This is the first in an ongoing series on data center development in Western Pennsylvania and the impact it has on surrounding businesses and residents.
Western Pennsylvania appears poised for what could be its biggest infrastructure boom since the end of the steel era.
A new industry, one forged in server racks instead of blast furnaces, is increasingly eyeing the region: data centers.
Just in the past year, developers have announced billions of dollars of investments for several massive campuses that would draw more power than entire cities.
The project planned at Homer City’s former power plant in Indiana County would draw more than four gigawatts of power, while a $10 billion campus along the Ohio River in the small Beaver County community of Shippingport could have similar power needs.
A gigawatt is 1 billion watts — enough to power about 750,000 average homes in the United States.
The projects in Homer City and Shippingport would depend on on-site natural gas-powered plants, both converted from former coal-fired power plants.
Other data centers are planned or in discussion in Upper Burrell in Westmoreland County, Springdale in Allegheny County and South Strabane in Washington County.
The ultimate power needs of some projects are still nebulous. But taken together at full capacity, the energy required for the Upper Burrell, Homer City and Springdale centers would be enough to power nearly every home in Pennsylvania.
Though the industry is relatively new in Western Pennsylvania, data centers are all too familiar to residents further south. For decades, the U.S. data center industry has mostly been centered in one place — Northern Virginia.
It is there that Western Pennsylvania residents and public officials who are curious about what’s to come can look for clues as the industry expands in the region.
Hundreds of data centers dot the landscape in what used to be mostly farmland outside the nation’s capital. The region — often called “data center alley” — forms the largest concentration of centers in the world, serving as the backbone of the world’s internet infrastructure.
To residents, local officials and industry representatives, the build-up in North Virginia alternatively serves as a cautionary tale and an economic success story.
The background
Once a sparsely populated landscape of farms and D.C. suburbs set around Washington Dulles International Airport, Loudoun County, Va., now is dotted with hulking glass-and-concrete structures and propped-up walls of half-built centers yet to come.
“In this county, there’s been a data center under construction every day for 25 years,” Kevin Gundersen told TribLive as he stood at a data center construction site near Dulles. Loudoun County puts that figure closer to 15 years.
Gundersen is a spokesman for Digital Realty, a data center firm that operates more than 300 centers globally. He joined the company only a few months ago, but his industry has been active in Loudoun County for years.
Loudoun, home to about 420,000 people, sits about 30 miles west of Washington, D.C. At around $170,000 per year, it has the highest median household income of any county in the United States.
The county is the data center industry’s epicenter in Northern Virginia, with 53 million square feet — nearly 2 square miles — of facilities.
Many are centered near the airport in communities like Ashburn and Sterling. Neighboring Fairfax and Prince William counties also each contain several dozen data centers.
Within the centers are thousands of server racks, blinking with small LED lights and constantly cooled by whooshing fans.
This is where the internet happens. The data centers there, and others around the world, essentially are the internet.
The servers host websites, allow users to stream media and enable cloud storage, among many other things.
“What’s in all these servers inside a data center? Really, our entire digital life,” said Eric Ballard, senior director of solutions architecture at Digital Realty. “Your phone, that environment, it’s talking back to something. Your phone, your social media, all your pictures, wherever you’re storing them, whether you’re storing them in the cloud or you’re storing them on Facebook or whatever, they’re all living in a data center somewhere.”
With more than two decades in the industry, Ballard has watched Loudoun grow into its current status as the “data center mecca of the world.”
Northern Virginia became the center of the industry, in large part, because of the roots AOL set down in the 1990s. The company, one of the world’s first major internet providers, centered its operations in Loudoun County in 1996 before an eventual merger with Time Warner.
Some smaller data centers already had been present in the region because of its proximity to government agencies and its status as a crossroads of national fiber optic routes.
But far from the days of dial-up internet, the recent boom of data centers is the result of something new: artificial intelligence.
Building and training AI models requires massive amounts of computing power and specialized equipment like advanced graphics processing units, or GPUs. That has led large tech companies to invest heavily in data centers.
Sizable firms like Amazon — which relies on more than 100 centers in Virginia for its Amazon Web Services — tend to build their own centers, while smaller players often opt to rent server space from companies like Digital Realty.
