In 2007, the US was on the cusp of an economic recession, and Buddy Rizer was tasked with finding Loudoun County, Virginia, a new way to make money. Rizer’s earlier career as a radio DJ didn’t exactly make him an obvious candidate to find a solution, but he was looking for what he called a “real job” and stumbled into a role at Loudoun’s economic development authority. 

This new gig came with urgency thanks to the bursting of the housing bubble: More than 80 percent of the county’s revenue came from residential real estate. The goal, at the time, was to raise the commercial tax base from about 19 percent of revenue to something like 23 percent, Rizer recalls. Today, just over half of the county’s tax revenue comes from commercial sources.  To jumpstart that turnaround, Rizer turned to the carcasses of another recent bubble burst — those of the dot-com era.

The county had been home to the headquarters of AOL, which by 2000 was the US’s largest internet provider. Combined with its proximity to the nation’s capital and access to resources including water and electricity, Loudoun quickly emerged as the physical manifestation of the internet, the place responsible for how the majority of Americans got online. Estimates suggest that as much as 70 percent of the planet’s internet traffic passed through Loudoun County.

But after the collapse of dot-com stocks in 2000, followed by AOL’s disastrous merger with Time Warner, much of that industry dried up, and Loudoun was left with hulking, empty buildings and miles of fiber optic cable already laid in the ground. Where some people saw abandoned infrastructure, Buddy Rizer saw opportunity: “And so I thought if we can fill those, that would be a good start,” he says. Rizer soon realized that the same factors that made Loudoun County attractive to AOL could once again make it a hot spot for technology. It still had an internet exchange point, lots of land, a government eager for investment, and a capable local electricity utility. “And so we came up with this plan to attract data centers.”

Today, Loudoun County has another moniker: Data Center Alley. Over just a small portion of its roughly 515 square miles, it’s home to about 250 data centers, the densest concentration in the world. For a long time, residents there recall only a passing understanding of this, if they realized it at all. The development of data centers in Loudoun was just something going on in the background of many residents’ lives. They noticed construction along main roads, paid an increasingly lower property tax rate, and sent their kids to coveted public schools.

The county’s data center boom arrived as tech companies expanded into the cloud, a sanitized name for the blocky buildings that house rows and rows of servers. And with that business came prosperity: 22 new schools built in just the last 15 years, tax revenue from data centers alone that exceeded the county’s operational budget by $35 million in 2024, and a decline in real property tax rate for residents from about $1.29 to 80 cents per $100 in assessed value since 2008.

Some longtime residents never heard of their county’s nickname until recently, when the effects of data centers on the community started to become impossible to ignore. What had been a relatively quiet boon locally was starting to foment a national backlash elsewhere, and starting to disturb daily life in Loudoun, too.

The current, massive US data center buildout has been accelerating thanks to the widespread adoption of generative AI, which has created a growing need for the physical infrastructure to run tremendous amounts of “compute” — the industry term for processing power. There are already 3,000 data centers in operation around the US, according to an April analysis by the Pew Research Center, with 1,500 more in development. When Rizer began recruiting companies to build data centers in Loudoun, he sat on conference panels for secondary markets. Now when he attends data center conferences, Loudoun is the biggest market there, and “there’s more economic developers than there are data center companies, because everybody sees the opportunity.”

Loudoun County residents are also starting to take notice. Within the past few years, data centers have been elevated from an unremarkable part of daily life in Loudoun to something that many residents now think about every day. For some, it’s the constant hum they hear from their decks; for others, it’s the transmission towers that loom over their favorite green space, or the surprise call from their energy utility that one of those towers could go up in their own backyard. While residents recognize that data centers have brought a lot of prosperity to the county, they’re beginning to wonder how much more they can take.

As communities around the country begin recognizing the potential opportunities of building data centers, the efforts have also faced immense pushback. Opposition to this development is shaping strange alliances across the political spectrum and has become a central issue in this year’s midterm elections. New York and Texas have begun pumping the brakes on new data center buildouts, worried about how their energy grids could support them without leaving residents stuck holding the bag if major tech players change plans. Local stories from around the country show that residents are coming out to community meetings in droves to oppose data centers. In at least one case, a violent attack on a local Indianapolis official appeared motivated by his support for data centers. And national polls show that many Americans do not want to live near them.

With its long history hosting data centers, Loudoun residents have more recently taken to calling it something new: the canary in the coal mine of data center development. Want to know what the country’s future looks like? Loudoun County’s past gives a strong glimpse of it. 

Even in Loudoun, where the existence of data centers has been a fact of life for nearly two decades, Rizer says that in the last few years, community opposition has become more vocal. “Before then, people understood what we were doing,” he says. These days, residents seem more aware of the inconveniences.

Rizer is no stranger to this kind of response to his projects, but the tone of the pushback is different. Residents have always had myriad worries: economic, environmental, and aesthetic. That part isn’t new. “I’ve done $70 billion of deals here, and the only thing in common is that somebody’s been against every single one of them,” Rizer says. “I have never seen, in my entire career, the vitriol, the hate that is associated with this.” Asked to put his radio DJ hat on to choose a soundtrack for this moment, he chuckles and says the first one that jumps into his head is Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down.” 

As Rizer and other officials in Loudoun field their own residents’ concerns about data centers, they’re also being flooded with calls from local officials across the country looking for their advice. Rizer is the first to admit that hosting a data center, let alone hundreds, is not the right choice for every community. He stands by the work he’s done to bring them to Loudoun, and still believes they’ve benefited the county on the whole. But data center expansion in Loudoun has recently taken on a life of its own, to the point that even Rizer no longer spends his time courting new facilities. “We don’t want more data centers here, but we want those that are here to be successful and continue to contribute to our community,” he says, diplomatically. 

But new facilities are coming anyway, and even Rizer, the “godfather of data centers,” is powerless to stop them. Over a series of visits to Loudoun County, I wanted to see for myself what it’s like to cross through communities surrounded by the cloud. Is the data center future that so many across the country seem to fear all it’s been built up to be?

Long before it became Data Center Alley, Loudoun County was already solidifying its role as the hometown of the modern internet. In 1996, AOL decided to move its headquarters from neighboring Fairfax County to Loudoun, eventually employing more than 5,000 workers in Ashburn at its peak in 2004. Soon, the first internet exchange point, MAE-East, would make a similar move to Ashburn, making Loudoun the physical location where much of the world’s internet traffic flowed. It was further solidified as a tech juggernaut when telecom company MCI WorldCom also opened a large office in the area, which became its headquarters in 2003. 

The companies brought more than just jobs and a new workforce to the area. They also laid fiber underground across the county, attracting other tech firms to the area because of the convenient promise of low latency and proximity to the nation’s capital. The attention earned Loudoun nicknames like “the Silicon Valley of the East” and “Dulles Technology Corridor,” after the nearby airport.

For a while, AOL and MCI’s presence made Loudoun an unlikely but bustling tech hub. Between 1990 and 2000, the county population doubled to 170,000. Early AOL employees have recounted lavish parties thrown by the company in its heyday, including “go-go-style dancers” and a sushi conveyor belt around an airplane at the nearby annex of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. 

During this time, data centers were already starting to pop up in Loudoun County, but with little fanfare. The first one arrived in 1997, and after that there was a slow drip of new data centers permitted in the area. In 2000, the local zoning administrator made a decision that would have lasting consequences later on, but made little noise at the time. Because data centers looked similar to offices, they became designated as “office parks,” meaning that they could be built on any land zoned for office space “by right” — bypassing more time-intensive regulatory review. That meant that unlike other commercial facilities like heavy machinery plants, which face more restrictions being built near populated residential areas, data centers could be built wherever offices had been allowed.

Then the dot-com bubble burst. In early 2000, AOL announced a blockbuster merger with Time Warner for more than $160 billion. But as the first wave of internet companies suffered sharp declines, AOL’s ad revenue tanked, and the country’s largest provider of dial-up internet was soon undercut further by the rise of faster cable broadband. MCI filed for bankruptcy in 2002 after a major accounting scandal. By 2006, it was acquired by Verizon, and a year later, a much diminished AOL announced it would move its headquarters to New York.

Soon after came the financial downturn that became the Great Recession. Looking for unique ways to pitch the county, Rizer, then a newly minted business development manager, saw an opportunity in the recently emptied buildings and miles of fiber still lacing Loudoun’s roads. From 2002 to 2005, no new data centers had been permitted. In the years after Rizer began courting them, only a few were permitted per year, county data shows, but growth was slow and steady. Then, in 2014, the number of data centers permitted jumped to seven. Rizer recalls feeling like the county could finally start relying less on its taxes from residents and more on commercial revenue. “We were catching up on schools and catching up on salaries for our workforce,” he says. He recalls no pushback out of the ordinary on any development project, and says that for 15 years, “everybody loved the data centers because of the difference it made in our community.” In 2018, data center permits tripled to 21 in a year, and they reached a new peak in 2022 at 25.

Only those who were really paying attention seemed to notice that Loudoun was quickly becoming the data center capital of the world. Many longtime residents I spoke to sheepishly admit they hardly recognized Loudoun’s global reputation for data centers, though they perhaps passively noticed the new, blocky buildings that popped up along main roads or the tall transmission towers near their favorite running trail. 

Over the past 20 years, though, Loudoun residents have seen a direct impact of data centers on their lives, whether they knew it or not. Real property tax rates declined dramatically, while property values have gone up in some communities as much as 182 percent in the last decade, even at residences close to data centers, according to county officials. The county has paved smooth roads and built sprawling athletic fields, a recreation center with an Olympic-size pool, and an average of nearly one and a half state-of-the-art public school buildings every year for the past 15 years, all thanks largely to the revenue generated by the county taxes data center companies have to pay anytime they get new equipment. And while data centers have gotten a reputation for creating relatively few jobs once they’re constructed, the county says that for every job inside those buildings, three and a half non-construction jobs are “supported” throughout the rest of the state economy. Those include ongoing maintenance at data centers, like electricians or HVAC technicians, and employment at other tech companies that move to Loudoun to be near where the data lives. 

While the data centers take advantage of a long-standing tax exemption from the state, Rizer emphasizes that the county has never spent a dime to attract them to the area. “A majority of the people that live here now only know prosperity, only know the strongest local economy in the country, only know great services and great schools,” Rizer says. “And so they don’t necessarily connect to that. They don’t see that common thread between the fact that the data centers are here and they have a great quality of life.”

My most recent visit to Loudoun is on a July day when wildfire smoke that’s wafted down from Canada has sent air quality into a Code Purple. The ashy filter makes the grayish buildings all around look especially drab, though when I visit a local bike trail lined with trees and transmission towers, I still see plenty of cyclists braving the AQI that exceeds 200 in some spots.

Julie Bolthouse, a longtime Loudoun resident who grew up across northern Virginia, drives me by the old AOL campus and points out a building with a playground on the other side of the street. “That used to be a major daycare center here in the heart of Data Center Alley, because there were so many people who worked here,” she says. “Now it’s just these big, giant computer energy-guzzling, water-guzzling warehouses.”

The lot where the old AOL campus sat is now filled with construction equipment and several-story buildings. The old headquarters has been demolished to make way for — you guessed it — more data centers. 

Throughout Loudoun, Bolthouse remembers land that now houses data centers being home to business centers and dentist’s offices. She returned to the area after college, enjoying that it made an easy trip to both DC and Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, and feeling comfortable in an area that’s generally not prone to major weather events like hurricanes. In 2017, the organization she joined, Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC), began tracking the impact of data centers on the local environment. A year later, Loudoun’s Board of Supervisors had one of its most contentious votes ever, narrowly approving a 750,000-square-foot data center spanning over 100 wooded acres near Goose Creek. Groups like PEC loudly objected to the development over environmental concerns, while those in favor of the proposal argued development would happen there regardless; it was just a matter of what would get built.

