One Obstacle For Trump’s Ai Power Pledge: The Neighbors

STERLING, Virginia — Lindsay Shaw was happy when she found out a data center was going up 100 meters from her front door.

Unlike most of her neighbors, she preferred a supercomputing hub to a shopping mall, which might bring a crush of car traffic. She was even more pleased when she learned the data center would generate its own power — rather than connecting to the grid and driving up her electric bills.

But then the data center turned on, along with the eight natural gas turbines powering it. Now her home is barraged by a high-pitch whine that she says has made her newly screened-in porch unusable.

“We don’t want to be outside anymore,” said Shaw, a cybersecurity professional living in Loudoun County, one of the densest data center hotbeds on Earth. “A lot of people might see this as progress, like I did. But if it’s impacting you then you see, ‘Oh, that’s what it means for a data center to be in your community.’”

Shaw’s experience is a possible cautionary tale for President Donald Trump, who is pitching a new wave of data-center-specific power plants as the solution to easing voters’ anxieties about the economic costs of the artificial intelligence boom. A pledge he signed last Wednesday with leaders of Amazon, Google, OpenAI and other tech giants calls for data companies to “build, bring, or buy the new generation resources and electricity needed to satisfy their new energy demands,” while “paying the full cost of those resources.”

But all those tech industry power generators would need to go somewhere. And that creates more possible reasons for neighbors like Shaw to turn against a project.

“I would never have bought my home if I thought this could happen,” said Craig Dobbs, who lives 1,200 feet from the new gas-powered facility in Sterling owned by Silicon Valley-based Vantage Data Centers. He said he couldn’t walk his dog, Piper, one day last month because the noise was “unbearable outside.”

“If anyone is hearing about these going in with their own gas turbine systems off the grid, they really need to think again, because it’s not fun,” Dobbs said.

The White House declined to answer questions about data centers’ local impacts. Vantage’s vice president of global marketing, Mark Freeman, did not answer questions about noise from the facility, though he said it “is fully permitted” and “in accordance with zoning ordinances of Loudoun County.”

In response to a complaint from Dobbs, company Vice President of Public Policy John Stephenson wrote that "I’m sorry to learn about your situation with increased noise impacting you," according to a copy of the email Dobbs shared with POLITICO.

Dobbs had sent the company a video taken from his front door and sound measurements taken on his phone in late February. Stephenson said the data center’s operations team had not seen any “abnormalities” on the day in question.

“However, we take any reports of issues at the site seriously,” Stephenson wrote, adding that he would have the team investigate the issue further.

The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, did not respond to questions about data center noise or what industry best practices exist for mitigating its impact on neighbors.

Democratic Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, who represents most of Loudoun County in Congress, has dozens of data centers in his district — but said he hears more complaints from constituents about Vantage’s Sterling location than any other facility.

“The noise and the pollution, that’s what makes it stand out to me,” said Subramanyam, who also covers part of Prince William County where data center construction is booming. While Trump’s pledge “might help with the ratepayer issue,” he said, “it comes at another cost to the community.”

Money’s not the only cost

The White House’s plan is meant to address one political obstacle to the AI boom — the fear among many voters that powering the hundreds of new data centers being planned across the country will make electricity more expensive for ordinary Americans.

“People think that if a data center goes in, their electricity prices are going to go up,” Trump said during a roundtable with executives from tech companies including Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI. “Some centers were rejected by communities for that, and now I think it’s going to be just the opposite.”

But the main solution Trump highlighted — telling tech companies to “build your own power plant” — could exacerbate another one: People don’t want to live next to power plants any more than they want to live next to data centers. Just 37 percent of respondents to a POLITICO Poll in January said they would support building data centers within three miles of their home, compared with 36 percent who would support a power plant.

In Shaw’s neighborhood in Sterling, the whine of the Vantage data center’s gas turbines can be heard even at homes half a mile away. Sometimes that noise combines with rumbling from the data center’s backup diesel generators.

Noise is a common complaint when data centers are built close to residents. That’s often because cooling systems atop the warehouse-sized buildings can make a low-pitched hum, especially on hotter days when they are operating more intensely. Because Vantage’s power plant is always running, it’s impossible to know exactly what aspects of its noise are coming from the gas turbines as opposed to the data center’s cooling system.

But multiple advocates and data center neighbors who have spent time around these kinds of facilities say the noise from Vantage is higher-pitch and more constant.

Greg Pirio, who lives 200 yards from the Sterling plant, told POLITICO that he has had to take sleeping pills on nights when the noise, carried on the wind, is particularly bad. Another neighbor, Hari Doue, said she has been considering spending $8,000 to soundproof two windows in her sons’ bedrooms to help them sleep at night.