It’s more than just the massive data center buildings that are needed to power the industry, however. The centers need large electrical substations, miles of transmission lines and hundreds of backup generators in case of a power outage.
That’s what got Prince William County resident Elena Schlossberg involved in the fight against the industry.
Local resistance
Schlossberg moved to a rural section of western Prince William County around 2001 from neighboring Fairfax County. She and her husband built a house near the foot of a mountain west of Haymarket, Va.
Educated as a middle school counselor, Schlossberg took an interest in environmental and land-use issues. But she wasn’t plugged into the data center industry’s activities until around 2014. That’s when she became involved in a fight against a series of transmission lines designed to power an Amazon data center near Haymarket.
She mobilized a network of friends at a “war room” around her kitchen table.
“I didn’t really understand — nobody really understood — what it was we were getting into,” Schlossberg said.
In the end, the fight against the lines was a half-win. Dominion Energy, the area’s electric utility company, buried about 3 miles of the lines, while another 3 miles were installed above ground along Interstate 66.
That initial battle led to the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, a nonprofit formed to advocate for residents and quality of life in the county. Schlossberg has served as its executive director since 2014.
The proliferation of data centers in the past decade — which Schlossberg calls a “metastasizing cancer” — has caused an enormous spike in power demand.
That has led to an increasing reliance on fossil fuels like natural gas and coal for energy generation as well as diesel fuel for backup generators.
For clean-energy advocates, it’s a nightmare scenario.
“The idea that a 21st-century technology that’s promising all this (transformation) … is running on diesel generators and coal, excuse me if I’m not sold,” Schlossberg said.
In addition to the heightened energy demand, residents have expressed concern about the amount of water the centers require to cool their servers and the constant hum that some produce.
The more recent AI build-up has struck a nerve among locals, causing a grassroots backlash that has seeped into politics.
“We have made it impossible to get elected in western Prince William unless you’re on the right side of this issue,” Schlossberg said.
Bipartisan politics
In George Stewart’s office in Gainesville, Va., sits a large map with color-coded push pins designating each data center or project proposal in Prince William County.
Stewart took his seat as a county supervisor last November after a special election triggered by the death of the former supervisor, Bob Weir.
In a county that has seen a recent boom in data center development, it’s unsurprising that the top issue on Stewart’s campaign page was to “stop unchecked spread of data centers.”
He’s not alone. Stopping the continued proliferation of data centers in the area is one of the rare bipartisan issues at the local level in Virginia.
The first issue listed on the campaign website for Stewart’s Republican opponent, Patrick Harders, was “stopping industrial data center sprawl.”
A sticking point to that stance, Stewart admits: Data centers draw money to the area.
In 2024, the centers accounted for more than 90% of commercial real estate growth in Prince William County, drawing nearly $300 million to county coffers, according to a tax report.
Further north in Loudoun County, taxes derived from the data center industry account for more than one-third of the county’s general fund revenues, according to the county.
But the money simply isn’t worth it, Stewart said.
“For the environmental impact, for the social impact, even for the political impact — the juice is not worth the squeeze when it comes to data centers,” he told TribLive.
In an increasingly internet- and AI-reliant world, Stewart said he recognizes the need for the industry, but the only appropriate place for data center development is “the middle of nowhere.”
“The only thing that’s missing to make that happen is the will, and America used to have a tremendous amount of will,” he said.
The massive energy requirements and the potential disruptions to everyday life and the landscape caused by development and noise are compounded by another issue, Stewart said.
The centers are “architecturally uninspired” — or more frankly, “ugly,” he said.
Many data centers, especially earlier designs, are enormous, medium-height gray boxes that residents have said prove unsightly in the generally bucolic landscape.
Economic impact
But Victor Hoskins said the industry has improved its aesthetics in recent years, using more glass and less 90-degree angles.
Hoskins is the president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority, the semi-public agency that works to drive commercial and industrial development.
He has spent his career bouncing between the public and private sectors. He previously served in the same role in neighboring Arlington County, where he helped woo Amazon to locate a branch of its headquarters — Amazon HQ2.
Most of Fairfax’s data centers are concentrated in the western portion of the county near Loudoun and the Dulles airport in communities like Chantilly and Reston.
