Data Center Growth Faces Rising NIMBY Pushback

The relentless push to expand regional data center hubs outward is encountering growing resistance from residents who don’t want these facilities near them and public officials who say the facilities are not sustainable.

The large amount of water used to cool data centers is generating opposition to new facilities in expanding data center hubs like Greater Phoenix, a region where local water resources soon will not be adequate to support the needs of one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities.

In addition to water usage, NIMBY resistance to data center growth is being driven by the noise produced by extensive cooling systems and generators required to run 24/7 at server farms, and by the encroachment of data center expansion into pristine rural areas.

Greater Phoenix is now the third-largest US data center hub, measured in net absorption of megawatts, according to JLL’s latest Data Center Outlook report.

New data center facilities have been proliferating in the suburbs of Phoenix. In Mesa, AZ, Japan’s NTT is building a campus with seven data centers; construction is under way in Mesa for Facebook’s 960 million-square foot, $800 million data center, which is scheduled to open by the end of next year.

In the western part of the Valley of the Sun, Vantage Data Centers is building a campus that will be home to three server farm facilities in Goodyear, AZ

But officials in nearby Chandler, AZ are considering a moratorium on new data centers, which officials say are not sustainable, don’t generate a significant number of new jobs and make too much noise.

About 20 years ago, Chandler welcomed a cluster of data centers by rezoning its Price Road neighborhood as the first phase of what city officials hoped would become an expanding tech hub. Now, the city is rethinking this strategy for what it calls the “Price Corridor.“

“Over time, we’ve realized it’s a drain on water and energy and as the Price Corridor has evolved, we’ve realized data centers aren’t our target,” Deputy Mayor Mark Stewart said, in a recent interview with the Arizona Republic newspaper. 

Opposition to outward expansion of data centers has even materialized in the epicenter of the data center universe: Northern Virginia, the largest global hub with 300 MW of capacity, nearly 10 times the total of the second-largest US hub in the Pacific Northwest.

In Culpeper County, VA, the county planning board this month voted down Amazon Web Services proposal to rezone 243 acres to permit the development of two data centers on rural property now occupied by a horse farm and equestrian center.

In Prince William County, VA a rural community adjacent to the Civil War battlefield at Manassas is opposing data center development in proximity to the historic site.

An estimated 80 percent of Northern Virginia’s data center cluster is housed in Loudoun County, centered on the towns of Ashburn and Leesburg.

The pace of new data center construction remains at record levels in Loudoun County, with more than 4 million square feet of new data center space in the pipeline, according to CRBE.