Northern Virginia data-centre corridor

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The Ashburn–Sterling corridor of Loudoun County, Virginia, and its neighbours — the densest concentration of data-centre capacity anywhere, and the place where the abstraction of "compute" becomes land use, transmission planning and county politics. It began as a network artefact rather than a plan: early internet exchange infrastructure settled there, carriers followed the interconnection, and the resulting fibre density made it the cheapest place in the world to put a large facility. Loudoun County markets itself as the data centre capital of the world. It is included here as geography rather than as a statistic, because the published capacity figures for the corridor disagree with one another by factors of several depending on whether they count installed IT load, contracted capacity or planned capacity — a disagreement worth noticing in a Journey about the difference between measurement and assertion. What is not in dispute is that electricity demand there is growing faster than the utility has been able to connect it.