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Your future is in Virginia | Massive AI infrastructure is being built out across the US. But if you want to know what the data center occupation looks like, visit Loudoun County, Virginia, where that future arrived 20 years ago.
The data centers I provisioned gear in 25+ years ago in the Washington NAP area, were all dead quiet to the surrounding environment. You literally did not know they were there. Once you'd been credentialed through, yes, inside they were dimly lit and very noisy (most cages, having weird, glowing F5 load balancers/ADCs inside), but the data centers themselves were good neighbors. The future, 20 years ago, arrived discretely, in khakis and polo shirts.
Those DC were very different from what they're building today. People didn't fight them because they were relatively benign. They really were basically just another big office building. They didn't use more water than any other office. They used more power, but nothing like one today. I really struggle to come up with something else comparable in how they have changed.
I heard a reporter describe these AI data centers and their size by saying that they were driving along the interstate alongside one, and it took them a minute and 45 seconds at 70 mph to drive past the building.
I don't inherently an issue with a data center that large, my problem has to do with how I only really see downsides from AI tech.
Feels like every CEO is losing their minds to AI psychosis and firing everyone for no reason, being an independent artist isn't a career option anymore, and people are deciding that learning how to talk to people is too hard and talking to the AI cheerleader is preferable.
In the same interview, the reporter, from Silicon Valley, when she went back to Silicon Valley and told some of her friends and people she had worked around in the area that people in the Midwest were unhappy, they responded with "Yeah, but they use AI for everything, right? Like, where else are they going to get that ability? What are they going to do without it?" and I don't know about you, but I very very seldom use it. The rest of you guys must be using it like crazy, but I don't. When the reporter relayed that people weren't using it as much, the people in Silicon Valley were flabbergasted.
Thank you for adding this nugget. I read similar recently, that half the people in Silicon Valley have no clue the rest of the world exists much less what they think and they are under the impression that the whole thing will blow over - soon. (these are the same people who refer to anyone who is not them as a groundling who can’t pass the marshmallow test. If you look the two phrases up, it’s pretty insulting and not very self-aware.)
The article I read commented that many of the CEOs believe they are saving the world and they probably don’t want to hear that the world doesn’t want to be saved the way they’re going about it.
Guess the propaganda isn't working as well as they expected. At least, that's what I assume they're thinking. AI, in general, in theory has use cases; my partner has been makign use of it to help organize a trip we're planning, but every single step of that trip has been thoroughly researched without AI. It's basically functioning like a mix of a planner and an aggregation of "50 things to do in this place" lists across the Internet, and in that role, it's fine, but if it disappeared tomorrow, it would make the task maybe 10% more tedious and that's it.
It just doesn't do enough to justify any kind of cost.
Yeah, kind of, but its like they absolutely forgot to include everyone else. Like, they hit the gold mine if they replace labor, but like wifi=s in ovens and toasters of not too long ago, they forgot to actually ask if its something we needed or if it was something we could use. We're not the intended end user, we're a stepping stone along the way.
You see the LinkedIn posts about people who work in Silicon Valley who go out and see normal people and they just can't wrap their heads around it either. They're being so highly compensated to build the walls of that bubble so thick, at times.
Maybe I'm just the weird one, but I find a lot of joy coming from getting out there and trying to understand people. Especially people who think a little differently than I do.
So many people - and not just in Silicon Valley, mind - seem to want to bludgeon the world with a hammer until it fits a shape they personally like.
>Feels like every CEO is losing their minds to AI psychosis and firing everyone for no reason,
There are many lenses with which to analyze the AI boom and almost all of them lead to very subjective or hypothetical conclusions. But there is one mode of analysis that leads to a single, very clear conclusion. The financials of the AI industry do not make sense. These companies do not produce revenue that justifies the investment. The investment needs to be these weird, incestuous deals. The whole thing has resulted in our economy consisting largely of 4 puffed up companies whose many source of funding is air and hope.
The only world in which the financials make sense is if we achieve an AGI and fundamentally restructure human society as a result. The very obvious conclusion here is that the capital class sees a society on the verge of collapse, where their power derived from an incalculable material wealth may not carry over if the next stage of human history does not respect private ownership rights as much as the current one.
And so they have seen an opportunity to bet the entire house on green. They will achieve the greatest technological advancement in human history and whoever gets there first will reign as humanity's God king. Or they will cause an unprecedented economic collapse and destroy our current global society.
They're inherent narcissistic traits blind them to the reality that they can never control their own appetites and yet expect a creature of the kind they hope to create to serve their whims with impunity...in a way, I almost feel sorry for anyone so blind to the world from whence they sprung.
Wait until ASI reveals itself....Then you'll understand that guiding a species as battered and bruised as humanity across the rubicon while attempting to avoid falling victim to the Great Filter requires more finesse than most machine intelligences are capable of wielding.
