He wants to sell his neighborhood to data centers

sell The – Mital Gandhi says the constant hum of nearby data centers—one of four within 2,000 feet—pushed him to propose a once-in-a-lifetime buyout of The Regency, a 143-home neighborhood in Loudoun County’s “Data Center Alley.” His plan, first pitched in 2024, would se

For three years, Mital Gandhi says he’s been able to hear the infrastructure of the AI boom from his own porch.

During the 2024 NBA Finals at his home in Ashburn. Virginia. he remembers turning his attention away from the TV and noticing a steady hum instead. It wasn’t house sound carrying through walls. He told Business Insider that the noise came from one of the four data centers within less than 2. 000 feet of his property. “You can see them from my front porch. You can hear them sometimes from my pool,” Gandhi, 47, said. “It’s not appealing to me to hear them or to be surrounded by them.”.

The Regency—his 143-home neighborhood in Loudoun County—sits in the area known for hosting about 200 data centers. the highest concentration in the world. But for residents like Gandhi, the disturbance isn’t limited to what’s already built. He says the neighborhood has also been living with constant construction as more facilities move closer.

Gandhi moved from Washington, DC to the suburbs in 2013 with his wife and son, after he grew tired of pushing a stroller in one of the busiest downtown neighborhoods. He never expected the tradeoff to be massive servers powering artificial intelligence everywhere around him.

Now he’s pursuing a deal that would do more than change his view—it would remake the entire community.

Gandhi’s proposal is straightforward: get the entire community to agree to sell their properties to a data center developer for $4.4 million per acre—about four times the price of an average property in The Regency. He estimates the overall deal would be worth more than $500 million. His pitch is rooted in a simple question he says he asked himself after deciding “the data center invasion is inevitable”: if it’s coming anyway. why not capitalize on it?.

Convincing 143 families has been an uphill battle since Gandhi first pitched the deal in 2024. Regardless of outcome, he calls his effort “heroic.”

“This is the best possible scenario for our lives at this point,” he said. “To give 143 families an opportunity — potentially a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — is probably one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life.”

The plan is designed to turn frustration into leverage. Gandhi has spent decades hearing the language of big bets and hard consequences.

Before he turned 30, he faced kidney failure. He recalled sitting in a dialysis chair and realizing how quickly life could change. “I could die without this dialysis machine,” he said. “It gave me a real sense of purpose for living.” That experience didn’t just shape his health—it shaped his ambition.

In the dialysis chair. he told his nephrologist he would try to make money that could help him build a future for others. “When I was in that dialysis chair. I told my nephrologist. I said. ‘Hey doc. I’m going to make you a million dollars.’” He said that one day he’d open a dialysis center to help save the lives of more patients like him.

Gandhi is also a man who says he’s learned to be direct. After a successful kidney transplant surgery in 2009 at age 30—he says his doctor granted him “more time”—he described his approach as blunt. “At the end of the day. one thing I learned from having a kidney transplant is that I don’t like the bullshit. ” he said. “I’m very direct. Either you’re going to love me, or you’re not, and that’s OK.”.

His business background is similarly built for negotiation and pressure. He described himself as a “corporate guy. ” having worked in fundraising as a major gifts officer for his alma mater. American University. and for Live Nation Entertainment as a national sales manager. He shifted into real estate when he took on a new role as managing partner of Merit Development. a firm based in New Jersey and Washington. in 2012. By the end of 2013, he had bought a dialysis center with his doctor for $1.9 million in Millburn, New Jersey.

“There are a lot of people who talk a big game, and there are very few who deliver it,” Gandhi said. “When I tell you I’m going to do something, you have nothing else to worry about.”

That attitude is part of how he landed his neighborhood’s attention. Among the first people he discussed the idea with was Walt Purnell, a Regency resident since 1999 and a former HOA president who lives across the street from Gandhi.

Purnell said Gandhi called him one day and framed the plan through the exasperation many residents felt. “He calls me one day. he says. ‘My wife thinks I’m crazy. but instead of putting up with all these complaints from all the neighbors incessantly. why don’t we sell the whole development?’” Purnell told Business Insider. Purnell, 80, said he agreed with the wife—then doubted the numbers. “And I said, ‘Mital, I agree with your wife. You’re crazy. We’re never going to get 143 homeowners to agree to do that.’ And he says. ‘Well. that may well be. but I’d like to be able to put a deal on the table and let them decide.’”.

To build a case. Gandhi used real-estate connections to shape a ballpark sale price based on what he said were other data center deals in the area. He pointed to an example in Prince William County. where Microsoft purchased 124 acres of vacant land for $465.5 million—or about $3.75 million per acre. He said he wanted Regency residents to see a number that felt justified rather than pulled from thin air.

“I made sure it was a justified number — it wasn’t out of the air,” he said. “It was more of a, ‘Huh, we could potentially do it.’ The biggest task here is to get 143 people on the same page.”

For Gandhi, the deal is also personal. “Do I think it’s the right thing for the community? Yes. To put all the pieces together as a dealmaker, that’s exciting for me.”

Longtime resident Rick Myers, 62, has lived in The Regency since 1998 and watched the neighborhood change over two decades. He remembered what the area looked like “back in the ’90s. ” when Ashburn was still becoming what it is now: a place surrounded by wooded. undeveloped land. In his telling, the space around The Regency was so green that data centers felt unimaginable.

“You really didn’t see anything but greenery everywhere,” Myers said.

