Mital Gandhi built his backyard for basketball games, cookouts, and pool days thirteen years ago. He can still use it that way most afternoons. On quieter days he hears a low hum from the data centers flanking his subdivision on two sides, reminds himself it isn't bass from somewhere else, and goes back to what he was doing. "We are the epicenter of the internet," he said this summer, describing his effort to sell his entire 143-home neighborhood, the Regency, to the industry that built up around it.
The number on the table for Regency: roughly $4.4 million per acre across the subdivision's 130 acres, an implied total near $576 million, contingent on every single homeowner agreeing to sell and Loudoun County approving a rezoning that isn't guaranteed. It's an extreme case. But it's a visible version of something that shapes every home search in Ashburn right now, whether you're looking at a colonial three streets from the Metro or a townhome in Brambleton with no data center in sight. The same industry that built Loudoun's biggest tax subsidy is also the one redrawing property lines in specific subdivisions, and no median price on any site tells you which side of that line a given address sits on.
The Rate Cut You're Already Getting
Start with the part every Ashburn homeowner shares, whether or not a data center is visible from the yard. Loudoun's Board of Supervisors has lowered the real property tax rate every year for a decade, from $1.145 per $100 of assessed value in 2016 to $0.805 for tax year 2026. County officials have been explicit about why: absent the data center industry, that rate would likely sit above $1 per $100 instead of below it.
An economic analysis prepared for the Northern Virginia Technology Council put a dollar figure on the gap. If data centers disappeared from Loudoun tomorrow, the residential rate would need to nearly double, from $0.805 to $1.537 per $100, adding an estimated $5,800 a year to the tax bill on a median-valued home. County Administrator Tim Hemstreet has said the industry now accounts for 38 percent of the county's general fund revenue.
That's the diffuse half of the story. Every homeowner in Loudoun, Ashburn included, is getting a version of that discount whether their street has a data center on it or not.
Three Miles Away, a Different Ledger
The concentrated half of the story looks nothing like a line item on a tax bill. It looks like the Regency.
The subdivision sits off Waxpool Road and Ashburn Village Boulevard, boxed in by existing facilities from DataBank, Sabey, Aligned, and Digital Realty, with a CloudHQ campus planned nearby. Gandhi, a former HOA president, spent years pushing back on noise and construction before deciding the fight wasn't winning anything. The Regency HOA has since set up an entity called Community Works LLC to negotiate on the community's behalf, and the proposal reportedly includes six-figure deposits and permission for residents to stay in their homes for eleven months after closing.
None of it is settled. Loudoun County Board Chair Phyllis Randall has said she can't imagine voting for a data center at that location, standalone or otherwise. The current HOA president has said publicly there is no offer on the table right now, even as trade press and Loudoun homeowners describe ongoing talks. Broad Run District Supervisor Sylvia Glass has confirmed developer outreach without confirming a deal. No rezoning application had been filed with the county as of mid-2026.
A few miles away, a different kind of friction is playing out without a single data center in sight. In Loudoun Valley Estates, the Virginia State Corporation Commission approved a route this year for new 500-kilovolt transmission towers, some standing up to 185 feet tall, running through residential backyards as part of Dominion Energy's Golden-Mars project, one segment of a larger loop built to serve Data Center Alley's growing power demand. The homeowners association there deeded twelve acres of its own land, including a walking path to school, directly to the Loudoun County School Board, hoping to hand the board the same legal standing it had used to block a similar route near Rock Ridge High School.
These are two different problems. One is a direct data center abutment with an actual buyout on the table. The other is transmission infrastructure built to serve data centers elsewhere, reaching into a neighborhood that has none.
The County Is Already Rewriting the Rules
Loudoun didn't let this happen by accident, and it hasn't stood still either. In March 2025, the Board of Supervisors eliminated by-right approval for new data centers, meaning every future project now requires a special exception with public hearings before the Planning Commission and the Board itself. A grandfathering provision protected applications already under review, but only for sites more than 500 feet from residential areas. Anything closer went back through the new, slower process.