Today, Bolthouse is the director of land use at PEC and helps lead a coalition of Virginia groups that advocate for stronger protections, tracking, and transparency around data center development. Bolthouse isn’t dispositionally anti-data center, nor does she want to see existing ones in the area torn down or shut off. But she does advocate for a pause on new development. “This industry is kind of creating a narrative that they’re up against communities, and that there’s a community backlash, and we just need to explain to the communities the benefits of data centers,” she says. “But what they’re really up against is physics. They’re up against the reality of what it takes to build out gigawatts of power, and the impact of building out gigawatts of power has direct impacts on people.”

Recently, she’s found, more of her neighbors are paying attention. She recalls 2025 as a turning point, where PEC no longer had to do the legwork to get people invested, but instead was triaging which press requests would make the most impact given its limited capacity. And for residents, data centers were becoming more than just eyesores. They were beginning to disrupt life in Loudoun.

Vicky Hu lives in a red brick home on a cul-de-sac beside a peaceful, tree-lined stream. Her backyard stretches far along the water, where a white gazebo gives shade to sit and watch the deer she says regularly cross her yard. Including her mother and daughter, three generations of Hu’s family have lived in this house. Having grown up in the city of Taipei, Hu marveled at the nature that surrounded her new home: deer as well as turtles and cranes. “To me, this is like a dream. My dream home,” she tells me.

Until last year, when Hu got a call that pierced that dream. She got a voicemail from a Dominion Energy representative and first wondered if there was an issue with her energy bill payment. Instead, she was told that a new transmission line connecting two substations would cut directly through her backyard. “Are you out of your fucking mind?” she yelled at the rep.

On the day I visit, the gazebo is filled with poster boards of blown-up maps of the community — and new development plans that threaten to overtake it. The trees along the stream are tagged with bright pink ribbons tied around their trunks. They mark the land Hu’s family says would be cleared should Dominion Energy’s plan to string 185-foot transmission towers through their backyard go through as planned. “It’s like the sort of thing you only think you’d see in a dystopian nightmare,” Hu’s daughter, 23-year-old Madison Taggart, tells me as she shows me around her childhood home.

Growing up, Taggart says that home always felt “like a timeless place that no one else could touch.” Hu bought it shortly after her daughter was born, having seen the community built from the ground up. She worked for a developer and recalls watching workers bury power and communication lines beneath the community from her trailer across the road. By 2003, she’d nearly finished selling the community, except for one lot that was reserved for a VP at her company. As Hu’s aging mother struggled with the stairs in her townhome, she kept thinking about that lot on the cul-de-sac next to the water. She asked her colleague if she could buy it, and two years later, she moved in.  

Now, Hu is engaged in a yearlong fight to redirect the transmission line to another route — one that, so far, she’s on the losing end of, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court of Virginia. After that first phone call, Hu said she ran around the neighborhood “like a crazy woman,” ringing doorbells and asking if anyone had heard of the proposal. She said they hadn’t. By the time I visit, a sign in her backyard shows a diagram of the proposed 185-foot transmission tower next to a comparatively stout Statue of Liberty (if you exclude the base she stands on).

Dominion insists that building the transmission line is necessary to power not only data centers, but also homes, businesses, schools, and hospitals. The local school district has been dragged into the fight over the route as well, though, with one proposal cutting close to two nearby schools. Hu’s homeowners association donated a portion of land that would be cut through to the school district, preventing it from being seized by eminent domain. 

Both the school district and residents in Hu’s community have been fighting the planned routes, and worry that the expansion could signal even more encroachment on key facets of the community down the road. “There’s also a deep concern for having this be a precedent that it could normalize easing the planning by just putting them on school property,” says April Chandler, Loudoun County School Board chair. Her concerns are with the kids and faculty of her community. “As a school board member, it’s not my job necessarily to consider what’s best for Dominion Energy or for data centers.”

Despite working or living in Loudoun since 2000, Hu had never heard the nickname “Data Center Alley” until last year, when a Swiss reporter came to interview her about life in the data center capital of the world. Now, she can’t unhear it. She notices transmission towers everywhere she goes. And she worries nowhere is truly safe from the ever-expanding buildout. “This is just the first power line coming through a neighborhood. Where do you think the rest of the power lines [are] going to go through?” she asks. She predicts that in the next five to 10 years, “when you look at the sky in Ashburn … you’re going to see a power line running everywhere, like a spiderweb.”

Should she lose the fight to preserve her backyard, Hu says she’d have no choice but to leave. “Do I want to stay here sitting on my deck watching the power pole? … Or should I stay here for a couple years to see if I’m going to get cancer or a brain tumor?” She has lost sleep and hair fretting over how to save her home this past year. “It’s just very sad,” she says. “You‘re thinking, ‘You work your whole life, you own something.’ But you actually don’t own it, because a power company can say, ‘I like your house. I want to take it.’”

As I get out of the car a couple blocks down from the Vantage VA2 data center, I can already hear the whirring. Because I visited on a day with such poor air quality, what I’m told are usually invisible emissions plumes make a faint outline in the smoggy air. They’re emitted, Bolthouse tells me, by the diesel generators powering the facility. She compares the noise to that of a lawn mower. (I later find out that the generators are never supposed to run on day with such poor air quality, but an emergency circuit issue required them to kick in temporarily.)

It doesn’t always sound like a lawn mower, though. Other days, the gas turbines that power the data center make an even more annoying high-pitched squealing noise, nearby residents like Lindsay Shaw tell me. We meet while she’s out for a walk with her dog, and she describes the way the sound permeates into her home. Constant light from the data center shines right into her bedroom at night unless the bathroom door is fully closed. Her fiancé has taken to wearing an eye mask.

Nobody wanted it this way. In an ideal world, Vantage would have done what hundreds of other data centers in the area have done and connected to the Dominion energy grid by the time the site went online last year. But after Vantage had already signed agreements with customers leasing space in the new data center, Dominion informed Vantage it didn’t have enough capacity to get the 800,000-square-foot data center on the grid. Rather than let the building sit dormant until Dominion built up capacity, Vantage decided to create its own energy source using gas turbines. This is becoming more and more common in other parts of the country, as the new AI-motivated data centers require vastly more energy than the old cloud servers. 

Residents and local politicians acknowledge that the Vantage site is an outlier because of its unusual reliance on on-site generated power from natural gas — albeit a very annoying one. Before it was built, Shaw tells me she thought a data center would be among the best options that could come to the lot across the street, in part because it wouldn’t be something that would drive a lot of traffic near what she says is an already dangerous intersection. But now she says the data center has caused plenty of other problems and feels the operators have not been proactive enough in engaging neighbors. Vantage’s senior vice president of global public policy, John Stephenson, says he “would respectfully disagree” that they haven’t proactively engaged nearby residents. He notes that they held a community meeting at a nearby brewery to field questions early on, but admits that “in retrospect, we probably could have done more.” The company has taken different approaches to mitigate the noise, including installing insulation and repositioning the turbines to lower their tone. 

But residents who live near other data centers throughout Loudoun — even those that don’t have to generate their own power on-site — also complain of noise. Jason Mello says he hears a constant “low-frequency drone” he attributes to the HVAC systems of nearby data centers from his Ashburn home. Living near Dulles Airport, many Ashburn residents are used to the sound of planes overhead, “but planes come and go. The data center hum never stops.”

Mello shows me videos of the noise from his deck outside a town hall meeting where we meet. He says he’s already spent $2,600 getting two new window inserts, with three more to go in his bedroom. He was quoted at least $15,000 for new siding that would further mitigate the noise. “As a homeowner, if I want to live in peace at night, that addresses the inside,” he says, “but if I’m sitting on my deck, I can constantly hear that humming. And I think that’s why you got to fix the problem also at the source.”

Several residents tell me that the boom in infrastructure needed to support the data centers has impacted their ability to enjoy the natural resources of Loudoun that once attracted them. “You can barely hear the birds anymore,” says Jessica Medeiros, another resident who lives across the street from the Vantage data center. Even when she tries to retreat from the noise near her home, she’s regularly reminded of the data centers’ presence. As a regular runner on the famed Washington and Old Dominion trail for the past 20 years, Medeiros says the “constant construction,” towering power lines, and reduced shade because of cleared trees “ruins the experience with nature.” She often says that when she dies, “I want my ashes scattered along the trail. But I think that trail’s going to look a lot different in another 10 years.”

“The greenery is gone. The sense of community is gone. It feels very stale,” says Jenny Marza, another Loudoun County resident. “There’s no more trees left and every inch is taken up by greed.” 

While fighting new development near her own home, Marza has already felt pressure from the data center explosion on her small export logistics business. For years she’s been looking at buying office and warehouse space in the area to be near the airport, but prices have been so astronomical that she’s been forced to continue leasing. Now, even her current office rent has skyrocketed — she suspects because every landlord knows that data centers are willing to pay an average of $3.76 million per acre.

Marza says “I’m kicking myself” over a warehouse she came close to buying last year for around $5 million, but held off because it was more space than she needed at the time. “And then we put a pause on the search for two years and when we returned, it was like, ‘Holy crap, there’s nothing left.’” Anything that was selling at $5 million was now $10 million. To Marza, the residential property tax savings and increased home values mean little when compared to the quality-of-life concerns she has and the ability to help her small business survive. “I feel like it’s a drop in the ocean of what they’re getting in return,” she says. “I feel like nobody protected our interests as a community.”

“Done the right way, you can be good neighbors,” Shaw says, reflecting on the Vantage site near her home. “But this one was done like that shady neighbor next door that has people coming in and out all hours of the night. And then the FBI raids them and you’re like, ‘Well, I knew something shady was going on.’”

When I arrive at the Loudoun government building on a July evening shortly before 6:30PM, I’m handed a red flyer outside by a group advocating for local government control of utilities used to power data centers. Inside, the nearly full room is prominently speckled with light blue shirts that read “I support data centers.” The shirts list the reasons: “Because I like: lower taxes, excellent schools, better job opportunities.” They also include caveats: “When they are: in the right location, well-designed, quiet, environmentally sensitive.” The slogan doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

I comfortably score a seat, but later hear complaints from some attendees who say they arrived shortly after me and were relegated to the overflow room. Though it’s a first-come-first-served event, those critical of data centers grumble that industry supporters seem suspiciously well organized in their early arrivals.

Still, it doesn’t have the kind of fireworks or soundbites that have made community meetings about data centers around the country into national news. While some residents voice strong frustration, the two-and-a-half-hour forum is cordial and respectful of Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis Randall’s request of no cheering nor jeering.

Randall is in a tough spot. As head of the elected nine-member panel tasked with adopting local ordinances, appropriating funds, and rezoning land, Randall has just enough power for her constituents to lay responsibility for their criticism at her feet, yet not enough to change some of the things she says she wishes she could. At the meeting, she listens to residents’ concerns, promising to follow up with phone calls for some while repeatedly acknowledging and lamenting the quality-of-life frustrations many of her neighbors have about living near data centers. But she also declines to give ground on topics she said are unfounded or detached from political reality. 

Randall walks residents through the history of data centers in Loudoun, including what they are and how they came to be zoned the same way as office parks. Before getting to the audience participation portion, she clicks to a slide that says “4 Things That Are Unpopular But True” with a grimace emoji. The first: At one point in time, residents actually preferred data centers over new housing developments. She references opposition to a 2021 proposal to build up to 779 residential housing units in Ashburn, called Hyde Park. Across about 125 comments, residents reportedly worried about increased traffic and infrastructure strain. Nearly two years after submitting the application, the developer withdrew and decided to establish a by-right data center there instead. “One of my worst days was January 5th, 2023, when the applicant called me and said, ‘Forget it. I’m going to go build a data center,’” Randall says. “And I pretty much begged them not to.”

The second unpopular truth: It’s not legal for Loudoun to enact a moratorium on development without the state’s permission. 

Third: Both the Biden and Trump administrations have indicated AI infrastructure buildout will be a national priority, so that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. 

And fourth: Despite resident backlash to certain data center land use exceptions the board has granted, the alternative would have been that those data centers could take the land by right anyway, with much less in return. The lesson being, if data centers can break ground whether government officials want them to or not, the county might as well get something out of it.

