Data Center Alley near DC offers a glimpse at metro Atlanta's future

ASHBURN, Virginia. — At a glance, the suburbs to the west of the nation’s capital look like other American burbs undergoing development booms.

Construction crews and cranes are a common presence in Northern Virginia communities in the flight path of Dulles International Airport, filling in virtually every undeveloped gap. But the people who live here don’t have to wonder what’s being built — it’s almost always the same thing.

“If you see a crane, it can only be another data center,” said Northern Virginia resident Elena Schlossberg.

She lives in the orbit of Data Center Alley, the world’s largest collection of computer storage facilities. The area’s affluent suburbs and rolling farmland historically served as bedroom communities for federal workers in nearby Washington, D.C., but the area is better known today as the home of our digital lives.

ExploreAtlanta’s data center market isn’t just growing fast. It’s unprecedented

More than 500 data centers populate Northern Virginia and about 200 of them are clustered around Ashburn and Sterling in east Loudoun County. Hulking warehouses filled with computer servers — and power infrastructure to serve them — are seemingly around every corner, surrounding subdivisions, shops and schools.

Here’s video of a recent trip I took to Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia, the world’s largest concentration of data centers.

In some areas, data centers (both complete and under construction) line the streets for miles. pic.twitter.com/VPZ2nhOvWl
— Zachary Hansen (@zach_ehansen) June 18, 2025

The region has spent more than a decade unchallenged as the country’s top data center market. But Atlanta has recently risen as a contender.

Metro Atlanta ranks second in the U.S., and for the first time in modern internet history, dethroned Northern Virginia as America’s top data center market for leasing activity in 2024, according to real estate services firm CBRE.

Atlanta’s rise has come as Northern Virginia has run out of room.

An Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter visited Northern Virginia in April to get a glimpse of the changes that could be on the horizon. As these Virginia communities grapple with both the perceived positives and negatives of data center development, advocates and critics offered the same advice: Plan ahead.

Residents like Schlossberg warned of the unintended consequences of letting data centers define your community.

“Virginia is a beautiful state with a lot of natural and historic resources, and we are going to ruin that,” she said. “As far as the eye can see, there’s data centers, diesel generators, transmission lines and substations.”

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

Virginia leaders who wooed data centers rave about the gusher of tax dollars they bring in, lowering tax rates for homeowners and bankrolling schools and other services. The industry now accounts for 38% of Loudoun’s general fund revenue.

Atlanta native Michelle Thomas, who is now a pastor and NAACP leader in Loudoun, said data centers are great employers. Through a partnership with Microsoft, she helped create a workforce development academy. Two similar programs will soon come to the Atlanta area.

“When data centers come into communities, sometimes there’s a little apprehension or even aversion,” Thomas said. “But data centers are the gift that keep on giving to the community. This is going to be one of the best things that’s ever hit Atlanta.”

Credit: Courtesy Microsoft

The Atlanta Regional Commission, the area’s planning agency, will take more than 100 delegates to D.C. in August for a networking summit. Data centers will be a central topic.

“We don’t want to caught flat-footed in metro Atlanta,” ARC Executive Director and CEO Anna Roach said.

Downloading tax revenue

Northern Virginia’s data center industry and the internet share an origin story thanks to the U.S. Department of Defense.

The Arlington, Virginia-based Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency pioneered the early framework of the internet in the late 1960s. As a result, the backbone of the World Wide Web developed nearby.

Today, about 70% of the world’s internet traffic flows through the area.

Loudoun leaders saw data centers as a potential solution to an existential threat exposed by the 2008 housing crisis. About 81% of the county’s tax revenue was dependent on residential real estate at the time, according to Buddy Rizer, the county’s executive director for economic development.

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

The county streamlined the process to build data centers through what is called “by-right zoning,” limiting government oversight over new projects.

Local governments are able to tax both the increased value of the developed land and the expensive equipment within data centers. Rizer said data centers are so lucrative that they generate more than three times the taxable value per square foot compared to the next most valuable type of development.

Data centers now constitute about 4% of the county’s commercial parcels but generate nearly half its property taxes, allowing leaders to slash residential tax rates.