Today, Loudoun County has another moniker: Data Center Alley. Over just a small portion of its roughly 515 square miles, it’s home to about 250 data centers, the densest concentration in the world. For a long time, residents there recall only a passing understanding of this, if they realized it at all. The development of data centers in Loudoun was just something going on in the background of many residents’ lives. They noticed construction along main roads, paid an increasingly lower property tax rate, and sent their kids to coveted public schools.
The county’s data center boom arrived as tech companies expanded into the cloud, a sanitized name for the blocky buildings that house rows and rows of servers. And with that business came prosperity: 22 new schools built in just the last 15 years, tax revenue from data centers alone that exceeded the county’s operational budget by $35 million in 2024, and a decline in real property tax rate for residents from about $1.29 to 80 cents per $100 in assessed value since 2008.
Some longtime residents never heard of their county’s nickname until recently, when the effects of data centers on the community started to become impossible to ignore. What had been a relatively quiet boon locally was starting to foment a national backlash elsewhere, and starting to disturb daily life in Loudoun, too.
Within the past few years, data centers have been elevated from an unremarkable part of daily life in Loudoun to something that many residents now think about every day. For some, it’s the constant hum they hear from their decks; for others, it’s the transmission towers that loom over their favorite green space, or the surprise call from their energy utility that one of those towers could go up in their own backyard. While residents recognize that data centers have brought a lot of prosperity to the county, they’re beginning to wonder how much more they can take.
In the past, new technologies grew organically, often driven by early adopters who recognized their value ahead of the market. I'm referring to emerging technologies such as open-source software, the rapid adoption of Internet access, and cloud computing. These were driven by innovative individuals and companies into the market, but demand evolved over time.
Now it seems like AI vendors are pushing to establish data centers faster than market demand or interest. One impact of the industry's push for data centers has been the rise in storage and RAM costs. I see innovative AI products emerging, like the NVIDIA DGX Spark and AMD AI Halo, but their costs are skewed by rising storage and RAM costs. Instead of democratizing AI use, it keeps new AI technology out of reach for early adopters and other innovative users.
I would like to experiment with new AI technologies as I have with other emerging technologies in the past. We have access to the models and software, but hardware costs continue to rise due to the data center buildouts. The push is to develop large data centers to capture the market before early adopters can demonstrate value and perhaps fragment their hold over the market. I would prefer to develop a private model environment I own and control over a data center model that costs more than it is worth and will likely cost more in the future.
Perhaps that is the point. Maybe the large AI companies would prefer that I rent my compute from them to maintain control over the models and my data. It bears consideration.
My understanding is that the data center build out is being dominated by frontier labs who are using the compute to build new models as opposed to just supporting existing users of AI tools.
So the market demand being chased here isn't necessarily the end user's demand (which I agree isn't that much yet) but the demand by the frontier labs (open AI, Anthropic, etc.)
They are essentially hoping that they'll find both a sustainable model as well as make some sort of scientific breakthrough with the models themselves as opposed to building solely / primary to service current customers.
That's a really good point and not one I considered. I didn't know that the scale required to generate the models was the bottleneck, since they have been releasing them regularly for years now.
I work in IT and recently flew into Dulles to do some work at a data center in Ashburn. I'm from the Chicago area and used to data centers, but Ashburn is a different beast as far as data centers go. Flying in, they're all you see. Once on the ground, it's a data center hellscape. I feel bad for anyone that lives near that data center alley because all you see are giant grey slab buildings and power substations everywhere you go in that town.
sprashoo | 15 hours ago
Wait, us-east-1 is an actual place?
I thought it was just a word that appeared in my IaC code.
Alatarlhun | 15 hours ago
I remember when this location used to be called Mae East in the 1990s.
iboneyandivory | 14 hours ago
The data centers I provisioned gear in 25+ years ago in the Washington NAP area, were all dead quiet to the surrounding environment. You literally did not know they were there. Once you'd been credentialed through, yes, inside they were dimly lit and very noisy (most cages, having weird, glowing F5 load balancers/ADCs inside), but the data centers themselves were good neighbors. The future, 20 years ago, arrived discretely, in khakis and polo shirts.
FesteringNeonDistrac | 12 hours ago
Those DC were very different from what they're building today. People didn't fight them because they were relatively benign. They really were basically just another big office building. They didn't use more water than any other office. They used more power, but nothing like one today. I really struggle to come up with something else comparable in how they have changed.
CareBearDontCare | 11 hours ago
I heard a reporter describe these AI data centers and their size by saying that they were driving along the interstate alongside one, and it took them a minute and 45 seconds at 70 mph to drive past the building.
SilverMedal4Life | 9 hours ago
I don't inherently an issue with a data center that large, my problem has to do with how I only really see downsides from AI tech.