Wary of the mass build-up and resulting backlash in Loudoun, Fairfax took a different approach, Hoskins said.
His agency worked with county officials to designate specific areas that could be suitable for data centers, hoping to drive development but on a limited scale.
“We do not actively market the (sites) the county has said ‘that’s too close to a school, that’s too close to a hospital, that will cause disruption to this future planned community,’” Hoskins said. “So we basically worked with the county on all of that.”
That doesn’t stop developers from seeking to build elsewhere in Fairfax, but they’re unlikely to receive the same backing from local officials, Hoskins said.
It’s not just the tech industry that relies on data centers in the region, Hoskins said.
Northern Virginia, beyond its deep ties to the federal government and its many contractors, is the home of defense and aerospace giants like Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics as well as Capital One, one of the largest banks in the country.
That’s in addition to a slew of regional headquarters for some of the biggest names in the corporate world.
With massive digital requirements, companies seek to invest in Northern Virginia because of its accessibility to data centers, Hoskins said.
“All of these things create a proximity and a clustering,” Hoskins said.
Compared to other large-scale industry, data centers have been frequently criticized as minimal job creators.
Digital Realty, more a real estate trust than a tech firm, may have relatively few staffers at its centers, Gundersen said. Employees of the clients that rent the company’s servers, however, file in and out of centers every day, he said.
In addition to the thousands employed for construction-related work at data center sites, the industry also ripples out further, Gundersen said.
Inside a data center in Ashburn, Gundersen pointed out custom-made steel piping for the cooling system bearing a “Made in the USA” decal and dozens of Caterpillar generators also made domestically.
According to a report by the World Economic Forum, data center and AI investments were essentially the sole industry driving the American economy upward in the first half of 2025.
Government estimates show the gross domestic product, a measure of the nation’s overall economic output, grew by about 2.2% in 2025. Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and an economic adviser during the Obama administration, claimed that, excluding investments in “information processing equipment and software,” the U.S. GDP would’ve grown by only 0.1% last year.
Advice for Western Pennsylvania
Despite the varying suggestions for Western Pennsylvanians from residents and officials in Virginia, one common theme emerged: Behold Virginia.
“If I was talking to a Pittsburgh local official, (I’d say) work with the companies, come down to Loudoun, walk around,” said Gundersen, the Digital Realty spokesman. “Do your homework.”
If Western Pennsylvania is indeed on the precipice of a data center build-up, Schlossberg advised officials to go south for a different reason.
“You have to go in with eyes wide open,” she said. “Open your eyes. Anybody who tells you this isn’t your future is not being honest.”
Before data center development spreads, Schlossberg said, local governments should adopt strict ordinances for where data centers can go and how they can be built.
That could include requirements to bury energy lines, strict noise ordinances with high and low frequencies in mind, location restrictions, and even aesthetic requirements, said Stewart, the Prince William County supervisor.
Stewart also advised locals to lean on their elected representatives to develop a high bar for developers and to maintain transparency throughout the development process.
“Do show up, but put some other people in the seats of the car with you. Bring a busload of people if you have to,” Stewart said.
Though Gundersen acknowledged that Virginians have “legitimate concerns” about the expansion of data centers, he said the industry also has brought plenty with it.
Since 2000, Loudoun County’s population has grown by more than two and half times. In that same period, the Loudoun County Public Schools district has built 51 new schools. And, in recent years, the county has consistently slashed its property tax rate, which now ranks among the lowest in the area.
Ballard, of Digital Realty, said it plainly: “There’s value in data centers. Companies need them.”
If a wave is coming, Hoskins said, officials can look to Fairfax County as a blueprint for local strategies.
“I think policy makers can look at the policies we’ve changed, the regulations we’ve already changed: height, setbacks, aesthetics,” Hoskins said.
It won’t stop development, he said, but it may allow communities to maintain their character while still reaping the economic benefits.
“You want parks? Well, they’re not free. You want recreation centers? They’re not free. You want affordable housing and workforce housing? It’s not free,” Hoskins said.
Once the data centers arrive, though, be prepared for the industry to “bum rush the door,” Stewart warned.
Even with regulations in place, Schlossberg said, local governments have to be prepared to stand their ground.
“The restrictions you put into these applications,” she said, “are only as good as your local supervisors will enforce them.”