Eastern Kentucky is debating one proposed campus. We should judge it by the record, not by the size of the building or the volume of the rumor.
By Brandon LaVoie
I learned industry in two places: on loading docks and in living systems.
For years I drove a truck through all 48 contiguous states. I delivered beer at Pier 7 in Boston. I hauled cheese into underground storage. I backed into factories, warehouses, farms, mills and distribution centers in nearly every kind of American landscape.
Years later, I studied ecosystem restoration through Gaia Education. That study gave names and structure to what the road had already shown me: soil holds memory, water carries decisions downstream, and land can recover when people stop treating it as disposable.
Both experiences matter to how I look at the proposed Muskie Data Campus at EastPark.
I have seen industry done well. I have also seen places where the smell reached you before the smokestack did. Anyone who has traveled through Chillicothe knows what I mean about a paper mill. Some operations become part of the air, the water and the daily burden of the people living nearby.
That is why I will not blindly trust a company because it prints a clean brochure. It is also why I will not pretend that every large industrial building is the same thing.
A paper mill, a chemical plant, a coal operation and a building full of computers do not use the same processes. They do not create the same emissions or leave the same waste. If we care about the land, we have to be precise about what threatens it.
So, I went looking for a place that already had what Eastern Kentucky is being told to fear. I found Loudoun County, Virginia.
A County Living With The Answer
Loudoun County’s 2026 property records count 209 completed data centers, with another 43 under construction.
Not 10. Not 30. Two hundred and nine completed facilities in one county.
Eastern Kentucky is debating one proposed campus. Muskie would be large, and its size should not be minimized. TeraWulf says the 285-acre site could eventually support more than 1,000 megawatts of computing capacity.
Power matters. Construction matters. Water matters. Noise matters. But large does not automatically mean poisonous.
If data centers inevitably destroy the communities around them, Loudoun County should be the place where that destruction is easiest to see.
The Air Was The First Place I Looked
I contacted the Loudoun County Health Department directly and asked about documented air-quality problems, public-health effects, generator emissions and complaints associated with data centers.
Dr. David Goodfriend, director of the department, gave me permission to quote his written response.
“The Loudoun County Health Department is not aware of any documented air quality or public health effects associated with our data centers.”
That answer did not come from TeraWulf or from a Kentucky economic-development office. It came from the health director in a county with 209 completed data centers.
Goodfriend also said complaints are generally greatest when facilities are being planned or built near homes, then tend to decline over time. Broader concerns remain about electricity and water use.
That is a useful distinction. Concern before construction is not the same thing as documented harm after operation begins.
Virginia is also monitoring carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and fine particles near data centers, homes, schools and industrial areas in Data Center Alley. Preliminary readings reported by the state have remained well below the federal comparison levels used in the project.
The monitoring should continue. Eastern Kentucky should begin with the same discipline: measure before construction, measure while the ground is being disturbed, measure after operation begins, and publish the results.
A real baseline protects both the public and the truth. Without one, every future argument becomes somebody’s memory against somebody else’s press release.
The Farms Are Still There
Loudoun County is not only server buildings and transmission lines. It is horse country and vineyard country. It has cattle, hayfields, orchards, wineries, farm markets and rural communities.
If hundreds of data centers had made the land unfit for agriculture, farming should have collapsed around them. It did not.
Loudoun counted 1,332 farms in 2022. That was more than the 1,259 farms counted in 2017, though fewer than the 1,396 counted in 2012. The county led Virginia with 98 farms growing grapes. It also led the state in the number of farms and acreage involving horses, with 4,898 horses on 476 farms.
Agricultural sales increased from about $37.7 million in 2017 to more than $50.2 million in 2022. Direct sales from farms to customers grew from about $7.8 million to more than $21.6 million.
Not every agricultural measure improved. Loudoun lost farmland between 2012 and 2022, its total horse population declined, and small farmers still struggle to make a living. Those facts belong in the story too.
But the vineyards did not die. Horse farms did not become impossible. Agricultural sales did not collapse. More than 40,000 acres remained protected through Loudoun’s Agricultural and Forestal District program as of June 2024.
That is the lesson Eastern Kentucky should carry home: do not put everything everywhere. Protect productive farms. Protect homes. Put major industry on land already intended for major industry.
A Tax Rate People Can Understand
Loudoun County homes are not cheap to buy. Data centers did not make northern Virginia real estate inexpensive.
They did help make those homes cheaper to keep than they otherwise would have been.
Loudoun says data-center revenue has helped fund schools and public services while allowing the county to lower its real-property tax rate. Since 2008, that rate has fallen from $1.285 to $0.805 for every $100 of assessed value.
Put that into household language. At the older rate, a home assessed at $200,000 would produce a county real-estate tax bill of $2,570. At the current rate, the bill would be $1,610. That is a difference of $960 a year.
Property assessments change, so no one should promise that every homeowner’s actual bill always falls. But the rate itself is far lower than it was before data-center revenue expanded.
That matters here. Eastern Kentucky has older people living on fixed incomes, families trying to hold onto inherited land, and households that can be knocked sideways by one medical bill or one broken transmission.
Keeping people on their land is economic development. A tax base that takes pressure off ordinary households is not a theory. It is money that remains in the kitchen budget.
