With Google and Microsoft Moving In, a Battle Over Hallowed Ground Erupts

In 1862, from a hill in northern Virginia, troops under Confederate General Stonewall Jackson rained artillery fire upon a column of Union soldiers on a dirt road about a thousand feet away, in the opening shots of the Second Battle of Manassas.

When I visited a farmhouse on the site on a frigid day earlier this month, I saw the signs of a modern-day conflict unfolding on the same ground. A four-lane highway has replaced the dirt road, and it was jammed with tractor-trailers and cement trucks, traffic that came in part from construction of nearby data centers. A similar scenario is playing out miles away where Amazon, Google and Microsoft have already built data centers or are looking to do so.

The person who squired me to this location was David Duncan, 60, head of American Battlefield Trust. Duncan’s battlefield-preservation group is fighting the planned development of a particularly large group of data centers—more than 20 million square feet eventually intended for rental to potential clients like a Google or a Microsoft—on a parcel of land behind where Jackson’s troops fired on the Union soldiers. The project is so enormous that it’ll take a decade or more to finish.