alt Hacker NewsGrowing up near Ashburn makes every anti data center argument feel like crazy land. From my perspective when I lived there, they were somewhat ugly large boxes that paid county tax and raised land value. I never noticed any kind of noise from them, though they were largely on industrially zoned land right by the airport. Also gave us single digit ping. Electricity rates are below the national average.
Now that I'm an adult I have several friends employed in the industry, mostly in cooling system automation.
A few things you might want to consider:
1) your example pays very substantial tax. (property taxes, plus, recently, tax on electricity use)
2) your example primarily used undesirable land.
3) your example grew slowly, allowing the power company to add capacity without a big challenge matching demand.
4) your example is in a heavily connected part of the grid, so it didn't need all of that added power generation to be local.
All of these factors led to datacenters being viewed favorably by Loudon County for most of this century.... but many (and sometimes all) of those factors aren't there for other projects. For example, there are a lot of projects where the datacenter is not paying any property tax or sales/use tax at all.
Heck, even in Loudon County, they're changing regulations to pump the brakes because the hyperscale datacenters are growing electric demand a bit too quickly for them to manage without adding a little friction.
Your anecdote about "it was good in this one county, from 1995 through 2025" cannot be reasonably extended to believe that all of these projects have similar tradeoffs.
(And I'm not even getting into the reality that "this datacenter will let me use AOL" will, of course, be viewed differently than "this datacenter will help my employer remove my job.")