“Faithful Servant, now at Peace,” reads one heart-shaped headstone in Tippets Hill Cemetery. But in the background of this final resting place, there is an incessant whirring sound and a shrill beep that blares again and again.
That’s because the small, historically Black burial ground in Loudoun County, Virginia, is surrounded on all sides by data centers. The cemetery’s few parking spaces had construction vehicles parked in them when NOTUS visited in early June.
The cemetery — and Northern Virginia at large — didn’t always look like this. At the turn of the century, there were a handful of data center campuses in Loudoun, Prince William and Fairfax counties — a region now known as data center alley.