LOUDOUN COUNTY, Va. — The most valuable farmland in America doesn’t grow corn or soybeans. It grows servers. Row after row of them, humming inside windowless concrete buildings that stretch across what was once horse country in Northern Virginia, consuming enough electricity to power small nations. And now the grid is breaking under the weight.
Northern Virginia’s Loudoun County has long held the title of the world’s largest concentration of data centers. More than 300 facilities operate here, handling an estimated 70% of the world’s internet traffic on any given day. For years, this was a point of pride — a tax revenue bonanza that helped fund schools, roads, and one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. But the artificial intelligence boom has turned that pride into panic.
The numbers are staggering. Politico reported that data center electricity demand in Virginia is projected to more than double by 2030, driven almost entirely by the computational hunger of AI training and inference workloads. A single modern AI data center can consume as much power as 100,000 homes. Dominion Energy, the state’s primary utility, has warned that it cannot build new generation and transmission infrastructure fast enough to keep pace…