Residents who speak at the hearing do not dispute her account of the county’s history. Many express frustration about the buildings encroaching on greenery or creating annoying and near-constant noise issues. But many others, including several in the blue shirts, argue in support of data centers as stewards of the community they are proud to be known for. One Ashburn resident describes a peaceful experience living across from a data center. “When the weather is good, I’ll open my bedroom windows, from which I can see it directly. It is silent, it is clean. It is a good neighbor,” he says. Another resident, who leads the nonprofit Northern Virginia Science Center Foundation, credits data centers with generating revenue that can help fund such endeavors to a greater degree than it sees in nearby Fairfax. The organization lists Loudoun County, Dominion Energy, and data center company QTS among its partners. 

Randall affirms residents’ data center complaints, but also fact-checks several claims about supposed data center projects she says never existed in the first place. One Ashburn resident, for example, bemoans what he calls the “Ashburn Commons proposal” that would create a blight next to existing housing, greenery, and other community institutions. Randall asks him to clarify if he is thinking about a proposal near the Harris Teeter grocery store. 

“Yes!” he answers. 

“That’s not real,” Randall says. Her colleague adds the would-be developer hasn’t even submitted a formal application for it, and the government had denied an initial request. 

“Well,” the resident cries out, “praise the Lord on that!” 

For all the gripes, I’ve still yet to meet anyone in Loudoun County who actually says they oppose data centers entirely. Whether they’re currently living next to gas turbines or their backyard could potentially be seized to build a transmission tower, Loudoun residents still recognize that data centers help power the technology we use every day. After all, they need to go somewhere. Why not there?

But even if Loudoun residents have accepted the economic benefits as a tradeoff for the loud eyesores near their homes, it doesn’t mean they’re open to an expansion of that deal.

“It’s not about trying to get rid of the existing data centers. These data centers are here. They’re running. I don’t want them to go anywhere,” Bolthouse says. “The question isn’t, ‘Do we need data centers?’ The question is, ‘Is it worth threatening our air quality, threatening our water supply, and throwing our communities into chaos, and taking people’s private land for transmission lines to get it?’”

I spoke with over half a dozen Loudoun residents, and universally, this is what they want communities considering data centers to understand: Know what you’re getting into. That means making sure existing laws and ordinances will apply to data centers, that local utilities have a plan to ensure enough capacity for the expected buildout, and that neither data centers nor the infrastructure needed to power them can be built too close to homes or schools. 

Even Rizer says the buildout in Loudoun has, in some places, gone beyond what he’d have hoped. “There’s no data centers here that aren’t where they’re allowed to be, but I think sometimes there’s a difference between what you’re allowed to do and what is probably best for the community,” he says. “And that’s what we’ve had to clean up a little bit.” At the town hall, Randall showed aerial images of several residential communities that were directly bordered by data centers. Those arrangements are not what any Loudoun official or resident considers ideal — but even so, she said, property values in those communities have only gone up.  

There are limits. Loudoun hasn’t had a strategic focus on bringing in more data centers since 2019, Rizer says. More recently, the local government is pursuing a plan to pump the brakes further — doing away with the ability for data centers to use office-zoned land by right, and considering pausing new permit reviews while contemplating zoning changes that could better address community impacts.

When peers around the country contact him about whether they should invite data centers into their communities, Rizer says, “It’s not right for every place. So do you want them? And if you do, where do you want them? How many do you want? And under what conditions would you take them?”

For Loudoun, unlike many yet-to-be-developed areas in the US, there is a definitive end in sight. The county has an ever-diminishing amount of space left to develop data centers, after which point it will continue to collect tax revenue when the companies update equipment within their walls. 

Loudoun residents hope that by the time it gets to that point, the things that they love about the area are still there. For many, it’s the convenience of living near DC, but still close to nature. It’s also often about the quality public schools, funded in part with the revenue raised by the colossal energy-guzzling slabs in their backyards.

AOL’s roots helped make Loudoun the first major data center capital, and that came with both advantages and challenges. For communities starting to consider their first data center today, Bolthouse says they’re in a much better position than Loudoun was because the industry isn’t yet “embedded” in layers of government. She still thinks their story could become a beacon of hope for others, rather than a warning — but it’s an uphill battle to get there. 

“I don’t want to be the example of what not to do,” she says. “I want to be the example of what to do. I want to bring journalists out to see how we fixed problems, how we are doing much better, and how communities are happy with these facilities because they’ve done something better.” Hearing Bolthouse’s frustration with the ever-expanding energy demands imposed by data centers, it’s surprising to hear her embrace the ones that are already here. But for all the friction they’ve caused in her community recently, it’s also clear from my visits and conversations that data centers have played a central role in supporting many positive aspects of life in Loudoun. The question, now, is whether Loudoun can manage its existing demand and successfully serve community needs as the data center footprint continues to grow. 

If Bolthouse sounds optimistic, she is certain that something has to give. In the past, Loudoun’s data center buildout was quiet and steady. Today’s is anything but. “I don’t see how that happens with the scale and speed to market that the industry is pursuing.”

The storm developed quickly over west central Illinois on April 17th, first as a single high-intensity system called a supercell, and then later that evening transforming into a long squall line of thunderstorms. Tucked inside a wall of wind were several smaller, quick-forming tornadoes, one of which landed directly on Rivian’s electric vehicle factory on the outskirts of the college town of Normal. The ferocious storm knocked down one of the walls and tore through the plant’s roof like a can opener peeling back the lid.  

Bobby Dean Parker, vice president of manufacturing at Rivian, was at home in Normal when he got the call from someone at the factory. Parker, an affable Southerner, had already experienced his fair share of powerful Midwestern thunderstorms despite only being on the job for six months. But he quickly realized that this one was different. “Hey, it’s not good,” the person on the phone told him. “Oh shit,” Parker thought, before dashing out into the still-stormy night. 

Thousands of miles away at an event in Southern California, Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe’s phone suddenly lit up with a flurry of texts. At first, information was scarce. Was anyone hurt? How bad was it? Scaringe was reluctant to send anyone inside to assess the damage without knowing the structural integrity of the building. Then someone sent him a video. 

Even in the dark, you can immediately see a giant hole in the factory’s roof. The power is out, so floodlights illuminate the wreckage. Water can be heard rushing in the background; the tornado triggered the plant’s sprinkler system, causing the pits under the assembly line to flood. The concrete floor is also slick with water. The damage appears quite extensive. 

Scaringe was stunned; his factory suddenly had what seemed to be its own sunroof.  

For Rivian, the tornado couldn’t have hit at a worse time, or in a worse place. Not only did it strike right as the company was poised to roll out its all-important, more affordable R2 vehicle, the storm landed directly on the section of the factory where production for the midsize SUV was set to begin in a matter of days. 

Since bursting on the scene eight years ago with a pair of exciting, luxury-priced EVs, Rivian has cultivated an impassioned fan base and earned a lot of goodwill in the industry. And while the company appears to have done many things right in its short history, all of its hopes for the future are currently pinned to the R2 model. These next few months are especially crucial. Rivian needs to ramp up production for the R2, hit all of its targets, and get the vehicle to customers in what is arguably the harshest climate for electric vehicles since the first battery-powered models arrived nearly two decades ago. 

Unlike many of the forces currently bearing down on Rivian, threatening its very existence, all the tornado did was blow a hole in its factory. The roof can be repaired, the debris swept away, the pits pumped out. But as for the myriad of existential challenges currently facing Rivian, the fix won’t be so easy. 

The first attempts at modern, commercial electric vehicles in the US date back to the ’90s. These were largely compliance cars, built by major automakers to satisfy California’s strict emissions regulations but not intended for wide release. The compliance cars were followed by a string of uninspiring mass-market models like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt, a pair of egg-shaped economy sedans that projected an electrified future that was inoffensive and characterless — a car for people who don’t want to think about cars.

But Tesla took an entirely different approach with its Roadster, followed by the Model S and Model X, which would become the first legitimate and commercially appealing EVs. The S was a luxury sedan, and though it had to convince buyers that the quiet hum of an electric engine was more powerful than the roar of an internal combustion engine, Tesla had smartly targeted a consumer that actually wanted a car that looked like a computer — and would spend a lot of money on it.

Things really got rolling after Tesla released the Model 3 in 2017, and then the Model Y in 2019. Four years later, the Model Y would become the best-selling car in the world, a title it reportedly retained for the next two consecutive years. 

EVs were originally thought of as a niche product, something for virtue-signaling bevested Silicon Valley types high on their own supply about “changing the world,” but hardly as a solution for the perils associated with climate change. It wasn’t until Elon Musk started framing Tesla’s mission around accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy that EVs came to be viewed as a critical piece of the puzzle. But Tesla’s success was never a foregone conclusion. After all, no new American car company had ever emerged to challenge Detroit’s Big Three (Ford, GM, and Chrysler/Stellantis) in achieving sustained, profitable volume production in nearly a century. 

Musk’s unprecedented success kicked off a global race for electrification. Legacy automakers were pushed to pivot their long-term strategies, restructure their production lines, and build ground-up EV platforms to survive. In China, companies like BYD, Nio, Xpeng, and Li Auto quickly adopted Tesla’s EV- and software-first business models. And a new class of EV startups emerged, aiming to copy Musk’s luxury-to-mass-market rollout strategy. 

One of those companies was Rivian. Founded as Mainstream Motors in 2009, the company would go on to great acclaim for its adventure-themed R1T and R1S electric truck and SUV, respectively. If Tesla had produced the first appealing EV sedan and crossover, Rivian had done the same for the pickup and full-size SUV. An early $700 million investment from Amazon alongside an impressive order for 100,000 electric delivery vans helped solidify the company’s reputation as one of the more serious players. Unlike most of the other EV startups to emerge at the time, Rivian seemed to have a bright future. While most companies, Tesla included, focused on sedans and hatchbacks, Rivian targeted the booming truck and SUV market. Branding itself as the “Patagonia of pickups,” Rivian sought to appeal directly to affluent, outdoorsy types. 

But in the years since Rivian first emerged, the mood around EVs has soured dramatically. Charging woes, range anxiety, and sky-high luxury prices kept most people at arm’s length from the EV market. Long before Donald Trump was elected the second time on a promise to eliminate the fictitious “EV mandate,” clouds were looming on the horizon. 

It’s undoubtedly a weird moment. On one side, Rivian is unveiling the new R2 to massive anticipation, Tesla is still pumping out Model Ys at scale, and EV adoption numbers are continuing to grow globally — thanks in part to a tidal wave of affordable Chinese exports. On the other side, you’ve got an avalanche of cancellations, pauses, and write-downs that makes the whole thing feel like it’s falling apart.

Tesla’s Model Y continues to be a certified global phenomenon. Despite Musk’s sky-high unpopularity and the company’s various missteps, Tesla has outperformed better-capitalized competitors like Volkswagen and Toyota to sell over 1 million Model Ys in 2025 alone, proving that there is a real appetite for well-designed, spacious, zero-tailpipe-emission vehicles. 

While Tesla soaked up the spotlight, Rivian was struggling to maintain its foothold, losing billions of dollars every year while trying to keep up production of its R1 vehicles. Then, earlier this year, the company rolled up to SXSW with its first pre-production R2s, a genuinely attainable family car that starts at under $50,000, built by a company that a lot of people seem to genuinely love and that has figured out how to make desirable EVs at scale, even if it’s still figuring out how to do so sustainably. The buzz around Rivian began to swell. Fans were convinced this would be the company’s Model Y moment as they flocked to get one for themselves. Rivian quickly racked up an estimated 200,000 reservations for the R2 — falling short of Tesla’s 450,000 reservations for the Model 3, but still an indication of widespread excitement. 

The R2 will arrive at a particularly brutal moment for EVs. Over a dozen automakers are walking away from their EV plans. Ford canceled the F-150 Lightning. Honda killed its Zero series of electric vehicles, as well as its Afeela collaboration with Sony. Mercedes reined in its EV output. VW idled the ID.4 and ID.Buzz. Nissan axed the Ariya. Many of those aforementioned EV-only startups, like Fisker, Canoo, Lordstown, Proterra, Arrival, and Sono Motors, ended up stillborn. It would seem that the road to the EV future is lined with sinkholes. 