The Schools Did Not Fall Apart
Loudoun did not collect data-center revenue while allowing its schools to decay. Its fiscal year 2027 budget fully funded the school board’s requested $105 million increase, bringing the school operating budget to about $2.1 billion.
All Loudoun County public schools were fully accredited under Virginia’s system in 2025.
Data centers did not teach those children.
Teachers did. Parents did. Students did. But money pays teachers, buys buses, builds classrooms and supports career education, special education, libraries, safety and the people who keep a school system working.
Loudoun has more than 200 completed data centers and fully accredited schools. Both facts exist at the same time.
The Lesson Loudoun Learned Late
Loudoun’s record is not a story about accepting data centers without limits. It is a story about learning where the limits belong.
I contacted the Loudoun County Department of Planning and Zoning. Courey Stewart, a Planner II, directed me to the county’s current zoning standards, comprehensive plan, land study and interactive map of existing and proposed facilities.
Those records show that older rules gave the county less control over some individual projects. Loudoun changed that on March 18, 2025. New data centers in several major industrial districts now require special-exception approval, giving the county a closer look at location, setbacks, noise, design and surrounding land before another facility is approved.
The county is still working on additional standards for noise, utility substations, building height, on-site power generation, energy storage and compatibility with neighboring property.
Some will point to those new rules as proof that data centers failed. I read them differently.
Loudoun did not drive the industry away. It kept the tax base, the funded schools and the lower residential rate. Then it improved the rules.
Do not regulate a billion-dollar industrial project with a handshake.
Eastern Kentucky can begin with lessons Loudoun had to learn over time. We can say yes to the right project, on the right land, under conditions strong enough to survive changes in company leadership and local politics.
Eastpark Is The Right Kind Of Land To Examine
The proposed Muskie campus would occupy about 285 acres inside the 1,000-acre EastPark Industrial Park, roughly 20 miles west of Ashland.
This is not an untouched river-bottom farm, a vineyard or a residential subdivision. It is former mining land inside a park that has been prepared and marketed for major industry for more than 25 years, near the transmission infrastructure a project of this scale requires.
That does not excuse damage. It means the project should be judged according to what it would actually do on land already assigned an industrial purpose.
Water protection should follow the property’s real drainage and receiving streams. Test them before the ground is disturbed. Require engineered stormwater controls. Continue sampling during construction and operation. Publish the results. Make the company repair damage it causes.
That is how restoration-minded development works. It does not pretend nothing can go wrong, and it does not declare the land dead before the first measurement is taken.
Promises Belong In Permits
TeraWulf says Muskie would use a closed-loop cooling system. The company has said the system would be filled and the fluid generally replaced about once every 10 years, rather than continuously drawing and discharging large amounts of local water for cooling.
That could be an important difference. It is still a company statement.
Write it into the permits. Require reports on actual water use. Require notice before any major change in cooling technology. Identify the source of the initial fill and the method for handling the fluid when it is eventually replaced.
TeraWulf is also redeveloping the former Century Aluminum smelter property in Hawesville as its Justified Data Campus. Company representatives told me approximately $50 million has already gone into cleanup and site preparation there. That number should be publicly documented, but the underlying strategy is sound: reuse industrial land, reuse transmission infrastructure and clean up what an older industry left behind.
That is close to the heart of ecosystem restoration. Restoration is not freezing land in time. It is repairing function, reducing future harm and finding a use that does not repeat the damage that came before.
The Terms Of A Responsible Yes
Loudoun does not prove that every data center is harmless. It proves that destruction is not inevitable.
Muskie should be required to operate under enforceable terms covering baseline and continuing air, water and noise testing; stormwater controls based on actual drainage; clear generator-testing schedules; public reporting of projected and actual water use; protection for existing electric customers; separate reporting of temporary construction jobs and permanent positions; local hiring and apprenticeships; disclosure of tax agreements and incentives; and a funded decommissioning and site-restoration plan.
None of that is anti-business. It is how serious people protect both the investment and the place receiving it.
What The Record Actually Says
Loudoun County has 209 completed data centers. Its health director says his department is not aware of documented air-quality or public-health effects associated with them. The county still has more than 1,300 farms, leads Virginia in farms growing grapes, leads the state in farms and acreage involving horses, and reported rising agricultural sales.
Its real-property tax rate fell from $1.285 to $0.805. Its schools are fully accredited and received a fully funded $105 million operating-budget increase.
Those facts do not tell us to stop asking questions. They tell us to ask better ones.
What enters the air? What reaches the water? Who pays for the infrastructure? What is measured? What is enforceable?
I know what destructive industry looks like. I drove through it. I worked around it. Sometimes I smelled it miles before I reached the gate.
I also studied how damaged systems recover. The lesson from both kinds of education is the same: the land remembers what we do, but damage is not the only thing it can remember. With good siting, honest measurements and enforceable rules, it can also remember repair.
We do not have to choose between economic development and clean water. Require both.
We do not have to choose between technology and agriculture. Protect both.
We do not have to trust every promise. Write the promises down and enforce them.
Eastern Kentucky has spent generations watching industries take wealth from our land and leave the damage behind. This time, we should demand something different: protect the land, protect the people, and make the investment remain here.
Let facts, not fear, decide what happens next.
About the Author
Brandon LaVoie is an elected Carter County Soil and Water Conservation Supervisor. He studied ecosystem restoration through Gaia Education and organizes land and river restoration work in northeastern Kentucky.