Pollution can come with the noise. One Harvard-affiliated analysis released last week found that soot emissions from the gas turbines could cause $53 million to $99 million in annual health impacts, largely in respiratory and cardiac problems, if the facility emits the maximum pollution levels allowed by its Clean Air Act permit.

“It sounds good to get these off the grid, but people need to understand the implications of these kinds of proposals,” Pirio said. “We feel kind of screwed over.”

Freeman, the Vantage vice president, criticized the health analysis for relying on “worst-case scenario models” instead of actual emissions from the facility.

The analysis, he said in response to questions from POLITICO, “should not be interpreted as forecasts of actual operations, local exposure or attributable health outcomes.”

Vantage’s Sterling location came online ahead of a growing trend of data centers that are installing their own gas turbines instead of hooking to the electric grid, as tech companies seek to get online faster while utilities struggle to keep up with demand. That trend began long before Trump announced his pledge and has resulted in a shortage of turbines.

The pop-up power plants may be popular with technology companies, but plans for installing them have stirred opposition in some communities.

Last spring, officials in Virginia’s Pittsylvania County voted down a proposed data center “megacampus” that would have been powered by a 3,500-megawatt gas-fired power plant. Local opposition to the project grew after researchers from Harvard University used computer modeling to predict that the power plant could result in more than $31 million in annual health care related costs.

Michael Cork, a health scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, conducted a similar analysis of the Vantage data center in Sterling as part of his consulting group, EmPower Analytics Group. The analysis, released last week, found that soot emissions from the facility could cause tens of millions of dollars in annual health impacts, not just in Sterling and Loudoun County but as far away as the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland.

“Because it’s located in a densely populated area of the country, even modest increases in pollution can translate into substantial public health costs and implications,” he said.

Both studies used an Environmental Protection Agency mapping tool to estimate the power plants’ health impacts. Cork’s analysis, funded by the local environmental group Piedmont Environmental Council, underscores that data centers’ costs are not just financial.

“It’s not just a question of reliability or affordability, it’s also a public health question, and quantifying the health burden is crucial so that policy makers and regulators can make their own decision about how to support digital infrastructure while also protecting air quality and saving lives,” Cork said.

While Vantage’s Freeman disputed the findings, he did not respond when asked for information about the facility’s actual emissions and how they might differ from what its permit allows.

Jessica Medeiros, who lives an estimated 600 feet from the data center, said it has not just disrupted her sleep but caused her to feel congested when in her home and her neighborhood. The symptoms disappear when she leaves the neighborhood, she said, but come back when she returns home.

“People talk about the cloud like it’s something floating in the sky, but for those of us living right next to these facilities, the cloud comes with a noise and feeling like I have allergies year-round, whenever I’m in my house,” she said.

‘No zoning rules to cover this’

Regardless of what Trump and the industry pledged last week, decisions about whether to allow data centers to generate power on-site come down to local officials tasked with approving zoning ordinances and variances.

The Vantage facility is just one of 200 data centers in Loudoun County, whose massive concentration of the computing hubs hosts much of the world’s internet traffic and has given it the nickname “Data Center Alley.” Following complaints about Vantage’s on-site turbines, local officials are working on updating the county’s comprehensive plan to address concerns including those involving on-site gas turbines and noise.

“There are no zoning rules to cover this,” county Board of Supervisors Vice Chair Michael Turner said in an interview.

Turner said county officials didn’t understand in 2022 and 2023 exactly what it meant to have gas turbines at a data center, nor did they have zoning rules to address it.

When Vantage submitted its building plans to the county, the plan was to use gas turbines only temporarily, not as a primary power source. Because data centers typically include backup diesel generators and other temporary power sources, it seemingly complied with the zoning ordinance, and the county allowed the project.

At the time, county rules allowed data centers to be built “by right” without any public hearing that might have invited more scrutiny.

But shortly after the project received approval, Turner said, Virginia power utility Dominion Energy told Vantage that it would have to wait three years before connecting to the electric grid. Vantage then pivoted to relying on the gas turbines for all of its power, Turner said.

Dominion did not respond to a request for comment. Vantage’s Freeman also did not respond to questions about how long the data center would continue to rely on the turbines.

It was only after the data center was operating, following a tour he took of the facility, that Turner said county officials realized the data center was “running in island mode.”

“It was very impressive, but it was obvious that this is not what we thought was allowed,” Turner said.

Turner said he doesn’t think Vantage “set out to deceive anyone.” Still, he noted, zoning rules at the time would not have allowed the power plant to be built in its current location if it wasn’t part of a data center.

Now the county is working to rewrite its zoning rules for data centers to categorize “baseload” power generation, responsible for producing all of a data center’s power, as an on-site utility, which would be subject to more stringent rules. It is separately working on new noise rules for the supercomputing hubs.

“Data centers can be wonderful, but you need to preemptively establish performance standards in order to make them compatible with your neighborhoods,” he said.