“We’ve been able to expand social services for our residents, and we’ve done all that while reducing the tax rate by 48 cents on the dollar,” Rizer said.

Flush with cash, the county has faced budgeting issues few local governments ever see. Loudoun enjoys about $1.4 billion in reserves, more than five times the city of Atlanta’s rainy day fund.

Loudoun’s school district last year even returned $10 million of unspent funds to the county.

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

Still, the reserves came in handy early in the pandemic when data center development slowed, netting less revenue than expected, and resulting in a $60 million budget shortfall for the county.

Loudoun County Supervisor Kristen Umstattd said leaders built the reserve to ensure “that we did not become overly reliant” on that revenue.

‘A company town’

Still, some fear their communities are over reliant.

“We’ve become a company town, and we are very much dependent on these data centers,” Loudoun resident Julie Bolthouse said.

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

For more than 14 years, not a day has gone by in Loudoun without some form of data center construction, Rizer said. As office construction slowed post-pandemic, data centers flourished.

Bolthouse, director for land use at an environmental nonprofit, said booms can’t last forever and can strain an area’s natural resources. At some point, good sites become scarce and developers settle for less-than-ideal spots, she said.

She walked around Tippet’s Hill Cemetery, a historic resting place for Black families after the Civil War, that has data centers being build around it on all sides.

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

“Two years ago, I would have told you we were tapped out,” Bolthouse said. “I would have told you the same thing last year. But I’m afraid to tell you that this year, because we just keep doing it.”

Industry leaders like Christopher Kimm, an executive at Equinix, acknowledge some projects have resulted in “well-publicized concerns by residents,” including buildings that brush up against houses and noise complaints.

They’ve created some image issues for the industry, he said.

“We’ve learned in Loudoun County that policymakers wish they were more attentive to this question of residential and data center adjacency,” Kimm said.

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

In March, the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors eliminated by-right zoning for data centers as the issue dominated local discourse. New proposals now must be zoned for industrial use and face at least one public vote for special permitting, a process similar to what the Atlanta City Council adopted in early June.

Umstattd was one of the two Loudoun leaders to vote against revoking by-right zoning, saying it “sends the wrong message to the industry.”

“One of the reasons you (in metro Atlanta) are seeing growth is probably at our expense,” she said.

‘A data center amoeba’

Bill Wright moved to Prince William County, just south of Loudoun, in 2020 to retire surrounded by nature.

Instead, Data Center Alley spilled over into his new home.

“They slap them down anywhere you spit,” he said.

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

As Loudoun started to run out of sites, developers stretched into rural areas like Prince William, which welcomed them in certain areas.

Data center projects have only gotten larger as companies expand into artificial intelligence. Instead of one building, they’re often several forming a campus, which can take several years to build.

Wright pointed to one complex by Iron Mountain that is under construction and will eventually span nine buildings across 142 acres.

“It’s like a data center amoeba,” he said.

One of the largest proposed data center campuses in the world is planned next to Manassas National Battlefield Park, which has unified many residents in protest.

Credit: Courtesy of Piedmont Environmental Council

Called the PW Digital Gateway, it’s a 2,133-acre proposal by QTS and Compass Datacenters that includes 34 buildings and more than 22 million square feet of data center space — about 14 times the floor space of Buckhead’s Lenox Square mall.

Local leaders in late 2023 voted 4-3 in favor of the project after a 27-hour meeting filled with public opposition. The project has been bogged down by lawsuits since then.

Mike Phillips, who works in media relations, found both his home and his children’s school boxed in by data centers after moving to Prince William.

Credit: Zachary Hansen / Zachary.Hansen@ajc.com

A four-building data center campus is under construction next to his son’s elementary school with two others in various approval stages.

“When I took the dog out or went outside for a breath of fresh air, I used to hear the kids at recess. Now, this is the only junk I hear,” Phillips said, gesturing to the construction. “And the kids out here at recess have to put up with this stuff too.”

About this series

This is the third part of a series on the rise of data centers in Georgia. To learn more about Georgia’s fast-growing data center industry, the AJC conducted more than 65 interviews and visited Northern Virginia to see the world’s largest data center market in action. Those interviews encompassed data center developers and operators, utility providers, market analysts, elected officials, government watchdogs and community activists.

About the Author