While you are watching this video, surfing the internet, or playing an online game, there
is a good chance that your computer is digitally connected to the data capital of the world,
which hosts almost 3/4s of the world’s internet traffic, and this internet capital is located
in Ashburn, Virginia.
This is hard to imagine as many people think that since online data is formless, it does
not require hard, physical storage.
While it is true that peer-to-peer data exists that stores the data on each client’s device,
the bulk of information that the average person enjoys such as videos, articles, images, and
so on has to be stored somewhere.
The internet needs data centers that can host massive amounts of digital space to service
all the users in today’s internet landscape.
Even with that, how did a rural county in Northern Virginia outside of Washington D.C.
come to host around 70 percent of the World’s Data?
To understand how Ashburn became the ideal location to host the vast majority of the
world’s data storage today, we must first look back before the internet became accessible
to the public in the 1980s.
Before the ability to surf the World Wide Web, there were packet switching networks
that were invented with ARPANET, the department of defense’s TCP/IP Network that connected
universities across the continental united states when activated in 1969, however, it
was centered around the Department of Defense, specifically the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.
ARPANET was a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency that was centered in Arlington
It would be here in Arlington, Virginia that the first Internet Exchange point was created
when a group of network providers decided to connect their networks in 1992.
This network would be called the Metropolitan Area Ethernet, or MAE for short.
MAE first started with four locations in the Washington DC area, the capital itself, Vienna,
Reston, and Ashburn, Virginia.
Later on, the entire east coast would be connected when New York and Miami were added to the
network as well.
This connection made Northern Virginia a powerhouse of connectivity in the early days of the internet.
In 1995, Netscape went public as a company that pioneered the concept of web browsing
in the early days of the commercial internet.
Later in the decade, Netscape would be acquired by America Online, which just like the newly
named MAE-East is based in Loudoun county, where the city of Ashburn is located.
Along with Equinix, these internet connection companies would attract some of the rising
internet-based companies at the time such as AOL, Yahoo!, and AT&T to lay down roots
in the Northern Virginia area.
Since the foundation of the internet in the United States, and soon the world, was laid
in Arlington, internet and internet infrastructure companies naturally conglomerated around the
general area.
Furthermore, the region is devoid of seriously destructive weather events, an obvious benefit,
and seismically stable as earthquakes can cause data corruption on spinning hard drives.
Both these items themselves make the area highly attractive for companies to look at.
from 2000 to today, Ashburn and subsequently Loudoun County would grow tremendously in
the internet infrastructure world because of this, thus, attracting more attention from
more companies in a self-fulfilling cycle Nowadays, Ashburn hosts every major player
in the tech industry such as Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, CyrusOne, Digital Realty
Trust, and Equinix.
According to Data Centers frontier, Northern Virginia is host to 4 of the top 10 cloud
computing campuses in the United States.
Today, Loudoun County houses at least 26 million square feet of data centers, and about one
thousand American football fields worth of space, and the county is not stopping there.
Right now there is another 4 million square feet in development on the eastern side of
the county.
The Data Alley hosts everything from data suites to custom-built cloud facilities, many
that you cannot find in the rest of the world.
Today, 70% of the world's internet traffic flows through the Ashburn data centers daily.
To quantify this, in 2019, there were 4 billion internet users, which is around 52% of the
world’s population.
Though it's not feasible to figure out how much internet traffic goes on each second,
Cisco estimated that there is 490 terabytes of internet traffic per second that flows
through the data centers.
Thanks to all the data centers in Ashburn, the energy consumption of Northern Virginia’s
data alley almost hit 1 gigawatt worth of energy in 2018.
The almost shattering record of energy shines a bright light on how resource heavy the data
capital of the world is and why Ashburn and its county of Loudoun is a prime location
to house the data center of the world.
According to the Loudoun County Head of business development, the data centers require a variety
of resources to stay in good shape, and those are power, water, a competent workforce, and
space to build.
Power of course is a key component for keeping the data centers running and as the data capital
continues to grow exponentially, more and more power will be required in the future.
To put terms of power usage in perspective, roughly 3% of the energy used globally is
for data centers alone.
Thanks to Dominion Virginia Power which provides most of the energy consumed by the businesses
in Northern Virginia which use a combination of available and environmentally friendly
sources, it makes the price of electricity 20% lower than the national average, which
is a no-brainer for energy-hungry data centers.
Because of the relatively low prices for power to keep the data centers running, it creates
a bonus of inexpensive internet for people to use.
Power is not the only sought-after resource to keep the data centers functional, water
is also another component that is used in large amounts to keep the data centers from
overheating.
According to Professor Venkatesh Uddameri, the director of the Water Resources Center
at Texas Tech University said that, “The typical data center uses about 3-5 million
gallons of water per day, the same amount of water as a city of 30 to 50 thousand people.”
Seeing how much water data centers use, it makes sense why the data center capital of
the world is located near the historic Potomac River and has municipal access to water to
cover its cooling needs.
The warehouses that house the data centers require lots of land and back in the 1980s,
Ashburn had that and was ideally placed near the united states capital.
The region back then was practically all rural which meant inexpensive land, allowing for
the data centers to expand rapidly to what it is today.
In just the last decade, 75 data centers opened up in Loudoun County alone, encompassing more
than 10 million square feet of operating space.
Now, the land in Ashburn is selling for millions of dollars and more.
Another integral part of why Ashburn is an ideal place for the data centers is its expert
workforce.
Because Ashburn is located near the United States Capital of Washington D.C., it has
the luxury to draw from one of the best workforces in the world, from both government contractors
to private tech experts in every specialization.
Giving the data centers in the Northern Virginia region a leg up on the world stage.
Without the backing of the local governments, such as the Loudoun County Officials and the
Virginia State Government, the “Silicon Valley of the East” would not be in the
place it is today.
Thanks to these governments recognizing the potential value of the data center in today’s
tech-driven economy, the data centers have been given special zoning ordinances to allow
for the construction of new centers and fast-track programs while also providing tax exemptions
to those data centers that meet their criteria.
The support of the local governments enabled the data valley to become an integral part
of the world’s internet today.
The Data Center Capital of the World became what it is today because of the right timing
of the first connection of exchange points, the prime location in the vicinity of Washington
D.C., and the abundant resources from the expert workforce to cheap energy has enabled
Ashburn, Virginia to become a pivotal convergence point of today’s internet landscape.
Now, because of its standing on the world stage, Ashburn has attracted data centers
and connectivity providers from all over the country and abroad and firmly cemented itself
as one of if not the premier hub in the spoke-and-hub system that connects our internet laden world
today.