Fish, milk, fast fashion: some things just don’t age well. You can add to that list my somewhat junior prognostications regarding urban growth. 

A bit more than five years ago, having just moved to and still getting to know our new community here in Ashburn, I wrote an article on my blog about data centers. You can read it here, Go Big. Big Brutalist Boxes, just crushing the once-rural landscape of the area and we’ve gradually come to accept their presence. Data centers seemed to be everywhere and yet—we couldn’t imagine what was to come. 

In my article I cited then-current stats indicating approximately 70 data centers in the Ashburn area with more on the horizon. Currently, Loudoun County handles more internet traffic than any other place on earth. And the number of under-construction and planned data centers seems hard to believe. I’ve put a map at the bottom of this article of the ones located here in Ashburn, along with a link to the data source. It’s quite…impressive. The Ashburn, Virginia area (the heart of “Data Center Alley”) now hosts between 133 and 199 operational data centers. The “Data Center Capital of the World,” routes an estimated 70% of the world’s daily internet traffic. 

But what happened to Ashburn in those five years? Well take a look.

The building on the left is our church back in 2020. It was sold and the land later developed as a data center. At the time I thought it was large, but it is merely one of the new, even larger configurations going in here in Ashburn.

And in an almost funny cosmic twist of fate, call it irony, the AOL campus which seemingly introduced us all to the internet was itself sold, demolished, and is now undergoing it’s own transformation from managing internet traffic to, well, storing and managing the data of the internet.

There is growing sentiment in communities across the US to restrict or prohibit data centers from moving in, not accepting the current tax tradeoffs for the strain on electric grids and water resources that the centers produce. I’ve been discussing/arguing with friends online about where, exactly, we should be placing these behemoths. Their great need for resources, particularly water for cooling and electricity to run their operations, places some limits on where they can be feasibly located. My home state of Nevada seems like a great location. The Bureau of Land Management (under Department of the Interior) manages nearly 48 million acres of public land for multiple use in Nevada, which accounts for about 63 percent of the state’s land base. Surely they can host America’s growing number of centers? Not so fast! I’ve been told. And indeed, Reno City Council just voted on a 30-day moratorium as they wrestle with the concerns of citizens and the offers of developers. Across the US more than 60 local municipalities have enacted similar moratoriums. Good information can be found here at US Data Center Moratorium Tracker.

And it’s not just undeveloped land that beckons the centers: here in Ashburn a local neighborhood has been offered up to $4M an acre for their homes. MSN has an article on that proposal here, though no plans have been filed with the county as of yet. But this is what they would be looking at, several data centers I snapped this morning on my drive thru the area and along Belmont Ridge Road. It’s hard to believe there could be any undeveloped land left in our 20147 zip code but apparently there is.

My article back in 2020 has not aged well. I don’t think it’s as bad as day-old fish, but something does smell. Take a look at the map below to get an idea of what’s going on in our Ashburn neighborhoods. It’s something alright.