A few weeks ago, Mayor Mike Borger and his wife Lynnae traveled more than 1,500 miles to Loudoun County, Virginia, the original hub for data centers, to find answers and to experience first hand the impact the industry has had on the area and its residents.
The following is Mayor Mike’s account of what he saw, learned, and the answers to questions he had:
“I had it on my heart to get a feel for what this could look like for Pampa down the road and what’s happening here with data centers, so Lynnae and I on our own nickel went to look at the origin and place that has the most data centers in the world-and that’s Loudoun County, Virginia. We had heard about this place before, but we wanted to see it for ourselves and we went completely by ourselves, not through the City of Pampa. I wanted to get a vision for at least kind of what could happen here, good or bad, and just see it for myself because there’s so much misinformation out there.”
“Before I went, I reached out to their Economic Development Corporation, and in Virginia, it’s done at the county level. I sent an email to them and told them who I was and that we were having some data center activity here and that I would love to find out more about it and if anyone would be interested in talking to me. The EDC Director Buddy Rizer emailed me back and we got a date scheduled for us to come down and talk to him. I got a real wealth of information from him just trying to understand what was going on here with the data centers.”
“So Loudoun County is about 35 miles northwest of Washington D.C., and decades ago when fiber first got started, the hubs for that were near Washington. Then when the internet became viable for everyone through AOL, they built their facilites called server farms that hooked to the internet and connected people. They built those in Loudoun County for two reasons: there was excess power through their electric company being in the Washington D.C. area, and their fiber connection to all over the world from right there. Those two reasons is why it started, and that was around 1997. Then about ten years later, AOL kind of became obsolete. They had a couple of large server farm buildings there and in 2009 when Buddy Rizer was hired by the county which was primarily a farming community, they wanted him to do something with those buildings. So he started searching around to see what could be done that was related to server farms, and that’s when the very first idea of having a structure that had the provisions for servers and tenants who could come in and put their equipment in and basically become a data center for servers started. He was able to get that done and then it just took off.”
“Now 70% of global internet traffic currently goes through Loudoun County. There are over 200 data centers in that county, and it still only occupies about 3% of the land there. Loudoun County isn’t all that big, about half the size of Gray County. From the start, they built those data centers a lot smaller than what Google is building out here, and they built them just within the town primarily in Ashburn. They did that because it was near power where they could hook into the grid and the fiber was right there close, so there was no reason for them to go out in a rural area.”
Once the data centers are started in an area, what are the companies who built them doing there?
“So for instance, Visa’s data center processes 32,000 card swipes per minute all over the world. When you buy gas at a pump or when you buy groceries, they are processing the card through that data center, making sure it’s matching up, who the seller is, connecting the money, and so forth. There’s a lot that goes on in that transaction, but 32,000 per minute is an enormous amount. Amazon processes 10,000 orders per minute. So I’m going to order some toilet paper and have it sent to my house in Pampa, it goes through that data center that quick. For Facebook, when you post something, it doesn’t just go through your phone-it goes through a server and your phone just acts like a terminal, and the server processes 2.4 million posts every minute. For Google, 9.5 million searches every minute. That’s a lot of information going through these servers in a building in Loudoun County, Virginia.”
What about A.I?
“Buddy said that people think the data center boom is all about A.I., but he said that’s not what it’s about. It’s about all those apps we all have on our phones, all our Cloud storage, all of our pictures-everything we do on our phone that 20 years ago we weren’t doing, and that all has to be processed by a computer somewhere.”
“I think something we all need to realize is this is something we’re all involved in. If you have a cell phone and you’re using apps or using a credit card, we are using things that a data center processes. It’s something we all use, and to reject the idea of data centers is also saying we reject the conveniences we have to be able to do all these things online. I didn’t realize all this until I saw it with my own eyes-what it’s all doing and what we’re all counting on. I get the idea of a lot of wires being strung around, the big buildings, and the power it takes to run one of these, but we have to ask ourselves, ‘what’s the alternative?’ Do we all want to go back to pencil and paper, writing checks, and sending everything by mail? Or do we want to continue to use these great tools we have to do things digitally?”
Were the data centers in Loudoun County operated and cooled by water?
“That’s been a really big area of misinformation, and even in Loudoun County where they have the Potomac River right through there, they have huge amounts of water everywhere, nothing like how it is here. They have vinyards and parks-I mean they have tons of water. But even there, the data centers by and large are closed-loop cooling, which is what we will have here. There’s no evaporation. As I drove around and looked at all these buildings, I didn’t see steam coming off of them or anything like that. They aren’t an excess water user, and even the ones that are using water, it’s like having a golf course. Here where they’re using closed-loop cooling, the only water consumption is for domestic use like sinks, restrooms, and things like that. When I went out and took a tour of the Google facility out here, the water is chilled and starts at one end of the building, circulates through the racks, and travels to the other end hot, then it’s chilled again. Inside the data center as far as the air goes, it’s about 85 to 90 degrees, so they’re not trying to cool the air, just dissipate the heat from those serves and it’s all done through a closed-loop system.”
