Northern Virginia has far more data centers than anywhere else on earth.
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This is the heart of the Internet: Loudoun County, Virginia. A third of all the online information is travelling through the fiber optic cables under all these data centers.

It’s all happening here because Loudoun is rated by FEMA as one of the most resilient counties - in terms of hazards - near Washington, D.C. and the 2,000 federal agencies headquartered there, who are big users of data. Plus it has the space to build: with a significantly lower population density than the other counties ringing DC.

In the 1990’s it was one of the Internet’s original “primary nodes,” the MAE-East network access point, although things are much more distributed now, with dense bundles of underground fiber-optic cables serving ultra-fast, low latency connections between the region’s growing data centers and all of our devices around the world, via lines running along the ocean floor.

This year we’ll get about three-quarters of a billion dollars in local tax revenue. There’s nothing out there that we’ve ever seen that generates the tax revenue that a data center does. We have about 31 million square feet right now with another 4 million that’s currently under development. And we’ll probably top out at around 40 million square feet or so.
This is an AWS data center.

Now that Loudoun’s nearly saturated, developers are building them throughout the region. In neighboring Prince William County and Frederick, across the Potomac in Maryland, they’re going big. Each county will see vast, 2,000-acre swaths of farmland turn into campuses with more than 20 million square feet of data centers.

Hourly map of electricity imports and exports shows, both Virginia and Maryland are already big net importers of electricity in the 11-state regional transmission organization called PJM, and these new data center campuses will add hundreds more megawatts to their loads.

So to make sure everyone has enough power, PJM has contracted the building of new high voltage transmission lines, including a 70-mile line cutting through Baltimore, Carroll, and Frederick Counties called the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project, or MPRP.

0:00 Data Center Alley
1:29 Tax revenue
2:04 Local impact
3:16 Data center expansion
3:53 Electricity demand
5:15 New electricity production
6:10 Innovations to reduce lines

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