Google is moving ahead with “Project Peanut,” a massive multi-site data center campus in Chesterfield County, as part of a $9 billion AI infrastructure push in Virginia.
The build will significantly expand local compute capacity for AI workloads, but residents and researchers highlight rising Google emissions, noise, air pollution, and fire risk in a park that has already seen data center fires.
Key unknowns include actual water draw, power usage, and job count, with critics frustrated by nondisclosure agreements and limited transparency around the operational profile of the three planned sites.
County officials frame the project as a long-planned tax-base win, projecting millions in annual revenue while claiming Google will minimize strain on the grid and water systems.
The tension here is the classic AI infra tradeoff: massive GPU and data center growth versus environmental impact, local quality-of-life issues, and largely unregulated AI expansion.
Construction was supposed to start by year-end, but on-the-ground status remains unclear.
This is a useful window into how large-scale AI data center builds are colliding with local communities and opaque planning processes.
Source: Google advances Chesterfield data center amid concern from residents, researchers
