A Virginia man says Amazon data center construction has turned his tap water brown, reduced air quality, and caused damage to his home.
Austin Newsom says his life was once quiet and simple.
He lives with his wife in a three-bedroom home just off U.S Route 33 in Louisa, VA, and owns a boat repair shop that operates on the same land. He recently built another house nearby, and planned to move into that one and sell the home he’d spent upward of $80,000 to renovate.
Then, Amazon started construction on a data center across the road from his home.
“Before this, you were able to sleep past 6 a.m. without crazy noises and just all kinds of sh-- going on,” he tells Realtor.com®. “Now it’s just chaos all the time.”
Since the project began, Newsom says he’s dealt with his tap water turning mud-brown, loud noises, flashing lights, reduced air quality, heightened traffic, flooding, a downturn in his business, and structural damage to his home.
Now, he’s suing Amazon, and a federal judge has allowed the case to move forward despite the company’s efforts to dismiss it.
The view from Austin's home. (Austin Newsom) 
Trucks returning to the construction site, a daily occurence (Austin Newsom) Amazon is already making an impact on Louisa County
If you live in Louisa County, you're no stranger to Amazon's efforts to build its data centers in the area. Amazon Web Services is in the middle of building two different data center campuses in Louisa and withdrew a third proposal last year following strong pushback from residents.
Newsom says he had heard rumors of a project, but didn’t know just how close the next project would be to him until his neighbor across the street suddenly disappeared.
“I noticed one day he wasn't there anymore,” says Newsom. “His stuff is gone. His boat's gone, his trailer's gone, everything in the backyard is gone. I went and looked at who owned the property on public records, and it was AWS. I was like, ‘Uh-oh.’”
As construction began, Newsom says he spoke with Amazon and Clark Construction representatives, who knocked on his door and, as they put up the fencing around the construction site, told him that if he ever had issues to come to them as they’d “make it right.”
“Then I started having problems, lots of problems,” he says. Innumerable dump trucks came down the road and sent dust through the air day after day. Flashing blue lights from security cameras poured into his bedroom all night. The roads became covered in mud. And eventually, that mud made its way into Newsom’s well, he claims.
“A lot of people in this county have what's called a bored well, which is a shallow surface water well. So when they're moving this amount of dirt and earth, digging and vibrations—all those microvibrations over time will work that sediment into the water stream, into that well, and flow straight into my water,” he explains.
He adds that a hydrologist he brought in agreed that the work was disturbing the water table. But when he tried to get in touch with the Amazon superintendent who promised to help address issues, he was met with silence.
“I called them, texted them, emailed them, called them some more. Never, never once heard back from them. Not one single time,” he says.
Brown water coming from Austin's sink (Austin Newsom) Is Louisa County also to blame?
It wasn’t that Newsom hadn’t heard Amazon was coming to town. But he contends that the town had seemingly done all it could to bring Amazon in under the radar.
“They started holding town hall meetings at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. 'Hey, emergency town hall meeting, 2 o'clock, be there.' They never really told you what it was for. They tried to keep it nonchalant, secret. Then afterward it's like, 'Hey, we told everybody, you had a chance to come to meetings,’” he says.
“They just did the meetings to let the community feel like they had a sense of saying something, but in the grand scheme of things, they already knew what they were going to do.”
After getting the cold shoulder from Amazon, Newsom sought help from the Louisa county Board of Supervisors, but says they weren’t much better.
“They just do enough to say they did something, and then they’re off to the next thing,” he says.
Newsom’s home is directly across from the work site, but he says he’s hardly the only one in the area dealing with the impact of construction.
"All my neighbors are dealing with it. Everybody's dealing with the dust, everybody's dealing with the noise. But everybody's just a little too scared to step up against a billion-dollar corporation,” he says.
Duane Adams, chairman of the Louisa County Board of Supervisors, did not respond to a request for comment for this story. However, Adams has previously told other outlets that he's been in regular contact with the Newsoms and has worked to address their concerns.
‘You legitimately feel like you’re at a construction site’
Newsom had plans to sell his home before construction began, but he says the experience of selling his home has been completely ruined by the project.
“It’s a very nice property. It’s got a massive shop. We just revamped the whole interior of the house,” he shares. “But it’s terrible—nobody wants to buy it every time.”
Newsom says that interested buyers cancel showings once they find out which house it is, or if they come look at it without knowing the area, they lose interest once they look across the road.
“You don’t feel like you’re at his house. You legitimately feel like you’re at a construction site,” says Jimmy Snyder, a Virginia real estate agent who has been helping Newsom attempt to sell his home. Snyder says that his typical marketing tactics—such as sharing video and drone footage of the home and surroundings—won’t work here. In fact, they’re a drawback.
As an agent, Snyder says, part of his job is to remain positive. But he finds this situation uniquely challenging in that regard.
“There’s a lot of negativity that’s going on here, and I’m not confident we’re going to be able to sell this,” he says. “So now it boils down to a waiting game, and price reduction.”
It could be a long wait. According to Amazon's plans, the first phase of construction is slated to finish around 2031, though Newsom says the full build-out could take up to 15 years. Amazon did not return a request for comment on this story.
What the studies can’t tell you
Data centers facilitate cloud storage, artificial intelligence, even the ability to read this article—but the pace of construction, and its toll on nearby communities, has become a flash point. Some cities and states have gone as far as banning data center construction in certain districts or above a certain size.
Not all the press about data centers has been bad. One George Mason University study found the opposite of what some might expect: Homes closer to data centers in Northern Virginia sold for higher prices, not lower. But that finding comes with a catch, says Arif Gasilov, a partner at Gasilov Group, an environmental consultancy that studies the cost-benefit impact of data centers for local governments.
"Studies saying data centers don't harm nearby home values can all be right and still not apply to Mr. Newsom," says Gasilov. "They measure facilities and houses across a mile and a half, while he's across the street from an active earthmoving site. Construction is temporary for the facility and permanent for someone living there day to day."
The lawsuit is moving ahead
In August 2025, Newsom filed a lawsuit against Amazon. His original filing sought a preliminary injunction that could have halted construction. Amazon moved to dismiss the case, but in a July ruling, the judge allowed Newsom's core nuisance claim to move forward, finding he'd shown enough evidence to proceed. A hearing on Newsom's request for a preliminary injunction is scheduled for Aug. 19.
But stopping the project was never the end goal, Newsom says now.
“I need them to actually do better, and make sure my way of life, the way I've lived for 12 years in this house, is as it was before they showed up,” he says. “I shouldn't have to deal with something all day, every day. And then I just need to be able to move. I just need to be able to leave. I need compensation for what I've had to go through. I lost the business, lost customers, not being able to sell my home—there's a lot that goes into why I'm going after them."
Newsom says that his fight is on behalf of all of those who feel like they can’t stand up to a corporation like Amazon. It promises to be a long fight—and it’s not even the only data center-related project that is slated to disrupt his home. A separate venture developed by Valley Link Transmission seeks to build an enormous new power line to feed Northern Virginia’s data center electricity needs, and Newsom says the proposed line would split his property.
“It’s like my house is the epicenter of all the bad things,” he says.