Loudoun County, Virginia - whose Ashburn area is nicknamed “Data Center Alley” and which calls itself the “Data Center Capital of the World” - reports, through its official economic development office, more than 53.3 million square feet of data centers in operation or under development. The county says these facilities house more than 3,500 technology companies and support more than 15,000 jobs, and that it has gone more than 14 years without a single day lacking data center construction.
The concentration grew from 1990s infrastructure: AOL and UUNET headquartered in Ashburn, and the MAE East internet exchange brought dense fiber to the region, making it a natural interconnection hub. That legacy made Northern Virginia the world’s largest data center market and, by extension, one of the focal points of AI-era power demand - the area’s grid operator, PJM, cited data center growth as the leading driver of its rising long-term load forecasts.