Not even Musk and his indelible brand have been immune. Tesla’s annual sales have dropped two years in a row — but Rivian’s decline was even steeper. In 2025, the company only sold 42,247 vehicles, an 18 percent decrease compared to 2024. It’s never earned an annual profit, and continues to lose upwards of $8,000 in gross profit for every vehicle it builds and delivers, according to its earnings reports. 

Globally, the auto industry has booked over $70 billion in write-downs related to their EV investments in the past year. The reasons are a mix of things converging at the worst time. President Donald Trump, a longtime friend and beneficiary of the fossil fuel industry, eliminated the $7,500 federal EV tax credit just as EV demand in the US was really taking off. Tariffs made the import of foreign EVs, especially affordable Chinese models, nearly impossible. Regulatory credits, which were a lifeline for pure EV companies like Tesla and Rivian, netting them hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each quarter, are also kaput. We’re in an era of extreme price sensitivity for consumers, and many electric models are still just too expensive. And a lot of automakers built EVs that were rushed, not very good, or gas models retrofitted to run as electric. 

The stakes for Rivian are huge. Starting at around $45,000, the R2 is designed to catapult Rivian to the next level of automotive success. If it’s a hit, then Rivian would be well positioned to challenge Tesla’s status as the most important EV company in America. A successful R2 would beget the R3, and more importantly the R3X, a rally-inspired off-roader with the playful, nostalgic design of an ’80s hot hatch. The R3X has been getting nothing but praise since it was first revealed, helping the company earn an enormous amount of goodwill that it’s hoping to sustain long enough to make it to production. But will it ever come out? Everything depends on the success of the R2.  

“This is arguably their biggest make-or-break moment yet,” Ed Kim, president and chief analyst at AutoPacific, tells me. “This is where Rivian goes from offering a small lineup of very expensive, large EVs that can get up to the six-figure range, down to a truly mainstream-priced EV that starts in the $40,000 range — which is actually well under the median price of a new vehicle these days, which is about $50,000. So here we have Rivian’s really first big volume play happening here.”

If the R2 flops, the company’s struggles would deepen. Rivian is coasting on its buzz and fan love, even though a wealth of technical issues and hardware faults have labeled its R1S SUV as one of the least reliable vehicles on the market. Like every other car company, Rivian is attempting to navigate an increasingly tumultuous and unpredictable global supply chain. The company is burning nearly hundreds of millions of dollars a quarter as it stands up its R2 production line, while breaking ground on a new factory in Georgia. It’s pushed back its expectations for profitability to account for massive investments in AI and autonomous driving technology. And the R2 is about to enter an auto market beset by price anxiety and an outwardly hostile regulatory environment. 

Rivian’s staunch supporters can’t help but inject more hype in the moment. “I am really excited about the R2!” John Krafcik, the former CEO of Waymo who now sits on Rivian’s board of directors, tells me. “I think it can reset the entire auto industry the way the XJ Cherokee did in the ’80s.”

More than just this EV, the promise of American industry is that innovation breeds successful businesses. There is a basic logic: Make a good product and people will buy it. It’s an idea that is easy to grasp but hard to execute. Rivian has demonstrated its prowess as a low-volume, premium company. But the headwinds — policy shifts, regulatory overhang, tariffs, rising costs, competition from China — are proving to be strong, perhaps even more powerful than a tornado. 

Five days after the tornado hit, I’m standing on a catwalk surveying the wreckage of Rivian’s factory. The hole is still there, though now there’s a makeshift plywood fence surrounding the damaged area. The extent of the destruction is immense and staggering to see in person. A huge section of the roof has collapsed. Much of the outer wall is gone, giving me a full view of the road outside the factory, green grass, and beyond that, cornfields. A remaining piece of roof is dangling precariously dozens of feet in the air. Other pieces lie twisted in obscene shapes on the ground. 

A yellow excavator works slowly outside to clear the area. It’s very much still an active cleanup scene. Rivian plans to install an autonomous system in the excavator to help speed along the cleanup process, Tony Sanger, VP of production facilities, tells me.

The tornado tore a hole right above the logistics section, where trucks drop off equipment and various supplies — basically a loading dock. After photos of the damage surfaced on Reddit, commenters obtusely noted the absence of any completed vehicles, as if that somehow proved that Rivian was behind schedule on the R2.

But Scaringe insists that the company is still on schedule and has no plans to lower its guidance on the number of vehicles it expects to sell this year. Which is not to say that nothing important was damaged. They’ll still need to check on nearly 300 conveyor drives that were flooded by the sprinkler system to see if any need to be swapped out. 

Despite these setbacks, Scaringe feels like they dodged a bullet. He says he feels extremely lucky the tornado landed when and where it did, and not, say, on top of the actual R2 assembly line during work hours. While the damage is significant, it’s not insurmountable. Rivian will bounce back — is presently bouncing back, he argues. The factory lights came back on April 21st for the first time since the storm. The pits have been pumped out. The floor has been dried and swept. The R2 is ready. Full steam ahead.  

“We could have come in and been somber about it,” Scaringe says. “But everyone’s just like, ‘Okay, let’s go fix it.’”

Hours earlier, I was standing on the factory floor next to one of the first fully assembled R2s, presented in a sophisticated blue color that the company calls Catalina Cove. For such an important vehicle, the R2 is surprisingly unassuming. It’s smaller and lighter than Rivian’s flagship R1 vehicles, since it was designed to be significantly more efficient and cost-effective to manufacture. The R1T and R1S both start in the low-$80,000 range, but can be optioned up much higher. The R2 starts at $45,000, though that version won’t be available until late 2027. Still, it’s definitely a Rivian, right down to the friendly oval headlights and flashlight tucked in the door frame. 

A few years ago, a meme circulated featuring two dozen or so white SUVs, all facing the same way and looking practically indistinguishable from each other. The implication was that all modern cars look alike, and as a result, individuality and design in automobiles was dead. You can argue with the veracity of that claim, but one of the reasons Tesla made such a splash in the mid-2010s was that it went in a different direction, designing its cars for sleek, aerodynamic efficiency, especially at a time when vehicle profiles were aggressively boxy. Nothing else really looks like a Tesla. 

By contrast, Rivian borrowed heavily from other automakers, like Jeep and Land Rover, but with a rounder, softer edge. Overall the company’s design ethos is decidedly friendlier, with the aforementioned oval headlights and a plethora of Easter eggs. On the R2, right next to the windshield wiper fluid cap, there is a small molded engraving of a cross between a frog and a skunk — a “frunk,” also the nickname for the front trunk that is common in EVs. The company’s vehicles do a good job blending midcentury modern design aesthetics with the utilitarian needs of an off-roader and the clean minimalism most often associated with lifestyle brands. But there’s also a bit of Star Wars in there, even some WALL-E and solarpunk. It’s what endears Rivian to so many people. 

At 8:30 in the morning, the factory floor is teeming with Rivian workers, most of whom are wearing matching olive green T-shirts that read “Keep Normal Adventurous Forever.” OneRepublic’s “I Ain’t Worried” is blasting over the sound system. Employees are encouraged to take as many selfies with the R2 as they want. The mood is understandably festive. They just got hit by a tornado, but they ain’t worried ’bout it.   

Scaringe grabs the microphone and begins by thanking everyone for their hard work, especially in the aftermath of the storm. With his thick frames, neatly parted dark hair, and a tall, athletic build, Scaringe resembles Clark Kent — but Steve-O from Jackass is also a fair comparison. Today he’s traded his traditional military-style khaki shirt for a Rivian-branded dark blue button-down. Dark jeans and a pair of On Cloud waterproof hiking boots complete the look. 

“The resilience that we’ve demonstrated as an organization over the last couple of days is emblematic of the strength of the organization we’ve demonstrated in the development of this product,” he says to polite applause.

He’s not a magnetic public speaker and seems a little stiff at times. Still, he runs through his prepared remarks at a steady clip. There’s an air of “let’s make this quick.” There are cars to build.   

Javier Varela, Rivian’s COO, tries to amp the energy levels by repeatedly shouting “Big volumes” and “Go R2!” in his raspy Spanish accent. By contrast, Bobby Dean Parker, the VP of manufacturing, is all Southern charm. Parker, who cut his teeth at BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen, and Tesla, gets arguably the biggest round of applause from the assembled employees. He was the one who stood shoulder to shoulder with them over the last few days during storm cleanup.  

“Today, I’m not letting the tornado steal the spotlight from our wonderful R2 and our wonderful team,” Parker says. “But what I will say is praise God that we’re not standing here today in a moment of silence.” He pivots to the R2, which he describes as both “thrill on the road” as well as “luxury on the road.” “So, whaddaya say? Let’s get it on the road.” 

Before that, the R2 needs to get off the assembly line. A row of three R2s await Scaringe, Varela, and Parker, one for each. They drive slowly off the line while high-fiving with the workers gathered along the sidelines. Varela honks his horn in celebration, while someone shouts, “Come on Bobby Dean, give it some!” Not that there’s any room for acceleration. Nor would it be safe to floor it while surrounded by hundreds of people. 

One of those people is Hemanth Atthipatla, a tall, friendly quality manager in the operations and manufacturing division. He calls himself a “gatekeeper” in charge of policing the R2, making sure it meets all of its quality checks before it reaches customers. Atthipatla was also one of the first Rivian employees to buy his own R2, which is on display at the factory today. His wife loves it, he reports, as does his newborn child, though it’s unclear how a baby expresses approval about an automobile. 

“I think if we are able to maintain the good quality and ramp up, and provide the vehicles to the customer, I think it’s going to be a deal-breaker for Rivian,” Atthipatla says.

Brittany Clauss stands out from the crowd with her neon green hair and matching cheek studs. She’s been working at Rivian for four years, first on the R1 line and now over to R2. The main difference, she says, is that the R2 line is more compact, which allows for easier communication between the various stations and workers. She works at the end of the line, checking each vehicle for defects before it goes off to the next stage. 

She doesn’t own a Rivian herself, but says she can’t wait to see the R2 out on the road. “I’ll be able to point them out and be like, ‘That’s what I’ve been working on,’” she says. 

Nearly 900 miles east of Normal, the center of the Rivian universe is in the parking lot of Campmor, off Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey. At least for a dozen or so hardcore fans who are gathered there on a brilliantly sunny Saturday in early April. 

Romy Vreeland is a nonprofit executive with graying blonde hair and a welcoming smile. She’s also the national secretary of the Rivian Clubs of America and host of today’s meet and greet in the Campmor lot. Rivian Club members go off-roading together, share tips about the best camping equipment, and generally bask in a shared appreciation of the Rivian brand. They like the brand, the cute-but-rugged aesthetic, and the fact that the company’s CEO isn’t a household name, let alone a lightning rod for criticism.  

“It’s like, it’s not necessary to know [his name],” she says of RJ Scaringe, a man she’s met only once and found to be lovely. “It’s not a liability.”

Today is one of their semi-regular meetups: a chance for Rivian owners to get together and talk about their favorite electric adventure vehicle, while hopefully converting a few newbies. Jeep owners have their rubber ducks. Tesla fans have their fixation on Elon Musk. Rivian owners… are still trying to come up with their own identity. They love the environment, but also are wealthy enough to afford a brand-new $80,000 electric vehicle. (It’s not dissimilar from early Tesla owners.) 

Vreeland is unloading boxes of seltzer and donuts for the meetup. She likes to joke that the Rivian community could at times resemble an enthusiastic social club but admits she frequently wonders how she’d become so immersed in it all. She does love the outdoors, camping, and cooking over an open fire. But she doesn’t consider herself a car person. After all, it isn’t always safe for women in these EV-themed forums online. Early on, she would hide behind anonymity when chatting with other Rivian fans on Reddit or Discord. 

But she made plenty of friends, like Rod Gillis, the beanie-wearing finance guy from Mahwah who also owns his own fitness business on the side. Or Steven Santora, who works in real estate, loves to watch EV content on YouTube, and has cash deposits down on three upcoming EVs, including the R2. These are New Jersey’s most unapologetically devoted Rivianiacs. 

“It’s a vehicle for someone who is old enough to afford it, but young enough to have fun with it,” Gillis says. “It’s a vehicle that can be a jack of all trades. You can go off-roading with it. You can take it to the track. You can have fun with it, but if we’re being candid, it’s not the least expensive option out there.”

