Most conversations about data centers happen in the abstract — projections, renderings, promises about what a community might become. Colonel Norman Larson doesn’t have to imagine any of it. He watched the whole story unfold already, from a front-row seat in Loudoun County, Virginia.
Before settling in Northwest Indiana, Norman spent years in what has since become known as the data center capital of the world. He was there when the first facilities were still a novelty — quiet, boxy buildings tucked along the highways outside Washington, D.C. — and he stayed long enough to see the region mature into a hub that now helps power much of the modern internet.
So when neighbors stop him around town, uncertain about what data centers might mean for their own backyard, Norman’s answers are grounded in experience.
“I’ve seen it from the very start up through a very mature data center situation in Loudoun County in Northern Virginia,” he says. “I’ll tell you, they were a benefit to the community.”
The transformation he witnessed benefited the entire community. Families who had lived in the area for generations watched their neighborhoods be revitalized. Young professionals started moving in. Restaurants, shops, and service businesses followed the paychecks. And underneath it all, something remarkable was happening with their tax bills.
“We saw the property taxes go down over time,” Norman recalls. “The values of the houses went up. People wanted to move there.”
That combination — rising home values alongside falling tax rates — is the kind of math most communities never get to enjoy. Norman credits it to a simple dynamic: the data centers were carrying real weight on the county’s tax base, easing the burden on the families who called Loudoun home.
“They were paying their fair share of the county taxes,” he says. “Even though the housing values were going up, the relative yearly taxes, dollar for dollar, they went slowly down.”
The ripple effects reached into nearly every corner of civic life. Roads were repaved. Schools got the upgrades they’d been waiting on. Emergency services expanded to keep pace with a growing population. Norman watched local leaders put the new revenue to work in ways residents could actually see and feel.
“A lot of the funding comes through that county tax base that’s generated through the data centers being partners with the community,” he explains.
That word — partners — is one Norman keeps coming back to. In his telling, the Loudoun story isn’t about a corporation dropping into a town and extracting value. It’s about an industry and a community growing up alongside each other, each one lifting the other as they went.
Now, looking out at his adopted home in northern Indiana, Norman sees the same window of opportunity beginning to open. He also knows how quickly those windows can close.
“A lot of places in northern Indiana would benefit from this,” he says. “If we wait, somebody else is going to get it. I would love to be in a community where we take advantage of it.”
For Colonel Norman Larson, the lesson from two decades in Loudoun County isn’t complicated. When a community welcomes data centers as partners, the returns show up in the places that matter most.