Fairfax County went further, requiring a 200-foot setback from any residential lot line and a 300-foot buffer for unscreened ground equipment, plus a one-mile buffer near Metrorail stations. Loudoun is now working through a second phase of its own rulemaking, addressing noise, backup generators, and substations more directly.
The politics haven't cooled. In late July, Supervisor Juli Briskman asked county staff to draft a plan for pausing new data center applications altogether, telling colleagues the community had been "asking us to fight back against these big corporations." The Board is scheduled to take up that motion on September 15.
None of this undoes what's already entitled or built. It does mean the regulatory ground under a given parcel looks different depending on when that parcel got its approvals, which is exactly the kind of detail a median price can't capture.
What Actually Separates One Ashburn Address From Another
| Subdivision | Situation as of mid-2026 | What it signals for a buyer |
|---|---|---|
| The Regency | HOA-backed negotiation over a full-subdivision sale to a data center developer, no rezoning filed yet | Direct abutment can eventually convert into a real exit opportunity, not only a nuisance |
| Loudoun Valley Estates | Transmission towers routed through backyards for a project serving the broader data center grid | Proximity risk isn't limited to visible facilities. Substations and transmission corridors can reach neighborhoods with no data center nearby |
| Belmont Country Club, One Loudoun, Brambleton | No reported buyout talks or transmission disputes tied to these communities in the research for this piece | Established master-planned communities currently sit outside the friction and are priced without that discount or that upside |
The practical takeaway is that Ashburn isn't one market with one relationship to data centers. It's dozens of subdivisions, each with its own distance to the nearest parcel zoned for industrial or office use, its own HOA correspondence history, and its own place in the county's entitlement pipeline. Regency's HOA reportedly fielded outreach quietly for more than a year before it became public. That's not unusual. It means the most useful question a buyer can ask isn't "does Ashburn have data centers," which everyone already knows, but whether a specific HOA has had any contact with developers, and whether a specific parcel sits inside or outside the newer setback protections.
Gandhi has pushed back on the idea that living next to data centers has hurt what Regency's homes are worth, pointing to recent sales in the neighborhood that he says haven't suffered. That claim is worth taking seriously and also worth checking street by street rather than assuming it applies everywhere in the corridor.
The Number That Actually Matters
Loudoun's own 2026 assessment data draws the contrast cleanly. The typical single-family detached home in the county gained 1.4 percent in assessed value over the past year, and the typical townhouse gained 0.5 percent. Total taxable commercial property, driven overwhelmingly by data centers, rose 26.9 percent in the same period, to $68 billion countywide. Commercial land specifically tied to data center use is now selling for an average of $3.76 million per acre, up $1.4 million from the year before.
That gap between a one percent residential story and a twenty-six percent commercial one is exactly why a single subdivision like the Regency can suddenly be worth $4.4 million an acre while the county's overall home values inch forward. The subsidy every resident gets is small and shared. The parcel-level swing is enormous and concentrated in the handful of communities positioned to cash in or absorb the disruption. A buyer comparing Ashburn to Reston or Leesburg on a portal's median price is comparing neither of those numbers. They're comparing an average that hides both stories at once.
A Few Direct Questions
Does living near a data center lower resale value in Ashburn? The evidence is mixed and localized rather than conclusive. Loudoun's countywide residential values kept rising through 2026 even as the data center footprint expanded, and Gandhi points to steady sales inside Regency itself. That doesn't mean every buffer zone behaves the same way. It means the effect, if any, needs to be checked at the subdivision level rather than assumed for the whole corridor.
Will Loudoun's tax rate keep falling? The county has built a Revenue Stabilization Fund specifically because officials expect data center revenue to be volatile, and they're setting aside roughly ten percent of it as a cushion. A board-level push to pause new applications is now on the calendar for September. Ten years of rate cuts is a strong track record, not a promise about the eleventh year.
If you're weighing an Ashburn address against something in Reston, Leesburg, or Great Falls, the data center question deserves more than a glance at a subdivision's marketing name. It deserves a look at the actual parcel, its distance to the nearest industrially zoned land, and whether its HOA has had any conversations worth asking about. That's the kind of comparison a spreadsheet won't do for you.
If you want help running that comparison for a specific address, Lindene Elise Patton can walk through it with you. Let's Connect.
