility company, and by the traffic of semis and garbage trucks. What harm would a data centre do?

Ghadban, a horse farmer and real estate broker of 45 years, began attending hearings in nearby counties to assess which developers would “go above and beyond the call of duty” to provide extra open space and architectural controls on the data centres they built. County rumours say the pair and the other landowners were offered $1mn per acre, which they deny.

For conservationists like Duncan and Schlossberg, Prince William County’s land is a communal heritage to be enjoyed and guarded as such. For Snyder and Ghadban, it’s theirs to sell. Things got ugly as the fight progressed. Snyder claimed she was assaulted on her way to a meeting about her parcel. Ghadban’s house was egged.

The two lament that their land remains unsold, but they are still determined to offload it. Page wonders aloud if she will live to see that. “How many more battles are we going to have to fight?” she says. “Am I going to be dead before that happens?”

The chair

Though it sits in one of the most prosperous areas in the state, some around here consider Prince William County the poor stepchild of Northern Virginia. Its neighbour to the north-east, Fairfax, hosts much of the overspill of families and businesses from Washington DC. Prince William tends to receive those who can’t afford to live closer in. Loudoun, to the north-west, cashed in early to the data-centre gold rush, after AOL set up there during the dotcom boom.

When Ann Wheeler became county chair on New Year’s Day 2020, the county’s lack was on her mind. “We had the lowest-paid teachers, and our firefighters and policemen were leaving because their salaries weren’t competitive,” she says. “The county government was starved.”

Everyone we speak to brings up Wheeler unprompted. Some nearly hiss at her name. She is charged with relentlessly pushing for the unpopular project as a lame-duck chair. Schlossberg tells us in a voice saturated with disgust of the “unholy alliance” between Wheeler and the property owners who wanted to sell. The former chair insists they are just “normal people wanting to sell their land”.

We meet Wheeler in the softly furnished and remarkably bland lobby of a Hilton Garden Inn. She has a coiffed silvery blonde bob, is dressed in a sports jacket and pink capris and says her husband has given her strict instructions not to come across as flippant. She is amiable and poised. While sipping Diet Coke from a tall tumbler, Wheeler seems at once cautious, glancing nervously at our recording device, and earnestly keen to set the record, as she sees it, straight.

A mechanical engineer by trade, Wheeler may have been better primed than most to view data centres as a boon. As a consultant for Commonwealth Edison in the 1990s, she pioneered the Chicago utility’s “demand management” programme. That meant encouraging households to use less electricity at busy times, in exchange for bill credits. To her, data centres entering a community might be seen as a technical and regulatory challenge, but one that could be managed by competent technocrats, with two-way benefits. When QTS and Compass Datacenters suggested developing land for Digital Gateway, it would have been “irresponsible” not to consider it, says Wheeler matter-of-factly.

Then the county was swept up in what she sees as a wave of post-pandemic hysteria. Neither the board nor the developers could keep up with what she calls misinformation over the project’s water use, noise and proximity to the battlefield. Before we met, Wheeler told us by phone that she sympathises with residents who believed the claims, and with an eye-roll reserves her irritation for those whom she sees as highly educated, well-resourced people “looking for something to get angry about”. It’s not long before Schlossberg comes up.

“God bless her,” Wheeler says. “To each their own, as my mother would say.”

She also harbours doubts that many of Digital Gateway’s opponents were truly driven by a desire to keep the memory of the civil war unsullied. For one thing, the highway is already visible and audible from the top of the slope on which we met Duncan. And no one, she says, came out to bat when the county renamed its portion of the Jefferson Davis Highway, named after the president of the Confederate States, during the Black Lives Matter movement.

Throughout 2022 and 2023, Wheeler says she and the supervisors were shouted at during meetings by Digital Gateway’s opponents, who seemed determined to rile up the rest of the county.

The candidate

Then a political upstart emerged. Deshundra Jefferson was a self-described long-shot candidate for county board chair. The board, she says, brought her ascension on themselves by dismissing the environmental concerns that she, and by extension the blacker and browner eastern side of the county, had about the project. “I was outspent, I was outgunned, but I won,” she says.

The daughter of parents from Jim Crow Mississippi, she bristled at what she saw as patronising claims that the project would benefit people of colour in the county.

It occurs to us that nearly everyone we’ve spoken to has invoked African-American welfare to justify their support for or opposition to the project, turning it into a kind of racial Rorschach test. For the antis, for example, Schlossberg and Haddow said it would have interfered with graves in an African-American cemetery. For the pros, Data Centre Don waxed lyrical about the jobs for black and brown workers that would have been created.

Jefferson wasn’t buying it. “The people who were getting rich by and large do not look like me,” she says.

The former journalist shook the county when she beat Wheeler in the June 2023 Democratic primary, outspent by three to one. In a sign of how traditional partisan lines are blurring, she went on to beat the Republican candidate who was also anti-data centre.