What have these data centers done for the economy in Loudoun County?
“When I considered running for Mayor, I looked into where we were in Pampa and what we needed and what we needed to work on, and I saw that our median income was very low compared to the rest of the state. Our median income is $52,000 a year, which is in the middle and not the average. I saw that as a great need, because hard-working people aren’t making enough money. So in Loudoun County, Virgina, they have the highest median income in the country at $177,000 a year. It’s done that in a period of about 17 years. So yes, it will help our median income. And we’re feeling some pain from that right now because people are leaving their old lower-paying jobs and going to higher-paying jobs. People say, ‘well, it’s just for construction and it’s temporary,’ but we don’t know that. What people know is what they’re making this year at the new job compared to what they made last year. That’s one thing Mr. Rizer said to me, ‘don’t negate the construction phase of this because it goes on longer than you expect.’ People will see that Pampa is a great place with great schools and will decide they want to stay. He said that happens a lot, and I expect that’s going to happen.”
“I believe it will raise our tax revenue not on our backs, but on the backs of the businesses that will spring up here. Sixteen years ago, Loudoun County was barely getting by, and they hired Buddy Rizer to turn things around, and now their annual property tax revenue, even after lowering the rate for residents by 48% over the last ten years, is $3 billion a year. And it’s all from data centers. I think in 2026, our total increase in tax revenues is going to be about $2 million from all those entities combined. In 2027, it will be about $13 million. In 2028, $26 million. And all of that is without raising property taxes.”
What is the county doing with that $3 billion in tax revenue?
“First of all, they’re lowering the rates and keeping them down for people. Second, they’re creating quality of life assets. They have a place that’s like our Youth Center here where there’s an olympic-sized swimming pool, family play area, and indoor basketball courts. They have a beautiful daycare facility, parks, vineyards, and fantastic schools.”
How does having the workforce hub affect Pampa’s economy? What is the likelihood they come to Pampa and shop at our stores and eat at our restaurants?
“There’s two ways to look at it: in Childress, they are in such a bind for housing now and can’t house everybody and serve everyone. They are in a true boom, but in a bad way where people are having to move away because rent is going up and they can’t afford it. When the construction phase slows down out there and if people try to build to accommodate that, they’re going to have a bust. So that’s the whole motivation for the workforce hub-to accommodate the workers now without putting an excess burden on Pampa. And it’s also to keep people from over-building from when it slows down and it’s not needed.”
“At first I was pretty negative about that because I wanted all that business here, but the truth is those people who are going to work on the project will live out there in a one-bedroom unit that’s pretty much like a hotel room. They have a bedroom, a bathroom, and no kitchen. Everybody eats at the same kitchen through Ermark. They’ll be bussed to the job site, bussed back home, eat, watch TV, go to bed, and do it again. They say folks will appreciate that because their per diem costs to live are super low if they stay out there, so they get to pocket that money, and they’ll want to come to town. It’s like they never get to leave work, and even though they’re going to have amenities out there, I think by and large, people are going to say, ‘let’s go to town.’ I think it protects us from the boom bust, and it’s also providing jobs. I know a sweet couple who just got married who are getting jobs out there where they will work in food service and housekeeping, and it includes their room and board, so they’ll get to live in those nice units, have all their meals paid for, and be able to pocket all their paycheck. It’s life changing for them. Well some people say, ‘yeah, that’s only going to be for four or five years,’ but we don’t know that.”
“I get it because I was disappointed that wasn’t going to be in Pampa, but now I’m seeing the benefit of it. For instance, the person who is in charge of that bought a house here in Pampa and lives here now. That’s the kind of the thing that’s happening right now. Last I checked, there were between about 500-600 workers out their working on the project, so we’re still on the front end of it. They told me they thought peak employment would be around late 2027, so we’re still ramping up and we haven’t seen a big influx yet, and it hasn’t happened largely because there’s no place for them to stay, but that’s changing rapidly.”
Additional Comments
“I think one of the wisest things I heard during the early discussions when Gray County was trying to approve the abatement is when Warren Chisum said, ‘People ask how many jobs are the data centers going to provide, and I said that I didn’t know, but it’s more than we’ve got now.’ That’s the way we should look at it. It’s not causing any harm and it’s going to provide more jobs than we have now. And the tax revenue those folks will pay us will really change our county and our ability to do the things we want.”
Mayor Mike also mentioned that among the 200 data centers in Loudoun County, Buddy Rizer said that Google is the best partner they have who actively gets involved and invests in the community, and it’s a partnership Pampa can certainly look forward to.
