The data center fight in Loudoun County, Virginia
Loudoun County has a proposed data center moratorium on this tracker. Status is derived, not stored — a pause with a documented end date flips to Expired on its own — and the source is right next to the claim.
Status today
Board of Supervisors voted 6-1 to direct staff to prepare moratorium options by Sep 15. Legal questions remain about Virginia law's allowance of blanket moratoriums. World's largest data center hub (~46M sq ft constructed or permitted)
Source
read 2026-08-13
An expiry date is the earliest a pause could have ended — extensions are common, so confirm with the clerk before citing it.
Recent news
4 stories tracked since 2026-07-23 across 4 outlets. 2× Local officials are moving to pause or block the project. 1× A community is pushing back on a nearby data center. Most recent: “Loudoun County weighs data center pause as Spanberger opposes statewide ban” (Yahoo, 2026-08-13).
- Loudoun County weighs data center pause as Spanberger opposes statewide ban
- ‘Concrete jungle’: As Amazon details plans for new Ashburn data centers, some residents are fed up
- Loudoun County considers putting pause on data center development
- Data center noise, fumes create flood of complaints in Loudoun County
Automated news aggregation, not human-verified — follow each link to the original outlet. Part of the story tracker, 4 headlines archived.
Where the decision gets made
Board of Supervisors — Zoning and land use in 'Data Center Alley', the largest concentration of data centers in the world. Adopted a Data Center Standards & Locations Comprehensive Plan Amendment and Zoning Ordinance Amendment requiring Special Exception approval for new data-center uses; residents separately report a rising flood of noise and fumes complaints.
Meets: See the board's published meeting calendar.
Where: Board Room, Loudoun County Government Center, 1 Harrison Street SE, Leesburg, VA 20175
Public comment: See the board's published agenda for the public-comment process for a specific meeting.
Read from the official page on 2026-08-12. Meeting details change — confirm before you go.
What to do next
- Questions to ask at the hearing — force specific answers onto the record.
- Estimate the impact — electricity, water, and rate pressure for any facility size in Virginia.
- Model CBA clauses — copy-paste language communities have actually won.
- Virginia briefing — rates, grid carbon, PUC contacts, and every fight in the state.
Elsewhere in Virginia
- Chesapeake — Enacted
- Front Royal — Enactedexpires soon — 2026-10-04
- Suffolk — Proposed
- Franklin County — Enactedexpires 2028-08-07
As of August 2026 · changes weekly — re-check before citing
Illustrative rather than exhaustive — dozens of localities churn weekly, and this tracks the ones we have read a source for. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to the ordinance, the enacting body's own page, or a datable report of the vote, and were read on that date. Rows marked *unverified* came from bulk compilation and have not been checked against a primary source — the locality, the year, and the status may all be off. Verify one of those with the town clerk before citing it as precedent. **Expiry is derived, not asserted.** A row with a documented end date flips to *Expired* on its own once that date passes. A time-limited moratorium whose start date was never documented keeps showing as enacted — that is a known gap, not a claim that it is still in force. Moratoriums are also routinely extended, so an expiry date is the earliest it could have ended, not proof that it did.
Part of the U.S. data center moratorium tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0.