The R2 could change all that. A $45,000 midsize SUV will naturally bring more people into the world of Rivian ownership. Not everyone will join the club or seek out camaraderie with other Rivian owners, and that’s okay, Vreeland says. Rivian owners used to wave when they would see other Rivians on the road. She’s not expecting that tradition will last in the company’s new era. “Normal car buyers,” she calls them. 

Whether those normal car buyers will actually consider the R2, much in the way they did the Tesla Model Y, will be closely watched by members of the Rivian Clubs of America — as well as investors, industry stakeholders, and everyone with a desire to see whether this country can still compete with China. The federal EV tax credit is gone, but the rise in fuel prices is leading some people to give EVs another look. 

Vreeland knows Rivian isn’t out of the woods yet. She reads the news, hears the stories about EV cancellations and financial headwinds, and hopes for the best. The message boards are split over various predictions for the future: Maybe some combination of R2 success plus investment from Volkswagen and now Uber will be enough to put the company on the path to a brighter future. She’s not convinced that autonomy and AI will be the saving grace — it just needs to be a great car. 

“You read these dire headlines, like the EV industry is dying, whatever, that can make you feel pessimistic,” Vreeland says. “But then when you get into the car and you understand it better and you understand, ‘Wow, this is an American company, like how did they do this?’”

When Rivian was created over a decade and a half ago, it looked almost nothing like it does today. In fact, it didn’t even intend to make electric vehicles. Scaringe founded Mainstream Motors in 2009, naming the company after his father’s engineering firm based in his hometown of Rockledge, Florida, a bedroom community for NASA workers. The elder Scaringe started his own company in his 30s. His son, fresh out of MIT with a PhD in mechanical engineering, founded his at 26. He was the sole employee. 

Mainstream Motors, which soon became Avera Motors, was unwittingly following the Tesla playbook by setting its sights on a fast, four-seat coupe with rear-wheel drive and extreme fuel efficiency. If they could find success with a fun-to-drive sports car, perhaps mainstream automotive success would follow. With money from friends and family, as well as $2 million seed investment from the Florida Energy and Climate Commission, Scaringe hired about 15 designers and engineers from a raft of other car companies, including Mitsubishi, Chrysler, and Mercedes-Benz, and set to work on their first prototype to show to potential investors, according to a 2010 interview with Scaringe in Hagerty. The company was so cash-strapped that the weekly snack budget was only $35, and employees frequently housed interns to save money, according to a 2021 article in Bloomberg.

In late 2010, the team unveiled their first prototype, a hatchback dubbed “the Blue Thing.” To save costs and provide a proof of concept for investors, the vehicle was essentially a rebodied Mini Cooper that used the Mini’s engine and drivetrain. A photo marking the occasion shows Scaringe and his team proudly posing behind the unfinished-looking Blue Thing with wrapping tape still covering the front bumper. 

“It was like anything else,” Scaringe said on a 2010 podcast about his company’s origins. “The only way to start was to start. Lots of U-turns, lots of twists, lots of turns, lots of gut punches. Overall, just brute force built it.”

Scaringe was able to secure critical early funding through a creative lease-back agreement with Space Florida, the state’s aerospace economic development agency. According to TechCrunch, Space Florida invested nearly $2 million, partially because it was interested in the vehicle for the Moon or Mars. The agency bought the Blue Thing for $500,000, and leased it back to Avera for just $100 a year. It later bought three additional prototypes for $1 million under a similar agreement. (The story doesn’t end well for Space Florida. The agency thought it had a 3 percent stake in the company that would become Rivian, which could have translated to a $3 billion windfall after the company’s 2021 IPO. But thanks to an unexplained recapitalization, it only netted about $7 million.)

Eventually, Avera changed its name after Hyundai threatened to sue, claiming the name was too similar to its Azera sedan. The new name, Rivian, was a play on the Indian River lagoon near Scaringe’s hometown. 

During this time, the product goals kept shifting between an affordable sports car, an expensive supercar, and a spartan race car to woo various investors. They even considered a dune buggy after a brush with insolvency necessitated bringing in investment from Saudi Arabia. It was there that Scaringe was challenged to design a rugged but efficient pickup for the desert, a mashup between an F-150 and a Toyota Prius, according to the Bloomberg article.  

The desert vehicle aspect fell by the wayside, but the truck part stuck. Scaringe knew that to succeed, it needed to be different from all the big, bloated pickups coming out of Detroit. According to Bloomberg, he made a unilateral decision during a board meeting: The truck would be electric. Tesla was about to release the Model 3 to much fanfare. Trucks were some of the best-selling vehicles in America, yet no one was thinking about how to make an electric one. The old compliance cars from the 1990s were fading from memory. Tesla, and electrification, seemed like the future. 

Rivian first revealed the R1T in 2018; the R1S SUV came out a day later. Deliveries were delayed several times, with customers having to wait until 2021 and 2022, respectively, to receive their vehicles. But eventually Rivian worked out the kinks; since production began in September 2021, the company has delivered over 175,000 vehicles — a respectable number for a brand-new startup. Tesla didn’t sell its 200,000th car until 2018, about 10 years after selling its first. 

But the real coup was securing a massive contract with Amazon for 100,000 electric delivery vans, leading to its blockbuster IPO in 2021, briefly valuing the company higher than Ford. The retail giant invested a total of $1.4 billion in Rivian, becoming a major shareholder in the process. 

This would become a running theme for Rivian: hitching its wagon to much larger, better-financed companies to ensure long-term viability and survival. Before the Amazon deal went through, Rivian was in talks to build EVs for GM and then Ford, though neither deal would pan out. (In muscling out GM, Ford invested $500 million in the company in 2019, only to sell its majority stake in a $7.3 billion write-down three years later.) 

The Amazon deal would eventually get eclipsed by the 2024 partnership with Volkswagen, which offered $5.8 billion to form a software joint venture — a life preserver for Rivian during a precarious moment. The company closed that year with over $4 billion in losses. 

Rivian is now heavily tied to Volkswagen, which is dealing with its own problems around plunging profits, declining market share, and software reliability issues. Rivian could help fix the lattermost of those problems, designing software for brands across the German auto giant’s portfolio. The deal was too good to pass up. VW now owns a nearly 16 percent stake in Rivian, surpassing Amazon as the largest shareholder. 

In some ways, it’s a hedge against a more uncertain and unpredictable future. In their public comments about the partnership, VW executives have seemed to imply that Rivian could one day become a subsidiary under the German auto giant’s global brand. The company didn’t start as an electric vehicle maker, and there’s a possibility it may not survive as one either.

“There’s a lot of moving pieces that they have to juggle,” said Sam Abuelsamid, an automotive tech analyst at Telemetry. “If they drop any of them, if they drop any of those balls that they’re juggling, that could be an existential crisis for them.”

The most prominent ball is the R2. If Rivian drops it, and the R2 is just a modest hit, will Vreeland and the rest of those fans stick around? 

Scaringe, a longtime vegan, is just finishing up a veggie breakfast before getting ready for an all-hands meeting at the Normal factory. The continued post-tornado cleanup will be a major topic, as will the impact on the R2 ramp. His message will be clear. 

“We’re trying to compete with the best in the world. We have to have a very large engineering budget [and] we’re spending a tremendous amount of money to build truly world-class technology,” Scaringe tells me. “If you qualify the same with the tornado hitting the plant at the start of production, it’s definitely the fastest. I don’t think Tesla or anyone else had to deal with that as well.”

The company desperately needs this vehicle to be a hit. Last year was a tough one for Rivian, with sales dropping 18 percent year over year. Expectations of profitability are being pushed further into the future thanks to heavy R&D spending on autonomy. Still, Rivian projects it will sell upwards of 67,000 vehicles in 2026, anchored primarily by the R2. With R1 sales expected to remain flat, that would mean Rivian expects to sell as many as 25,000 R2s before the end of the year. As TechCrunch noted, that would be one of the fastest launches of a new EV ever recorded. 

“R2 is the most important thing we have because it’s what takes us from being subscale to being a scaled manufacturer,” Scaringe tells me. 

Ramping up production of a brand-new vehicle, especially one as vital as the R2, is rife with pitfalls. Ask Elon Musk. Tesla became a giant in the auto industry based on the success of the Model 3, an affordable EV that seamlessly blended cool tech with an affordable price. But the car very nearly drove Tesla out of business. The company was bleeding cash while being over-leveraged on robots and automation. In a desperate bid to hit a 5,000-vehicle weekly milestone, Tesla set up a giant, makeshift assembly tent in the parking lot to build the Model 3s by hand and ease bottleneck issues inside the main plant. Musk famously referred to the rollout as “production hell.” 

Scaringe could hardly be confused with Musk — one’s an egghead from Florida, the other’s a pro-natalist white supremacist who recently (and briefly) became the world’s first trillionaire — but he knows that dangers lurk around every corner. (Scaringe himself is estimated to be worth $200 million, despite a recent divorce that cost him millions of dollars and some of his voting stake in the company. That said, Scaringe did succeed recently in getting Rivian’s board to approve a Musk-like, performance-based pay package worth over $4 billion. If the R2 is a hit, Rivian lives on — and Scaringe becomes the world’s newest billionaire.)

Like Tesla, Rivian relies on some automation — during my tour, I watch as hundreds of industrial robot arms assemble the trays that will eventually contain the R2’s lithium-ion battery — but won’t be overreliant on it. For Scaringe, the real threat lies further downstream, lurking in the company’s supply chain. That’s why he’s putting such an emphasis on making things in-house, like writing its own operating system software. While many automakers rely on suppliers like Bosch for electric motors, Rivian designs and manufactures its own. It sources its battery cells from LG Energy, but makes its own packs, as well as the cooling systems for fast charging. Soon, it will design its own AI chips for autonomous driving. It’s even considering making its own lidar sensors. Anything less, Scaringe believes, would open the company up to an unacceptable level of risk. 

“The supply chain environment has not been stable in the last five years. It’s just very, very dynamic,” Scaringe says, citing tariffs, the war in Iran, and high gas prices. (Yes, even an EV company can feel the sting, due to the downstream effects of mining for battery minerals, for example.) “The biggest risk for ramp-up is the supply chain.”

Vertical integration at this level is enormously costly. But Rivian isn’t like Fisker or any of these other EV startups that have already gone out of business, Scaringe insists. He explains that the company is spending significantly on a world-class engineering team, producing its own silicon, motors, power electronics, and computers. Yes, Rivian loses money every year, but it also creates a variable cost advantage at scale. The R2 is the essential vehicle to unlock that scale, enabling the company to cover these fixed costs. But the process will start slowly, Scaringe says. “We’re not pressing a button to have hundreds of thousands of cars produced the day we start production.”

Still, it quickly becomes clear that what really animates Scaringe isn’t talk of supply chain woes or the anguishes of early production — it’s autonomy. A conversation about Rivian’s entry into self-driving cars is when he is at his most Muskian, projecting that the company — which has never publicly demonstrated a fully autonomous vehicle — will eventually develop a Level 4 system, meaning no human supervision required within certain limits. 

“It’s our biggest focus; it’s the largest area of investment,” Scaringe says. “It’s my biggest focus in terms of my activities within the business — this is what I’m spending the most time on.”

This surprises me, almost as much as it did when I was in Palo Alto last year to watch Rivian announce its plans to design its own AI chips. It seems counterintuitive, like a pivot from what the company had previously represented. Rivian is supposed to be an outdoor lover’s alternative to Tesla: rugged and off-road-worthy, while still being fully electric. Now it seems like it’s trying to chase the mercurial billionaire down an AI rabbit hole.

Scaringe subscribes to Musk’s outlook that, eventually, “everything will be autonomous … and that’s not 10 years away,” he says. “That’s in the next couple of years. You’re going to start to see ever-increasing levels of autonomy.”

It’s not just the cars that are getting an AI makeover. Over 70 percent of Rivian’s software team is using Cursor, an AI coding agent owned by SpaceX, to code new software features, said James Philbin, senior VP for autonomy and AI at the company. “I think it definitely changes the job,” Philbin told me last April. “But potentially I think will accelerate a lot of software development.”

