Loudoun County reports the world’s highest concentration of data centers; Dominion says the cluster requires major transmission and generation investment to meet growing electricity demand.
You have almost certainly never heard of Loudoun County, Virginia. It sits roughly forty kilometres west of Washington DC, covers about 520 square miles, and holds about 450,000 residents, which is fewer people than live in the Newcastle-Gateshead metropolitan area in the north of England. The place is not on any tourist itinerary, and it isn’t famous for anything the way a wine region or a beach town is famous. Yet there is a reasonable chance that when you last opened Instagram, checked your bank balance, or asked an AI assistant anything at all, the packet of data doing the work touched a warehouse full of servers in Loudoun before it came back to your phone.
A widely repeated claim says that around 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic passes through Loudoun. The county’s 2021 revenue and tax policy study described that figure as frequently quoted but did not establish its accuracy. What is not disputed is that Loudoun has the highest concentration of data centers anywhere in the world, and that Ashburn, its small unincorporated community at the eastern end, is a major hub of the physical internet.
How it got there…