Feels like every CEO is losing their minds to AI psychosis and firing everyone for no reason, being an independent artist isn't a career option anymore, and people are deciding that learning how to talk to people is too hard and talking to the AI cheerleader is preferable.
Like... all I see is this tech hurting people.
CareBearDontCare | 9 hours ago
In the same interview, the reporter, from Silicon Valley, when she went back to Silicon Valley and told some of her friends and people she had worked around in the area that people in the Midwest were unhappy, they responded with "Yeah, but they use AI for everything, right? Like, where else are they going to get that ability? What are they going to do without it?" and I don't know about you, but I very very seldom use it. The rest of you guys must be using it like crazy, but I don't. When the reporter relayed that people weren't using it as much, the people in Silicon Valley were flabbergasted.
horseradishstalker | 8 hours ago
Thank you for adding this nugget. I read similar recently, that half the people in Silicon Valley have no clue the rest of the world exists much less what they think and they are under the impression that the whole thing will blow over - soon. (these are the same people who refer to anyone who is not them as a groundling who can’t pass the marshmallow test. If you look the two phrases up, it’s pretty insulting and not very self-aware.)
The article I read commented that many of the CEOs believe they are saving the world and they probably don’t want to hear that the world doesn’t want to be saved the way they’re going about it.
SilverMedal4Life | 8 hours ago
Like two different worlds, huh?
Guess the propaganda isn't working as well as they expected. At least, that's what I assume they're thinking. AI, in general, in theory has use cases; my partner has been makign use of it to help organize a trip we're planning, but every single step of that trip has been thoroughly researched without AI. It's basically functioning like a mix of a planner and an aggregation of "50 things to do in this place" lists across the Internet, and in that role, it's fine, but if it disappeared tomorrow, it would make the task maybe 10% more tedious and that's it.
It just doesn't do enough to justify any kind of cost.
CareBearDontCare | 8 hours ago
Yeah, kind of, but its like they absolutely forgot to include everyone else. Like, they hit the gold mine if they replace labor, but like wifi=s in ovens and toasters of not too long ago, they forgot to actually ask if its something we needed or if it was something we could use. We're not the intended end user, we're a stepping stone along the way.
You see the LinkedIn posts about people who work in Silicon Valley who go out and see normal people and they just can't wrap their heads around it either. They're being so highly compensated to build the walls of that bubble so thick, at times.
SilverMedal4Life | 8 hours ago
Maybe I'm just the weird one, but I find a lot of joy coming from getting out there and trying to understand people. Especially people who think a little differently than I do.
So many people - and not just in Silicon Valley, mind - seem to want to bludgeon the world with a hammer until it fits a shape they personally like.
CareBearDontCare | 7 hours ago
On one end, you can either understand others' pain and work within and around it. On the other, you force everyone else to change to what you want.
SilverMedal4Life | 7 hours ago
Well, if that's the case, then I suppose there's one only thing for it.
Everyone minus one.
Noname_acc | 6 hours ago
>Feels like every CEO is losing their minds to AI psychosis and firing everyone for no reason,
There are many lenses with which to analyze the AI boom and almost all of them lead to very subjective or hypothetical conclusions. But there is one mode of analysis that leads to a single, very clear conclusion. The financials of the AI industry do not make sense. These companies do not produce revenue that justifies the investment. The investment needs to be these weird, incestuous deals. The whole thing has resulted in our economy consisting largely of 4 puffed up companies whose many source of funding is air and hope.
The only world in which the financials make sense is if we achieve an AGI and fundamentally restructure human society as a result. The very obvious conclusion here is that the capital class sees a society on the verge of collapse, where their power derived from an incalculable material wealth may not carry over if the next stage of human history does not respect private ownership rights as much as the current one.
And so they have seen an opportunity to bet the entire house on green. They will achieve the greatest technological advancement in human history and whoever gets there first will reign as humanity's God king. Or they will cause an unprecedented economic collapse and destroy our current global society.
sectorboss88 | 4 hours ago
They're inherent narcissistic traits blind them to the reality that they can never control their own appetites and yet expect a creature of the kind they hope to create to serve their whims with impunity...in a way, I almost feel sorry for anyone so blind to the world from whence they sprung.
sectorboss88 | 4 hours ago
Wait until ASI reveals itself....Then you'll understand that guiding a species as battered and bruised as humanity across the rubicon while attempting to avoid falling victim to the Great Filter requires more finesse than most machine intelligences are capable of wielding.
[OP] theverge | 16 hours ago
Today, Loudoun County has another moniker: Data Center Alley. Over just a small portion of its roughly 515 square miles, it’s home to about 250 data centers, the densest concentration in the world. For a long time, residents there recall only a passing understanding of this, if they realized it at all. The development of data centers in Loudoun was just something going on in the background of many residents’ lives. They noticed construction along main roads, paid an increasingly lower property tax rate, and sent their kids to coveted public schools.