I asked whether Philbin, who previously worked at Waymo and Zoox, felt like he was swimming against the tide by developing an autonomous vehicle at an adventure- and off-roading-themed EV company. “I mean, I would flip the question back and I would say, ‘Why are these legacy OEMs swimming against what is clearly the tide of the future?’” he said. “In 10 years, the vast majority of cars will be EVs and I think the vast majority of cars will be increasingly autonomous.”

While some may see the move as savvy, others could construe it as desperate. As EV demand stalls out, autonomous vehicles have been surging, fueled by the incredible growth of robotaxi startup Waymo over the last year. The company now operates in 11 cities in the US. Meanwhile, Uber’s hot on Waymo’s heels. Last March, the ridehail company said it would buy 10,000 robotaxis from Rivian — specifically, autonomous R2 vehicles — as part of a deal that could net Rivian $1.25 billion in new investment. Like VW, Uber has become another well-capitalized benefactor during a pivotal moment. And before the R2 has even rolled out, Rivian has an order for 10,000 of them. 

To lay the groundwork, Rivian is offering more AI-powered products to its customers. Last year, the company rolled out its so-called Universal Hands-Free driving feature, covering 3.1 million miles of road in the US and Canada, for second-gen R1 vehicles. And later this year, it expects to release point-to-point hands-free driving, which includes navigating turns, intersections, and on/off-ramps. Think of it as Rivian’s version of Tesla’s controversial Full Self-Driving feature. 

But early tests have been mixed. Edmunds called it “boring” but impressive. In his review of the R2, Verge contributor Lawrence Ulrich called the Universal Hands-Free system “overconfident to the point of obliviousness.” My own experience in the passenger seat of an R1S using hands-free driving was marked by several disengagements and a couple of close calls with cyclists. And now, Rivian is facing a lawsuit from R1 owners over allegations of false claims about its autonomous driving capabilities.

But while Tesla’s approach to full autonomy relies exclusively on cameras, Rivian plans on adding lidar sensors to its R2 vehicles later in 2026 for extra safety. That was enough to get Uber through the door and into a lucrative deal. And Rivian could certainly use the cash as it wades through the sticky terrain of early R2 production. Scaringe argues that Rivian can outpace Tesla, and even Waymo, given its ability to feed camera data from its customer fleet into its “Large Driving Model.”

“We’ll have a lot more data than Waymo,” he says. “Tesla, by far, has the most data but the most constrained sensor sets … Waymo has the most sensors but a very small fleet. We have something in the middle.”

Of course, the money won’t come unless Rivian hits a series of crucial milestones, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on the Decoder podcast recently, including testing without a safety driver behind the wheel. “They’ve got to deliver,” Khosrowshahi said, “and based on everything that we’ve seen from RJ and team, putting together a first-class AI team, we’re confident that they can deliver on those R2s.”

Scaringe seems equally confident in Rivian’s success. Of course, he has to be. Throughout our interview, he projects confidence. Rivian won’t be acquired by VW, but the partnership allows for cost sharing of parts and content between brands — much in the way a subsidiary would. 

It isn’t until later, when we’re walking the factory floor together, that the mask slips a little. 

“The R2 is how all that [vertical integration] comes to a realization,” he says. “It’s why R2 for us — if R2 is not successful, then we’ll need to resize how we’ve set up the business.”

Which is to say: If the R2 doesn’t work, Rivian won’t look like Rivian much longer.

When the R2 comes out, it won’t be available in the world’s largest market for electric vehicles: China. 

Unlike most American car companies, Rivian only sells its cars in North America. Tesla’s decision to open a factory in Shanghai is widely seen as a pivotal moment in the company’s history and a key waypoint on the road to its current $1.24 trillion market cap. 

But China’s domestic brands, not Tesla, are the ones that are currently devouring the world. Backed by heavy state support and massive domestic overcapacity, China currently manufactures roughly 75 percent of all EVs worldwide. Many of them sell for less than $20,000 — half the price of any comparable vehicle in the States. Tariffs and other protectionist policies have kept China from selling its cars to US customers, though experts wonder how long that will hold. Ford CEO Jim Farley has warned that allowing China to sell its cars in the States would be a death blow for Detroit. 

Rivian has imported its own fleet of Chinese cars for benchmarking purposes. It tests them on a private course, and then tears them to shreds to examine every bolt and computer chip. Xiaomi’s SU7, in particular, has impressed Scaringe, with its clean-sheet approach to software and superior quality execution. But the Rivian CEO doesn’t ascribe the same industry-killing abilities to China as some of his automotive counterparts. 

“We’ve taken the cars apart … there’s no magic,” he says. “They’re using stampings, they’re using castings.”

The country’s actual competitive advantage, according to Scaringe, is that labor is so much cheaper over there. Even if the cars are built here in the US, that advantage vanishes, and China has to compete on a more level playing field.

Still, Washington seems to have taken Detroit’s apocalyptic warnings to heart, throwing up seemingly insurmountable trade barriers to prevent China from exporting its cars to the US. Tariffs make it prohibitively expensive for any Chinese car to be sold here. And cars with any connected vehicle software that originates from China are barred from sale under a Biden-era law. 

But many auto experts think it’s inevitable that Chinese cars will eventually find their way to US dealerships. The US could require Chinese OEMs to create a joint venture with a domestic brand, much in the same way that China does for foreign automakers that want to sell to its residents. Even President Trump has expressed willingness to allow China to sell in the US, as long as the cars are manufactured here.

If they do, Scaringe is confident Rivian won’t get snowed under. “If the Chinese companies decide to produce domestically in the United States, those advantages disappear,” he argues. “The cost of labor for a Chinese company operating in the United States and the cost of labor for a US company operating in the United States is going to be the same.”

But expecting a level playing field in this day and age seems a bit foolhardy, if not outright unrealistic. Detroit is trying to insulate itself from a Chinese onslaught by going back to the drawing board on EVs. Can Rivian engineer its own solution? 

The relationship between small towns and the big-name employers who come in promising lots of jobs and investment is always a bit fraught. There’s concerns about putting all your eggs in one basket when relying heavily on a single employer, especially one deeply rooted in a volatile market environment. Normal certainly knows this better than most, having endured the “changed fortune” headlines after Rivian’s purchase of the former Mitsubishi plant in 2017. 

But those fortunes could reverse if the EV market fails to climb out of its current slump. Like most automakers, Rivian has gone through several rounds of layoffs in its short history, most recently in June, with cuts from its sales and marketing divisions. The company’s salaried factory workers were excluded; next time, they might not be so lucky. 

“It’s been kind of a culture change for the Bloomington-Normal community,” said Adam Campbell, dean of career and technical education at Heartland Community College, where Rivian runs an apprenticeship program. 

Campbell said that aside from its vast cornfields, Normal has always had a sizable white collar community, with State Farm’s international headquarters and two universities. “With Rivian coming in as a major manufacturer within the state, that’s kind of shifting the culture a little bit for the better. So now we are moving more into advanced manufacturing.”

But even Heartland realizes that the winds are changing. The future, at least the American future, won’t necessarily be “EV only,” as some had previously predicted. Hybrid vehicles are now the new growth product of the industry, which has spurred the college to add a new hybrid diesel equipment technology program to its curriculum. 

“We’re not stuck in the old way of doing things,” Campbell said. “We do try to be innovative.”

It may not be enough. Rivian has already experienced significant turnover in its short history, shedding thousands of employees. Campbell knows he needs to structure his curriculum to respond to a rapidly changing economic environment. 

“Hypothetically, if the electric vehicle industry ebbs and there’s a pause in that, the students that come through our programming, what they learn is still 100 percent viable,” he says. “It can work across multiple industries.”

It seems like everywhere you go in Normal, there’s some reminder of Rivian’s outsize role in the community. The Parkview Inn, a restaurant in Bloomington known for its broasted chicken, slot machines, and decor that leans heavily on license plates as art, is a typical haunt for Rivian workers, current and former. Joe (who declined to give his last name) worked at the factory for a year and a half before deciding that spending hours indoors every day on the assembly line was not the best use of his time. He now works in landscaping and is much happier.

Joe, who is still wearing his “Keep Normal Adventurous Forever” T-shirt, says he keeps in touch with his friends at the plant, who report that the pace has picked up considerably for the R2 production. “All my friends say it’s, like, at least 10s if not 12s right now,” he says, referring to 10-hour and 12-hour shifts. Some workers are on four 12-hour shifts a week on a three-week rotating schedule. 

He has a lot of opinions about Rivian, like about the managers (“Everybody’s chill”), the high-end e-bike the company says it’s making (“In my opinion, they were late to the game when they dropped it”), the skilled workers that Rivian brought in from out of the country (“They bought houses for people to come here”), and the rumors of a secret hydrogen project Rivian is allegedly working on (“I don’t know if they’ll ever speak about that again”). But ultimately, he wishes Rivian well and is actively cheering for the R2 to be a success. 

“I hope so,” Joe says. “Just for the sake of my town.”

Joe may not know it yet, but Normal isn’t the only town relying on Rivian’s future success. The new Normal is a town called Stanton Springs North, about 45 miles east of Atlanta, Georgia, where Rivian recently broke ground on a new $5 billion factory to build hundreds of thousands of R2s. While the Normal plant is a retrofitted facility with a capacity of only 200,000 vehicles a year, the upcoming Stanton Springs campus is designed to be the platonic ideal of a Rivian factory, built from the ground up to manufacture up to 300,000 EVs annually. 

It represents Rivian’s dream for its future. But the company recently was forced to scale back the plan after Trump’s Energy Department slashed a loan agreement with the company from $6.5 billion to $4.4 billion. It’s still getting a big loan, but even its dreams are getting downsized. Its own government appears to be actively working against it, first by eliminating pro-EV policies, and now by renegotiating a settled loan deal. 

The myth Americans tell themselves about their country is that it’s a place that breeds innovation and nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit. A well-regarded company that makes interesting, thoughtfully designed products that are also environmentally friendly, one that employs thousands of people, with the potential to employ thousands more — you’d think a company like this would be on a glide path to success. And yet Rivian is struggling to secure its future in the face of a volatile market, a hostile government, and fatigued consumers. If Rivian stumbles, or worse, fails, that myth of American innovation may suffer an irreparable blow. 

The R2 had its official launch June 9th. The reviews were broadly positive, and fans are already crowding into the Rivian subreddits and other forums to yap about specs and test drives. Will the non-fans, the hundreds of thousands of regular people that Rivian desperately needs to dig its way out of this rut, show up too? The company is riding high on the positivity of loyal customers like Romy Vreeland and her club cohorts — even as its stock never seems to rise above $20 a share. Clouds loom on the horizon: Days after the R2 deliveries started, Rivian announced it was laying off hundreds of employees. 

The market headwinds are blowing, gusty and gale-sized, but not yet spinning fast enough to classify as a tornado. Rivian can only batten down the hatches, and face the storm.

Correction, Wednesday July 1: An earlier version of this article stated that Rivian was designing software for Volkswagen’s internal combustion engine vehicles. It is just for electric vehicles.

Update, Monday July 6th: An earlier version of this story said that Rivian’s factory in Georgia will have capacity for 400,000. After renegotiating the loan with the Department of Energy, the capacity will now be 300,000 vehicles.

The wildfires that would come to engulf Los Angeles had just begun to burn when Frankee Grove finally admitted to herself that she needed a roommate. It was January 2025, and Grove, then 42, had recently broken up with her boyfriend of six years. They had lived together in a two-bedroom Spanish bungalow on a quaint street in Venice. For Grove, this rental — with its vegetable garden and hardwood floors, arched doorways, and terra-cotta roof — had come to feel like a home. 

But she couldn’t afford the $5,100 monthly rent by herself. She needed to find a subletter, but her spare time was spoken for: She was volunteering to help those impacted by the wildfires currently ravaging the Pacific Palisades. Grove, a dedicated empath and striving progressive who has two decades of experience in education, always tried to see the good in others, and she wanted to embody those qualities herself. 