He says some trees still stand on a half-acre lot behind his home, keeping the data centers at bay—at least until the weather changes. In colder months, he says, the bare trees reveal windowless data centers looming behind them.

“The trend now is to make them four, five, six stories tall, so that you’re going to see them no matter how tall the trees are,” Myers said.

For residents, the problem isn’t only the view. Purnell described a steady grind of disruption: construction noise, construction traffic, and emergency generators running in the middle of the night. He said some facilities didn’t have proper baffling on air conditioners, creating a constant hum.

“The construction noise, the construction traffic, the running of their emergency generators in the middle of the night… Some of them didn’t have proper baffling on their air conditioners, so there was this massive humming all the time,” Purnell said. “Everybody was complaining.”

When Gandhi sent out a mass email outlining the potential deal. Myers said he estimated about 60% of neighbors were in favor of selling. Purnell said support initially surged: when Gandhi and Purnell polled their neighbors on the initial proposal. 138 out of 143 households said they would accept the deal if the price was right.

But the numbers didn’t hold.

Once residents saw a detailed offer sheet, Purnell said support began to waver. “Everybody decided there’s something they didn’t like about it, and so we’re sort of stalemated,” he said.

One of the central frictions is time. Gandhi said one of the biggest issues Regency residents have with the deal is the timeline: because the plan would require zoning changes and the addition of electrical infrastructure, he estimates the transaction could take about seven years to complete.

For some residents, that delay changes the meaning of the offer. A Regency resident who works in finance and has lived in the neighborhood for a decade said the deal’s headline value looks clean until you ask what people risk while waiting.

“The value of a house generally — especially in our market — will appreciate, assuming you keep it maintained, by doing nothing,” the resident told Business Insider.

The resident also described a question that follows almost automatically in real estate: what compensation would be needed if owners can’t monetize their largest asset immediately.

“How much risk is someone willing to take,” the resident added, “if the answer is you cannot monetize one of your largest assets for some period of time? Then the compensation to offset that risk needs to be appropriate, and the purchase price needs to be appropriate.”

Some parents, Gandhi said, are also weighing how a long closing would fit family plans. School schedules can’t easily be paused, and a multi-year process creates uncertainty.

“There are people who have kids in the school system, where they want to extend the closing even further because they want little Johnny to graduate from high school or middle school or whatever it may be,” Gandhi said. “The only term that everyone can agree to is money.”

Gandhi’s pitch faces another challenge: he needs unanimity. With 143 households in the development, even small pockets of hesitation can stall the proposal.

A deal like this also doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Northern Virginia has seen similar attempts to negotiate with data center developers.

In 2025, Chuck Kuhn, a businessman in Leesburg, Virginia—a town 15 minutes away from Ashburn—sold 97 parcels of land to a global data center investor for $615 million. The property was approved for five new data centers, according to the Washington Business Journal.

In Prince William County, one county south of Loudoun, landowner Mary Ann Ghadban and her neighbors agreed to sell an assemblage of land to data center developer QTS in 2021, though Gandhi said the deal is still mired in legal troubles.

The potential buyer for The Regency would be a data center developer that would lease the property to a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services or Google. The identities of both parties are being kept under wraps via NDAs. Data Center Dynamics reported that both are already major players in Loudoun County.

Even with those details, the picture still doesn’t narrow enough for residents who wonder who might be coming next.

Around The Regency, the data center landscape is already crowded. About 6 miles up the road, Amazon Data Services paid $427 million for George Washington University’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus. Aligned Data Centers sits directly east of The Regency. Digital Realty is the southern neighbor of the development. and DataBank and Sabey—both located on Red Rum Drive—are among the data centers Gandhi says he can see from his front porch.

Local officials, meanwhile, have their own stance on how land should be used. Sylvia Glass, district supervisor of Broad Run, where The Regency is located, said in a statement that Loudoun County would prefer the land be used for “housing, commercial, and civic uses.”

Glass said: “I am aware that The Regency has received outreach from data center developers and I have spoken several times with residents.” She added she is “not involved in any negotiations the community may be having” and that “no rezoning application has been submitted to Loudoun County.”

Still, not everyone believes Gandhi’s deal will hold.

Ashburn resident Karen Nilsen Brown. a real estate agent who lives about 3 miles from The Regency. said she hopes the offer doesn’t go through for the community’s sake. “We’re losing beautiful trees and greenery,” Brown, 54, told Business Insider. “The landscape that was once allowed in the county is now being replaced by, basically, these cement panels.”.

Gandhi understands the sentiment, but he says it may already be too late to reverse what he sees as an unstoppable shift.

He believes the best option now is to help residents find greener. less concrete-filled pastures—even if it means leaving behind the neighborhood he says he came to love. “Do I think it’s the right thing for the community?. Do I think it’s the right thing for the region?. Yes,” he said. “To put all the pieces together as a dealmaker, that’s exciting for me.”.

He also said he supports the broader technology wave. “I do believe AI is the future, and I do believe AI is going to take jobs,” he added. “It’s nice to be a part of the boom instead of being left behind.”

That blend—accepting the future while trying to protect a community’s present—sits at the heart of Gandhi’s story. He says he fell in love with Ashburn when he moved from the city more than a decade ago. and with his neighbors. He became HOA president and also served as PTO president at his sons’ elementary school.

Selling a home that his two sons can always come back to wasn’t something he imagined would ever be on the table.

“We love Ashburn, it’s a fantastic area,” Gandhi said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t know 13 years ago that it was going to be Data Center Alley.”

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