Rows of server racks inside a data center.
Credit line: Photo: Ismail Enes Ayhan / Unsplash

Nowadays, if you live in Northern Virginia, it is difficult to get through a day without seeing or hearing a news story about a new data center: proposed, approved, opened, or, increasingly, disapproved by local government and canceled by its backers. Conscious of this, I did what I often do — I typed “data centers” into the Google search engine on my computer. This is what came up in AI mode:

The Virginia Epicenter

Despite the recent attention, even furor, over data center expansion here in PWC and neighboring counties, I was nonetheless caught a little by surprise to find that Northern Virginia is the worldwide hub of data center operations. It deepens my understanding of how important the issue of data center expansion is to this region, recognizing that it has clear implications for the area’s economy, its standard of living, and its quality of life.

These questions appear salient: How is data center growth affecting the region’s economy and quality of life right now? And how is it likely to affect them in the next decade or so? When issues like this are posed before the public, I like to get personal with the economics. For me, this means asking questions like “How does it affect my taxes?” and “Will it get me or someone I know a job?” Before we get there, though, let’s reduce what a data center is to simple, understandable terms.

Data centers are not really new; they can be said to have emerged in their earliest form when computer companies, such as IBM, began to construct ever-larger mainframe computers in the 1950s. As we all know, first transistors and then later, integrated circuits, or “chips,” as we like to call them, vastly and rapidly expanded computing speed and scale. These developments led, in turn, to the PC, the Internet, the information-driven business environment, and the social-networked society we have today. If you have spent any time in an office building, at one time or another you must have seen a company’s server stacks. They might be in a space as small as a closet, or they might occupy several rooms. At any rate, until recently they were a business commonplace in the modern world. This is the starting point for the colossal data center of today.

Not so long ago, in the first years of the 2000s, we moved into the era of cloud computing. The cloud was designed to improve speed, security, and reliability for individual users and businesses by putting everyone’s data onto a floating set of electrons, more or less. Everyone’s valuable files were now permanently available and assuredly safe, no longer at the whim of a virus, a failed motherboard, or a power surge. This was great for a personal user and his files. More than that, though, the cloud provides something more: it gave businesses of every size the ability to scale their computing needs, buying software and storage infrastructure as a service sold by Microsoft, Google, or Amazon. These providers handle all this data by managing the cloud on a network of data centers.

Yet all that concentrated data floating in its big pond of electrons requires constant database management, systems engineers to ensure it is available and flows reliably in the right direction, and cybersecurity professionals to ensure it is safe from contamination by hackers or viruses. This is how we arrive at the modern data center of the type we catch glimpses of while driving down Prince William Parkway. These are the so-called hyperscale data centers run by the major cloud providers already mentioned, and by others less well-known. This type of operation is the successor to your company headquarters’ office space being swallowed up with server stacks. Yet the alternative presents problems of its own.

As anyone can readily see through one’s car window, these buildings are immense, multi-story structures, typically tens of thousands of square feet. According to online publication Virginia Business, the recently canceled Prince William Digital Gateway project planned for Manassas would have occupied 37 structures over 2,100 acres — approximately 22 million square feet of building space.

Data centers of this size do, in fact, live up to their reputation of being significant consumers, too. Just as one’s home computer needs to be kept reasonably cool, the roughly 5,000 servers in a typical hyperscale center — already consuming large quantities of energy for processing — generate huge amounts of heat, which then requires additional power to drive the air conditioning units that keep the servers from overheating. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated in a 2024 report to Congress that the amount of power required to keep a center of this size cool is around 100 megawatts (MW). To grasp the scale of this, consider that a typical suburban town of 44,000 — the population of Woodbridge — consumes at any given time around 44–55 MW. So then, it would be safe to conclude that an average hyperscale data center consumes 1.5 to 2 times the amount of electricity of a town the size of Woodbridge. Like everything else we need in daily life, the cost of electricity is driven by consumer demand, and data centers are the great, big gorilla consumers. Something to think about the next time you look at your power bill.

There is so much more that can and should be written and considered regarding the proper place of data centers in PWC’s economic development. It is only fair to suggest that some of the power consumed has been diverted from company offices to larger concentrations, so some of the net growth is zero. There is absolutely no doubt, however, that the advent of AI and the Internet of Things has enormously increased the power consumption level of the computing infrastructure in the U.S. and other modern countries. The entire economy is simply using much more electricity than a decade or two ago, and a significant part of that growth is data-center-driven.

On the other hand, it is only right to point out the degree to which data centers in PWC have demonstrated their economic benefits by generating jobs, stimulating economic activity, and generating tax revenue. PFM Group Consulting prepared a study in 2022 for the PWC county government, which concluded that every dollar invested in data centers here generated over $13.41 in returns via economic stimulus: new construction, contracted local services, new customers for local businesses, and some hundreds of good, high-paying jobs. The same study suggests that the amount of real property tax revenue generated by data centers has played a key role in keeping PWC homeowners’ property taxes low.

Data centers are a volatile issue in Northern Virginia right now. The questions they pose are complex, but the underlying questions on our minds are clearer. This is a lovely, storied region with a growing population that needs and deserves robust economic growth. It must, however, be a program of growth balanced with thoughtful consideration for its history, its environment, and its quality of life. This article and future ones on this and related subjects will endeavor to explore these and connected questions. We hope to provide some fact-based reflection on these questions for citizens and voters to use as they make up their minds when they attend Board of Supervisors meetings and when they go to the polls on Election Day.