‘What The Hell Were They Thinking?’ Neighbors Trapped In Data Center Construction Chaos

POINT PLEASANT, W.Va. — Randy and Marsha Frame have lived in their home here for 42 years. They renovated it in 2013 so the house would be just how they wanted for their retirement.

“We have no intention of ever leaving here,” Marsha Frame, 68, said in an interview.

As long as they’ve lived in this quiet subdivision, the back of their home looked out over an empty field that used to be a soybean farm. That’s changing thanks to a new neighbor moving in: a gigantic data center.

Now the Frames’ backyard abuts a temporary fence marking the edge of a construction site that has upended their lives, flooded their yard and prompted many of their neighbors to leave.

The site, which takes up roughly half a square mile, is like a village of dirt. There are piles of it everywhere, roads dug within it, dump trucks hauling tons of it. Dozens of construction vehicles run by workers in neon gear swarm the property. Piles of other materials, like rocks and sawdust, speckle the property, from which large puffs of dust rise throughout the day.

Anyone who has visited the house — including officials from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection, which has cited the project for failing to control stormwater runoff — has the same look on their face, according to Marsha Frame. It’s a look that says, “What the hell were they thinking?”

Data centers, typically large, flat buildings that house computer servers for processing and storing data for a variety of information technology services, are being rapidly built across the country thanks to an AI boom. There are several thousand operating in the U.S., with another 1,500 in various stages of development, according to a Pew Research Center analysis earlier this year. More than two-thirds of the new facilities are planned for rural areas, such as the Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia, which will provide 460 megawatts of capacity to the artificial intelligence firm Anthropic. Just this week, Gov. Patrick Morrisey announced another new data center project in Mason County, 20 minutes north of the Monarch campus.

“Proposing to site a hyperscale data center near homes is unfortunately not unusual,” John Quigley, a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. “The construction is just the beginning of the problem. The noise impacts air pollution, light pollution, the list goes on. These things are very impactful if they’re not managed properly.”

The data center surge has prompted a backlash from the public, with majorities of Americans saying in poll after poll that they oppose the construction of such facilities near their homes. A survey released this week by Economist and YouGov, for instance, found 63% of voters would oppose a data center in their community, while 51% say new data centers are generally bad for the country — only 20% say they’re good.

Elected leaders at the local, state and federal level have responded, with hundreds of communities proposing moratoriums on construction projects. Lawmakers in at least 15 states have proposed banning data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and at least five states have followed through with pauses on incentives or development, such as New York’s statewide moratorium.

At the national level, a partisan split has emerged, with progressives supporting moratoriums and President Donald Trump insulting data center skeptics in caustic terms.

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social this week. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called for a moratorium on data center construction earlier this year, citing the threat posed by unsafe AI products and the need to make sure corporate CEOs don’t gobble up all the profits. Last month, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a progressive with presidential ambitions, proposed a “Data Center Bill of Rights” that would ban construction within 2,500 feet of a home and impose other restrictions.

“People want a buffer. Why should data centers be right near people’s homes?” Khanna told HuffPost.

It’s not just the noise pollution or the likelihood of local electricity and water rates going up, Khanna said. “It’s also this anxiety of being taken over by tech billionaires, and it’s one of the few things people can do to say, ‘Stop. We want some control over it.’”

Some Republicans have signaled they want to respond to the voter backlash against data centers, and a House committee this year advanced a bill to protect neighbors from utility rate hikes. It’s unclear if the House will vote on the bill during its one remaining week in session before November; it’s even less likely the Senate would also act, and it’s virtually certain a more sweeping bill like Khanna’s won’t be considered at all.

Most states have offered tax incentives for data centers, and the West Virginia legislature has strongly encouraged tech firms to build in the state, passing a law last year that boosted data center developments in part by preempting oversight by municipal and county governments, said Kelly Allen, director of the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy, a liberal think tank. The law also apportioned tax revenue from data center projects.

“Normally, that revenue stays in the community. It funds schools and local public services, and now it’s going to be rerouted to the state for state priorities,” Allen told HuffPost.

In the text of their new law, West Virginia lawmakers suggested it was their patriotic duty to encourage data center development.

“It is in the United States’ national security interests to limit the flow of data to China and to protect the flow of data and maximize computational power inside the United States,” the statute says.

In Point Pleasant, a group of neighbors has banded together to raise alarms about the Monarch Compute Campus, which is still a massive construction project, not yet a data center. They’ve been quoted in multiple stories by local journalists.

In May, roughly a month after construction began, heavy rain caused a break in the silt retention fence the construction crew had put up around the data center site, and the Meadowlands Estates subdivision where Randy and Marsha Frame live experienced significant flooding. While about five homes were damaged, the Frames’ was spared, but three days later they had flooding in their yard from another storm.

While images of the flooding caught the attention of local news outlets and spread widely on Facebook, much of the impact of the construction is less obvious to those who don’t live in the quiet community, situated just a couple of miles from a local school, an animal shelter, and the county fairgrounds.

There’s constant beeping and whirring from construction vehicles, even on holidays and weekends. Randy Frame has measured noise levels as high as 94 decibels — comparable to the noise from a motorcycle — for hours at a time. One night, he stepped outside with the couple’s dog, 10-year-old Darby, to find dust blowing everywhere, hours after construction had ended for the day.

A mix of water and wood fiber coated part of their yard during hydroseeding of the construction site, leading them to worry about Darby. Their own health has taken a hit; both have lost weight and seen increased blood pressure due to stress. Marsha, who suffered a head injury years ago and has seizures as a result, said she has increased the use of her inhalers.

Nscale, the company building the Monarch Compute Campus, has been responsive to complaints. Marsha Frame said Nscale offered to repair damage to their foundation caused by heavy machinery operating nearby. The company built a wall of dirt to block water runoff and some of the construction noise from reaching the neighborhood, and an Nscale spokesperson told HuffPost it lowered the beeping volume on its machinery and increased its use of water trucks to reduce dust.

The company has also set up a program to buy nearby homes at above-market values if neighbors can’t stand the construction. So far, Nscale said, it has closed on 32 homes, with 13 more under contract, and could use the properties as employee housing. (Frame said there are only 54 homes in the subdivision.) Neighbors will have until June 2028 to decide whether they’d like to sell their homes, a deadline that should give them a chance to see what life is like living next to the data center before determining whether to uproot their lives.

Jason Bechtle, Nscale’s site manager for the project, said the construction will support more than 9,000 jobs annually.

“Once operational, the campus will sustain nearly 2,100 direct and indirect jobs, injecting $395 million annually into our local economy,” Bechtle wrote in an op-ed for the River Cities Tribune & Register, citing an economic analysis Nscale commissioned from Ernst & Young. The finished product, the company said, will have its own power plant, won’t use municipal water, and won’t raise anyone’s utility bills.

Quigley, the UPenn fellow, said it’s typical for data center developers to throw their money around.

“There’s a big concerted effort on the part of some of these developers to essentially buy off local opposition,” Quigley told HuffPost. “There’s a lot of money flowing to this thing because everybody just sees this kind of a gold rush mentality going on.”

Marsha Frame said she and her husband are going to ride out the construction in hopes that life will get better once the data center is completed. They feel they can’t replace their life here. They planted the trees in their backyard four decades ago.

“We’re planning on surviving the construction come hell or high water. It depends upon the data center itself,” Marsha said. “We’re at an age where moving away from close friends and family is not an option. And frankly, thinking about packing up 47 years of life isn’t exactly an option, either.”