But before Jefferson’s term could start in January, the meeting that would decide the fate of Digital Gateway took place on December 12.

The meeting

At a previous meeting discussing data centres, Data Centre Don says he handed out colouring books for members who brought their children. He reminisces dreamily about the tacos served by the truck his union brought to the function in November. “We fed the opposition, we weren’t there to fight with the residents,” he says. None of those overtures were made this time. “We knew we had the votes.”

By all accounts, it was a circus.

Inside the board chambers, the co-CEO of QTS, Tag Greason, attended in person to watch the fight. Outside, Schlossberg, wrapped in white woollen leg warmers and a trench coat, embraced an anti-protester dressed as the Grinch, and lit Hanukkah candles with an intergenerational crowd before handing holiday presents to the board.

Wheeler’s experience as chair was less misty-eyed. The hours stretched on because each of the 200 speakers was entitled to say their piece for three minutes. And because the board was actually considering three applications, two from QTS and one from Compass, functionally everyone had nine minutes. Heads of organisations, like Schlossberg, had 15 minutes.

Opponents, with red stop sign stickers on their clothes, fully deployed their time, which many used to express rage at what they considered to be the board’s lack of transparency. For Snyder and Ghadban, the meeting felt even longer, because they had arrived several hours earlier to prepare.

The event lives on in a 24GB recording on the county’s website. “There’s this sense among the community that the board doesn’t listen,” said a young brunette woman at one point in it, mournfully.

One protester wore a black T-shirt with a graphic of Mr Monopoly overlooking an ugly grey data centre in a green field surrounded by barbed wire. “I hope they like the new Manassas Battlefield,” a speech bubble read.

One woman’s j’accuse came as verse: “’Twas the night before the vote, when all through PWC, we tossed and we turned, fraught with worry. Our stockings weren’t hung by the chimney with care, because we weren’t hopeful, we knew this vote wouldn’t be fair.” (Wheeler says that “nothing was decided before we went in that meeting”.)

At times the venom fairly dripped on the floor. John W Lyver of American Legion Post 1799 was asked if he was representing the official position of his organisation. “Do you need my ID card?” he snapped back, before delving into a 15-minute presentation.

Another American Battlefield Trust employee, Max Hokit, describes a faint buzz of excitement at the start of the night, as attendees set up a coffee maker and a selection of snacks. “But then you start to wrap your head around, ‘I’m going to be here through the working day tomorrow,’” he says. As the hours rolled on, Schlossberg fell asleep using her coat as a pillow.

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A man dressed in blue civil war garb with a long unruly beard stood silently next to the podium, holding up a phone with a “guns save lives” sticker on it; his role in proceedings was not entirely clear. Supporters were briefer, wearing purple stickers, with one man bemoaning neighbouring Loudoun County pulling ahead. “They get rich and we sit in here and fight,” he said.

What happened next spurs fury. Since Jefferson’s term wasn’t set to begin for three weeks, Wheeler had a vote in the meeting. At the end of the 27 hours, the applications were approved by a single vote, including hers.

“There was a feeling among those who opposed the project that this was a done deal, it was a fait accompli, and that no matter how hard they worked, no matter the public outcry, no matter the results of the election, the board was still intent on pushing this through,” says Jefferson.

The end

Two years and a bit later, long after the circus left town, the project died. The battlefield trust had lost their suit in a Virginia circuit court in January 2024, but held their nerve and won in the state’s Court of Appeals. The data-centre proponents took their case to the state’s Supreme Court, but dropped it a couple of months later. The county and the developers stepped away one by one.

In the end, it came down to a clerical error. County law requires that notices for zoning meetings be advertised in the press a minimum of six days apart, to maximise eyeballs. A clerk for the county board went on vacation and forgot to confirm dates with The Washington Post. The paper published the first notice four days late, with just a three-day gap. The court ruled that the public wasn’t truly able to process what the county and developers had in mind before the meeting.

It was a shocking and mundane way for a multibillion-dollar project to die. But Duncan of the American Battlefield Trust says many land-use fights are won because of moneyed corporations ignoring technicalities. Still, he admits that “we got lucky”.

Nearly three years later, Wheeler doesn’t regret backing the project. What seems to pain her is that what she sees as facts and good intentions were not enough, and that a record she regarded as decent public service is remembered through the fury of the data-centre fightback. Her “greatest mistake”, she says, was not to engage once she decided her opponents were dealing in falsehoods. This is a technocrat’s response that, in this age of populism, only deepened the suspicion that people like her had stopped listening at all.

As we leave the Hilton Garden Inn, there’s a flicker of sadness at being turned into a symbol of everything her opponents despised.

“As long as I’m not portrayed as . . .” Wheeler trails off. “I mean, I do care about the county.”

Zehra Munir and Martha Muir cover US real estate and energy, respectively, for the FT

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