Still, she was bleeding cash. Grove eventually turned to Facebook, hoping to find someone who could move in quickly. She connected with a woman named Sabrina Mollison, whose online persona was classic SoCal: A fledgling fitness influencer, she posted Instagram reels of herself working out in expensive athleisure, posed for selfies in full-length mirrors, and affixed aspirational (but fairly banal) captions under day-in-the-life content (“Trust the process” and “You can’t make progress if you don’t start”). 

Grove, who grew up in Massachusetts to teacher parents and had a decidedly more bohemian vibe — she launched a botanical side hustle, sported a surfer-girl haircut, and summered on Cape Cod — believed that their incompatibility might be a good thing. They didn’t need to be friends. Lately, her life was defined by instability. Grove welcomed a simple, transactional relationship. 

Mollison arrived for a tour wearing a workout uniform and a thick layer of makeup. Grove showed her the house. Mollison appeared underwhelmed, her affect flat, but said she would rent the room for Grove’s requested $2,200. Grove didn’t ask Mollison to sign any type of lease, just took her deposit and told her that she could move in in a few days, during the last week of January. 

Mollison arrived via an Uber with all of her belongings in black trash bags. Grove felt a growing sense of unease. As Mollison unpacked, Grove thought back to how restless she felt the night before. Her gut told her that something was wrong, but she chalked it up to nerves. She traded her apprehension for the financial security of a confirmed subletter, of doing something kind for someone else.

After Mollison settled in, she handed Grove $670 in cash. It wasn’t enough to cover what she still owed for the first month’s rent, but Mollison said not to worry. She’d give her the rest of it by week’s end. 

A few days later, Grove, who worked for an ed-tech company, left for a three-day work trip to New Orleans. Upon her return, she noticed that some of her food (a dozen eggs, a bottle of wine) were gone. Had Mollison eaten her groceries? Grove, allergic to confrontation, approached Mollison gently, as if her new roommate were a child who did something naughty. 

“I realize we didn’t have a conversation about food and stuff in the kitchen,” Grove told her, “and I prefer to keep our things separate.” 

“Okay,” Mollison said matter-of-factly, with the same dejected air Grove had noticed from previous interactions. It wasn’t rudeness so much as aloofness, a type of non-engagement, as if Mollison wasn’t actually processing what Grove was telling her. The missing food was a bad sign. Things would escalate quickly.

Grove woke up to find Mollison sleeping on the couch, presumably drunk. After Mollison got up, Grove noticed bright red stains smeared all over the cushions: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. This wasn’t a piece of Ikea furniture, either, but rather a designer midcentury modern sofa from Cisco Home that Grove’s ex-boyfriend bought for $6,600 (plus delivery). 

Grove quickly took the covers off the cushions and brought them to her local dry cleaner, who charged her over $300 to remove the bright red Cheeto dust. Grove, with her aversion to confrontation, again didn’t say anything to Mollison, but knew she had to cut her tenantship short. 

The next day, Grove texted Mollison: “Hey Sabrina, we need to talk about this arrangement, when do you have time today or tomorrow to do so? I’ll work around your schedule.” Mollison responded that they could discuss it that day. Before they spoke, Grove called her 74-year-old godmother, Catherine Russo, for advice on what to say. Russo, a longtime lesbian activist from Cape Cod, had known Grove since birth and had always been somewhat of a protector. Grove admitted that she had no idea how to approach this fairly basic interaction and hoped Russo wouldn’t think it too ridiculous that she might write out a script, memorize it, and then have the conversation. Her godmother was supportive of the idea.

Grove took a deep breath, calmed her nerves, and walked into the living room. She held eye contact, kept her chin up, and told Mollison that she didn’t think the arrangement was working out, and that Mollison had 30 days to vacate. 

“Okay,” Mollison replied with the same flat tone as before. Well, Grove thought, that was easier than expected. She didn’t put anything in writing. To Grove, they were two grown adults who had come to an agreement. 

But bad things kept happening: A few days later, Grove came home to find a humongous husky in her living room. She asked Anthony Jones, Mollison’s boyfriend, who was in the house with her, if it was his dog. 

“No,” Jones said. “It’s Sabrina’s.” 

“I got her from the shelter,” Mollison said. “Her name is Luna.” 

Grove was floored. She took a minute to gather her thoughts and then confronted Mollison in the same civil tone as their previous interaction. Grove told her that she couldn’t have the dog here, and it needed to be taken out of the house. 

“Okay,” Mollison said. 

Mollison, of course, did not get rid of the dog. She also seemed to be drinking more heavily, and came home the following night in a rage, screaming at someone on the phone and stomping around the house. Grove, terrified, pushed a bench in front of her bedroom door, fearful that Mollison would try to enter. 

It was here that Grove got the sneaking suspicion that Mollison may not abide by their verbal agreement for her to move out. She turned to ChatGPT for help, asking AI what the proper course of action would be to have a subtenant evicted. The chatbot told her she needed to serve the subtenant, in writing, with a formal 30-day notice to vacate.

Grove was confused: Mollison wasn’t on the lease, hadn’t signed a written subtenant agreement, had barely any belongings in the house, and had begun to damage Grove’s stuff. Why couldn’t Grove just kick her out and change the locks? It felt absurd, and a little ironic. Grove, a diehard liberal, wholeheartedly supported tenants’ rights, but she could tell that this eviction process — something that she morally didn’t even necessarily agree with — was going to be difficult. 

On February 14th, Grove posted the notice on the front door and on Mollison’s bedroom door. A few days later, Grove was in her room when she heard Mollison come home. Mollison was on the phone, enraged — and yelling about Grove. To whomever she was speaking, Mollison read aloud Grove’s notice to vacate, the end of which promised to initiate formal eviction proceedings if Mollison did not move out within a month’s time. 

And then Mollison, still talking on the phone and unaware Grove was eavesdropping, said: “Bitch, I promise you before then, your life will be ruined. You want to play games? I promise you, to my core, I am going to ruin your life.” 

Two days later, Grove decided to install security cameras in her home. She needed technological reliance, a thing that could both document and deter. The decision, however, made Grove feel dirty. She was morally against surveillance, and equated it with America’s slide into techno-dystopianism. A few mansions had gone up in her neighborhood recently, outfitted with a gaggle of cameras. She’d never do that, Grove told herself. But here, with Mollison, this act of surveillance — of self-surveillance, since everything she did would also be recorded — was both invasive and protective. 

A few days after hanging the cameras, Grove found, on the kitchen counter, an application for a civil restraining order. Mollison’s allegations shocked her: She accused Grove of “stalking” her, “yelling,” and “threatening” her. She also claimed that Grove said that she would “kill me and my dog,” Mollison wrote. “I believe she has weapons. I am afraid for my life in my own home.” According to the packet’s cover page, a restraining order was not issued, but a court date for March 13th, 2025 — a few weeks hence — had been set for Mollison to plead her case to a judge. 

Grove took photographs of the application and put it back where she found it. Now, she was scared. She called one of the only people she knew would try to protect her: Matty Cater, her ex-boyfriend. He agreed to come be with her, but was shocked at what Grove had gotten herself into. 

With Cater there, tensions only escalated. Grove entered the kitchen from her bedroom to find Mollison drinking wine on the couch with a friend, their glasses placed without coasters on Grove’s expensive coffee table. Grove asked them if they would please use the coasters. 

Mollison rose from her seat, clearly drunk. “Bitch,” she said. “I’m going to fight you!” 

Grove went back into her bedroom. “Matty,” she said. “Sabrina just said she wants to fight me.” 

Cater went out into the living room. “Ladies,” he said. “You need to leave. You are drunk, and you need to leave the house.” 

“Well, I’m going to fucking fight you!” Mollison screamed. 

Grove approached Cater. “Let’s just call the police,” she said. They waited outside, away from Mollison, for the officers to arrive. Jones, Mollison’s boyfriend, arrived just before the cops showed up. He asserted, with a degree of confidence that gave Grove pause, the falsehood that Mollison was on the lease, that this was her house too, and that Grove was actually the harasser. 

The conversation became a he-said-she-said, and the police admitted that there was nothing they could do to solve the dispute. After the police left, Cater told Grove that it would be too dangerous to stay there. They booked a room at a hotel and, when Grove returned to the house the next day, she elected to stay in the detached office, only entering the house to use the restroom, so she could avoid Mollison. 

Anxiety radiated throughout Grove’s body. Her appetite dropped. Naturally thin, she still lost 10 pounds. She couldn’t concentrate. She worried about her job, where she began to make careless mistakes. During a meeting with the company’s founder, she flubbed crucial metrics for the schools with which she worked. She couldn’t lose this job. Now single, her income was essential to her livelihood.

To make matters worse, Grove was about to leave on a long-awaited vacation to the Bahamas with her mother, who had been battling a rare and aggressive form of cancer. Worried that stress would poison the trip, Grove obtained a prescription from her doctor for anti-anxiety medication and booked an appointment with her psychic. 

“She has evil and dark energy,” the psychic told her, referencing Mollison. “You need to leave.”

Grove took her psychic’s advice. She disclosed to her landlord the situation with Mollison, and told him that she planned to move out at the end of March. And then Grove left for the tropical Caribbean, hoping to have a reprieve from the situation in which she found herself.

Russo, Grove’s godmother, offered to fly to Los Angeles from Massachusetts to house-sit while Grove was in the Bahamas. A women’s rights activist who did advocacy work in war-torn El Salvador (she documented human rights abuses and helped women escape paramilitary occupation), Russo wouldn’t be intimidated by a bad roommate. 

But both she and Grove underestimated Mollison’s willingness to escalate. 

By the second night, Russo finally told Grove what had happened: Mollison pushed Russo and screamed at her to “get the fuck out.” Russo called the police, who came to the house but didn’t arrest Mollison. After they left, Mollison went on a rampage in the house. She violently shoved all of the furniture in her bedroom out into the hallway and then into Grove’s bedroom. She also smashed the pot holding a 10-foot-tall ficus tree, sending dirt all over the floor. Russo filmed the destruction and sent the video to Grove. Mollison grabbed two more plants and threw them into Grove’s bedroom, the pots shattered atop her white rug. 

When she was done, Mollison told Russo, “Clean this up.” And then she left the house.

Later, Russo told her goddaughter: “I’m glad it was me and not you. I’m fine.” 

When she could steal time, Grove initiated her next steps. She filed a police report for vandalism, notified her newly retained eviction attorney as to what happened, and initiated a formal eviction lawsuit against Mollison to try and get her out as soon as possible. 

During what seemed to devolve into a standoff, Mollison’s boyfriend, Anthony Jones, came to the house. He approached Russo. “Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” he said. “She’s going to get to live here for free for a long time.” 

Grove arrived back in Los Angeles a few days later, where she essentially moved into the detached office in the backyard. Russo, terrified for her goddaughter, told her that she was going to stay until Grove moved out at the end of the month. After the two endured another night of Mollison’s drunken antics (smoking cigarettes in the kitchen, doing what appeared to be cocaine off the counter, screaming at Russo through her bedroom door), the Los Angeles Police Department set a meeting at Grove’s home on March 19th to go over her complaint about Mollison’s vandalism. 

Grove and Russo walked the assigned detective, Chris Choi, through Mollison’s behavior, and he seemed genuinely concerned and understanding. He also recommended to Grove that she file her own restraining order against Mollison as a form of legal protection. 

It was another thing added to Grove’s growing to-do list. Not only did she have to avoid Mollison, but also look after her godmother, not get fired from her job, and find a new place to live. And now she had to keep accumulating more and more detailed records of her interactions with Mollison and the damage she had caused. The situation was consuming Grove, with every waking moment dedicated to the wreckage that Mollison had wrought. 

Grove woke up the next day hoping to have a normal morning: work, a few chores, and then lunch. That’s when, at 12:01PM, Grove stepped out from her office and found six police officers standing in her backyard. 

“Are you Frankee Grove?” one of them asked. 

“Yes,” she responded. 

“You’re under arrest.” 

