Actor Robert Duvall Fails to Stop Amazon Building a Data Center
Despite anger from local residents, including well-known actor Robert Duvall, the town of Warrenton in Fauquier County, Virginia approved a new Amazon data center construction this week.
As AP News reports(Opens in a new window), northern Virginia already has the world's largest concentration of data centers and it's only set to get worse after a $35 billion data center plan(Opens in a new window) was announced in January. Residents are fed up with the noise pollution from cooling fans, the high-voltage transmission lines required to power all the servers, and the large amounts of land covered by these huge buildings.
Over 100 people turned up for a meeting in Fauquier High School on Tueday to speak and oppose the construction of the Warrenton AWS data center. 92-year-old Robert Duvall was one of them and said, "We must all work to preserve the character of this town ... The vast majority of town and county residents agree that this is a bad use of this site." Attendees gave him a standing ovation.
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough and the town council vote went 4-3 in Amazon's favor early on Wednesday morning. Warrenton can now look forward to a 220,000-square-foot data center appearing on the edge of town(Opens in a new window) that will employ 50 people and generate around $900,000 a year in tax revenue.
John Foote, a local attorney representing Amazon, pointed out that, "The site produces no revenue for the town today ... The last I heard, the children of Warrenton are educated in county schools ... That money will in fact be useful for the county as well as it will be for the town."
There is some good news for local residents: the building permit Amazon received states it can't build an electric substation on the
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