The county’s data center boom arrived as tech companies expanded into the cloud, a sanitized name for the blocky buildings that house rows and rows of servers. And with that business came prosperity: 22 new schools built in just the last 15 years, tax revenue from data centers alone that exceeded the county’s operational budget by $35 million in 2024, and a decline in real property tax rate for residents from about $1.29 to 80 cents per $100 in assessed value since 2008.
Some longtime residents never heard of their county’s nickname until recently, when the effects of data centers on the community started to become impossible to ignore. What had been a relatively quiet boon locally was starting to foment a national backlash elsewhere, and starting to disturb daily life in Loudoun, too.
Within the past few years, data centers have been elevated from an unremarkable part of daily life in Loudoun to something that many residents now think about every day. For some, it’s the constant hum they hear from their decks; for others, it’s the transmission towers that loom over their favorite green space, or the surprise call from their energy utility that one of those towers could go up in their own backyard. While residents recognize that data centers have brought a lot of prosperity to the county, they’re beginning to wonder how much more they can take.
Gift link: https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/975597/loudoun-county-virginia-data-center-backlash/?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6ImdOTzNBbXNGVFoiLCJwIjoiL2NzL2ZlYXR1cmVzLzk3NTU5Ny9sb3Vkb3VuLWNvdW50eS12aXJnaW5pYS1kYXRhLWNlbnRlci1iYWNrbGFzaCIsImV4cCI6MTc4ODc4MjY4NiwiaWF0IjoxNzg4MzUwNjg3fQ.fluxVpED1fJ-DEk8WWOP3EJ5LdE4FtugNovvbbdW1j0
DaGoodBoy | 14 hours ago
In the past, new technologies grew organically, often driven by early adopters who recognized their value ahead of the market. I'm referring to emerging technologies such as open-source software, the rapid adoption of Internet access, and cloud computing. These were driven by innovative individuals and companies into the market, but demand evolved over time.
Now it seems like AI vendors are pushing to establish data centers faster than market demand or interest. One impact of the industry's push for data centers has been the rise in storage and RAM costs. I see innovative AI products emerging, like the NVIDIA DGX Spark and AMD AI Halo, but their costs are skewed by rising storage and RAM costs. Instead of democratizing AI use, it keeps new AI technology out of reach for early adopters and other innovative users.
I would like to experiment with new AI technologies as I have with other emerging technologies in the past. We have access to the models and software, but hardware costs continue to rise due to the data center buildouts. The push is to develop large data centers to capture the market before early adopters can demonstrate value and perhaps fragment their hold over the market. I would prefer to develop a private model environment I own and control over a data center model that costs more than it is worth and will likely cost more in the future.
Perhaps that is the point. Maybe the large AI companies would prefer that I rent my compute from them to maintain control over the models and my data. It bears consideration.
Korrocks | 13 hours ago
My understanding is that the data center build out is being dominated by frontier labs who are using the compute to build new models as opposed to just supporting existing users of AI tools.
So the market demand being chased here isn't necessarily the end user's demand (which I agree isn't that much yet) but the demand by the frontier labs (open AI, Anthropic, etc.)
They are essentially hoping that they'll find both a sustainable model as well as make some sort of scientific breakthrough with the models themselves as opposed to building solely / primary to service current customers.
DaGoodBoy | 13 hours ago
That's a really good point and not one I considered. I didn't know that the scale required to generate the models was the bottleneck, since they have been releasing them regularly for years now.
-xblahx- | 14 hours ago
I work in IT and recently flew into Dulles to do some work at a data center in Ashburn. I'm from the Chicago area and used to data centers, but Ashburn is a different beast as far as data centers go. Flying in, they're all you see. Once on the ground, it's a data center hellscape. I feel bad for anyone that lives near that data center alley because all you see are giant grey slab buildings and power substations everywhere you go in that town.
MaximumAd9779 | 12 hours ago
Ashburn still has incredibly high property value and I have no idea how that’s going to be maintained.
clean-links | 16 hours ago
Cleaned link: https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/975597/loudoun-county-virginia-data-center-backlash/?view_token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJpZCI6ImdOTzNBbXNGVFoiLCJwIjoiL2NzL2ZlYXR1cmVzLzk3NTU5Ny9sb3Vkb3VuLWNvdW50eS12aXJnaW5pYS1kYXRhLWNlbnRlci1iYWNrbGFzaCIsImV4cCI6MTc4ODc4MjY4NiwiaWF0IjoxNzg4MzUwNjg3fQ.fluxVpED1fJ-DEk8WWOP3EJ5LdE4FtugNovvbbdW1j0
Tracking parameters were removed from the original URL(s).
Apprentice57 | 14 hours ago
Uhhh I assume this is automatic gosh this is not a clean link either lol.
https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/975597/loudoun-county-virginia-data-center-backlash/ is what you want