Grove felt herself leave her body. And then the cold metal grip of the handcuffs on her wrists, the cop’s hand on her arm, her feet beginning to shuffle toward the street. Grove could also hear, from over her shoulder, Russo begging the officers to let her go. As the cop brought Grove over to his cruiser, she saw Mollison standing on the sidewalk, arms crossed, a devious smirk stretched across her face. 

“What is going on?” Grove asked one of the cops.

“She claims you assaulted her.” 

Grove was in shock. She tried to explain that it wasn’t true, that it was actually Mollison who was terrorizing her, that a grave injustice was underfoot. But there was nothing the police could do. They brought Grove down to the police station, took her mugshot and fingerprints, and put her in a holding cell. Grove was drowning in shame. She had been arrested in broad daylight. What would her neighbors think of her? What if her boss found out? Shit. She was supposed to be working right now! What if someone was pinging her on Slack? What would she tell them? Grove hung her head in her hands. How would she get herself out of this mess? 

Thankfully, her time in the slammer was short-lived. Instead of a formal arraignment, Grove was given a slip with a court date, where next steps would be hashed out. Grove walked out of the police station to find Russo waiting for her. They embraced, and Grove burst into tears. She couldn’t help but replay the trauma of being paraded out onto the street, shackled and in sweatpants, for the world to see, like a secret criminal who had finally been exposed. 

Grove, relegated to the backyard office and consumed by anxiety, began compiling more evidence to refute Mollison’s claims, including logging clips from her home security cameras. She also ordered a body camera on Amazon, opting for overnight shipping. 

The next morning, Grove strapped the body camera to her chest and started preparing to leave for an Airbnb, where she could avoid Mollison and plot her next move. As she packed a bag and loaded up her car, Mollison’s friend, whom Grove had met when she visited the house previously, approached her in the backyard, holding a paper bag. 

In a fake, lilting, overly friendly tone, as if on the verge of a cartoonish giggle, she said, “Frankee, I have something for you. Should I just leave it here?” She placed the bag on a picnic table in the backyard. 

Grove ignored her, didn’t touch the paper bag, continued packing her car, and then left. Grove and Russo drove to their Airbnb, an apartment in a large concrete complex in Marina del Rey. They pulled into the underground parking garage and found a spot. Just then, Grove’s phone pinged: activity on her security camera. Grove opened her app, which fed a live feed to her phone. 

Six police officers filed through the front door and into her house — guns drawn — and began clearing the space room by room.

“Oh my god,” Grove said. “They’re looking for me.” 

Grove tried to understand how Mollison was able to convince the police to come back to the house and arrest her again — and how Mollison’s friend trying to hand her a paper bag came into play. As Grove would come to confirm later, Mollison’s scheme to have her arrested twice was actually a two-parter: First, Mollison falsely claimed that Grove assaulted her, resulting in Grove’s first arrest. Then, armed with that complaint and Grove’s detention, Mollison went to the Santa Monica courthouse and filed for a domestic violence restraining order, claiming that they were in a romantic relationship and that Grove was abusive. The court granted the order — which needed to be formally served to Grove, hence the paper bag — and, once Grove was “served,” Mollison claimed that Grove, being at the house, had violated the retraining order, making her eligible, once again, to be arrested. 

The plan was calculated, diabolical, and extremely clever. In fact, Grove and Russo felt it was likely too clever and suspected that Mollison’s boyfriend, Anthony Jones, was actually the brains behind the plan. (Mollison did not respond to multiple requests for comment; Jones was unable to be reached for comment.) 

But there was also a deeper, tragicomic irony that was not lost on Grove. She had become a victim of the same progressive politics — tenants’ rights, women’s rights — that she had championed all her life, in that the credence California’s justice system automatically gave so-called victims could, quite simply, be weaponized against an innocent person: her. She was furious that Mollison took advantage of a system meant to protect vulnerable people, and that Grove, the innocent person here, had no recourse in the moment, despite Mollison’s lack of credibility. The system — built to believe victims, believe women — mandated that Grove get handcuffed, mugshots, fingerprinted, and stuffed in a cell. 

And now, seeing the cops back at her house, Grove was losing her religion. 

As Grove watched the police parade through her house, she vowed not to leave her Airbnb — turning her refuge into a prison — lest the cops were looking for her. But it wasn’t like Grove was sitting around with nothing to do. She still had to work, and she had hired a criminal defense attorney to help her navigate the Kafkaesque nightmare that had become her plea to prove her innocence. 

As part of this process, Grove wanted to find out as much about Mollison as possible. She discovered that Mollison was fired from Equinox for allegedly filing time cards for client sessions that never happened. Grove’s friend tried to reach Mollison’s relatives, but discovered that her family had, in fact, cut off contact with her, and were unwilling to help. 

In the meantime, Grove’s criminal defense attorney, Dawn Dunbar, filed a motion in court for an emergency ex parte hearing so a carve-out could be implemented within the restrictions of Mollison’s domestic violence restraining order, allowing Grove access to her house. The judge granted it, and set another hearing so Dunbar could argue the merits of the restraining order itself. Simultaneously, Detective Choi finished investigating the vandalism allegations against Mollison and told Grove that he recommended vandalism and theft charges against Mollison with the Los Angeles District Attorney.

Choi explained that if the DA decided to file charges based on the evidence presented, an arrest warrant would be issued for Mollison. But, Choi said, because the DA was so backed up, it could be at least a year before there might be any movement. 

Grove gasped. “A year?” 

Still, she was hopeful. In the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder, Los Angeles had elected a hyper-progressive DA, but in 2024 had reverted back to a tough-on-crime stance, electing Nathan Hochman. Grove obviously didn’t vote for Hochman, but in a strange twist of fate she was now essentially praying that a lifelong Republican who once worked in the George W. Bush administration would levy charges against Mollison. (Once in office as DA, Hochman had immediately revoked a host of his predecessor’s policies, now allowing his staff to pursue the death penalty and sentencing enhancements, among other changes.) Grove had never in her life wished ill on another human being, and yet here she was, hoping that this woman who invaded her home would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. 

Choi explained that Grove could, in the meantime, file a civil suit against Mollison for monetary damages, which Grove planned to do. Despite the timeline for criminal charges, Grove felt that the tables were finally beginning to turn in her favor. Her good luck continued. Grove’s lawyer, Dunbar, called with great news: The judge, in a move that Dunbar had not seen in almost 20 years of practice, dissolved Mollison’s domestic violence restraint order outright. Grove was ecstatic. She felt that she was on the verge of getting her life back. 

Grove was able to go back to the house and finish packing. When the movers arrived later that week, she called the police for a civil standby, which are basically officers who hang out to prevent any drama. By a stroke of luck, the same officer that arrested Grove came to the house to keep the peace. Grove filled him in on what had happened, and the disclosure seemed to bring a sense of levity to the situation. He asked about Grove’s gardening techniques, and she gave the officer a few tips. 

Still, Mollison was in the house. When it came time for Grove to take her belongings from Mollison’s bedroom, the two cops took the lead. 

“We’re going to have to go into your room,” the officer said to Mollison. “Is the door locked?” 

“Why don’t you go find out?” Mollison snapped back. 

The officers were not pleased. They made their way into the bedroom, and Grove was able to finish packing without further confrontation. The movers brought her stuff to storage, the cops left, and Grove made her way to her Airbnb. She went back to the house one last time the next day. It was empty and quiet with just her in it, its rooms devoid of furniture, just like the first day she moved in. Softly, she thanked the house and said her final goodbye. This was not how she wanted to close this chapter of her life, but still she wanted to take the time, and the space, to make sure the home knew all that it did for her. 

Grove made the seven-hour drive to her friend’s house in Marin, north of San Francisco, where she planned to crash for a little while. Something about the forest, with its late-winter rains and redwood trees, began to calm her, and the stress that had come to ravage her body slowly dissipated. She spent a week up there before coming back down to Los Angeles for her court hearing regarding the dual restraining orders Grove and Mollison had lobbed against each other. The judge made a quick decision: Mollison’s would be officially dissolved, and Grove’s would be formally instated for a three-year term. 

Now that that was taken care of, Grove turned her attention to other matters: the pending battery charge against her (Grove and her attorneys filed a mitigation package with the district attorney, thwarting the charges), Mollison’s pending eviction (which was approved, but since there was a three-month delay for lockouts, Mollison was still able to live in the house rent-free, which only proved to Grove that the bureaucratic eviction process was basically meaningless until the sheriff showed up and kicked the tenant out), Grove’s landlord getting pissed because Mollison was basically allowed to squat there for the foreseeable future (Grove gave him $10,000 to avoid any civil action), and Grove’s lawsuit in small claims court against Mollison for the damage she caused at the house (which required Mollison to be formally served). The process server Grove hired hadn’t been able to find her, so she decided to do it herself. 

A local guy that had a crush on Grove had wanted to take her out on a date, so she pitched him on a unique outing: Do you want to park your van in front of my old house and play Scrabble until my horrible roommate comes home? The guy, a digital nomad who embraced #vanlife, was down, so they made their way to Venice. After a couple hours, a Waymo pulled up in front of the house, and Mollison stepped out, headphones over her ears and a can of beer in her hand. Grove’s friend grabbed the paperwork, got out of the van, and approached Mollison. As soon as Mollison realized what was happening, she said, “I don’t live here,” and ran away. With Mollison served, the small claims lawsuit could proceed. 

But Grove had to leave town. The next day, she flew to Cancún for her job’s annual employee retreat, and then stopped off in Tepoztlán, Mexico, to stay in a small vacation home that Grove’s extended family owned. Grove also wanted to see a shaman who lived in the area and whom Grove had known since she was a child. The shaman agreed to conduct a cord-cutting ceremony with her, so she could let go not only of the house, but of Mollison’s effect on her. 

Grove laid down atop a table in the shaman’s quarters, surrounded by dried flowers and floral water and crystals, and tried to let go, to try and not let resentment control her. 

“You really need to just trust that what is meant to happen to her will happen,” the shaman said. 

But it was deeper than that for Grove. She had to come to terms with the fact that her nightmare roommate ordeal had subverted her entire belief system. She wanted to trust people, to believe that she and those she loved were generally safe, and didn’t want this situation to have a lasting effect on who she was deep down. Grove had always held a strong sense of right and wrong, but now felt both a hardened thirst for justice and a deep-seated shame that all of this, in the end, was her fault. She feared it may make her a more skeptical person. Beyond that, however, she knew one thing to be true now that she had skin in the game: Rather than an aspect of her progressive ideology being flawed, she concluded that many — perhaps all! — foundational systems in this world are more dysfunctional than she could’ve ever imagined. Being an optimistic, heart-on-her-sleeve progressive did not make her immune to their consequences. 

A few weeks later, in June, Grove made her way back to Los Angeles for her small claims court hearing. Mollison did not show up, and the judge sided in Grove’s favor, awarding her a $12,800 judgment. A month later, the sheriff’s office arrived at the house in Venice and officially evicted Mollison, who left without incident. Grove, wanting to collect on her small claims judgment, first filed a bank levy on Mollison’s account, but there weren’t any funds to seize. (As of this writing, Grove has yet to receive a penny from Mollison. The Los Angeles District Attorney declined to prosecute Mollison, but the case is still under review with the Los Angeles City Attorney.) 

Grove filed to have Mollison’s wages garnished from Club Pilates, where she worked during her time as Grove’s roommate. But then Adela Sirbu, owner of Club Pilates Marina del Rey, called Grove and said that she had to fire Mollison for allegedly stealing socks, poaching clients, and coming to work drunk.

During their lengthy conversations, Grove kept her tone professional and matter-of-fact, sharing only enough to relay the trouble that Mollison had caused her. But it was Sirbu who seemed more eager to speak about Mollison, to understand what type of person was truly lurking underneath her online persona and that of an unscrupulous employee. And the more that they commiserated, the more Grove allowed herself to believe that forgiveness was not actually the solution. In fact, Grove felt ever more sure in her conviction that Mollison should be punished for what she had done. And yet Grove couldn’t come out and say it directly, to go against her shaman’s advice, to betray what she wanted to believe about herself, to admit what she felt deep down in her heart.

And then Sirbu ended up saying it for her: “I hope she ends up in prison.”