Inside Virginia's Data Center Suburbs

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: When you type a question into chat GPT and it spits back an answer in two seconds, it feels like magic. But it's not magic. Your query goes into a giant building like this. We're good. No, no, no. Apparently, we're not allowed to film here. This is Data Center Alley in Northern Virginia, and it may just be the most important place in the country that you've never heard of. Roughly 40% of the internet passes through Data Center Alley. These are massive, massive buildings. Look at these. They've already built 200 data centers in the area, and 100 more are under construction, though much of it is shrouded in secrecy. So BlackRock owns this data center. [00:00:38] Speaker 2: The reason why I stopped you is we're not allowed to take photos. Our biggest problem as a country, we post too much shit on YouTube. [00:00:44] Speaker 1: By the end of this video, you will understand what a data center is, see the massive scale of this operation with your own eyes, hear what locals actually think about them, and understand why they are so shrouded in secrecy. [00:00:58] Speaker 3: I don't have a single person in this area, at least my neighborhood, who works in the data center, actually. [00:01:03] Speaker 4: Insurance prices, everything, everything gets higher. [00:01:06] Speaker 1: Let's investigate Data Center Alley. When you hear AI boom, you probably think of Silicon Valley, but much of it's happening in the quiet suburb of Ashburn, Virginia. This map right here shows the locations of all the data centers in Ashburn. Northern Virginia has more hyperscale data centers, the kind needed for ChatGPT and other major AI companies, than any other city in the world. So why do they call this area Data Center Alley? [00:01:38] Speaker 5: Oh, most of the data centers are near to the highway, and there's a big chasm. There's like 120 that are built now, that are here in this area. This is the highest level in the world of data center concentration. There may be positives, that's why they're here in the first place, but it's like opening the door to a huge monster that we don't know how to deal with. [00:02:00] Speaker 1: I cannot describe to you how massive these data centers are, and it is just unbelievable how huge these are. We're like shocked driving through this. This facility here, this is just an example of one of the 200 data centers in Loudoun County, but this is just a massive facility. Here's another one. Over 40% of Virginia's electric grid goes to power buildings like this one. BlackRock owns this data center. Before we get to this security guy's confrontation, though, you need to have a better sense of what happens at these data centers and hear why the residents we talk to don't like them. Then you can hear his argument supporting them. [00:02:42] Speaker 2: It's our national security in the United States. [00:02:45] Speaker 1: So, what does happen inside these data centers? A data center is the brains of the internet, the engine of the internet. [00:02:52] Speaker 6: It is a giant building with a lot of power, a lot of cooling, and a lot of computers. It's row upon row upon row machines. [00:03:00] Speaker 7: Data centers are the physical backbone of digital infrastructure, housing servers, and the equipment to run everything from AI and basic internet functions. [00:03:07] Speaker 1: These data centers generate enormous amounts of money for the county, so locals must be thrilled, right? [00:03:13] Speaker 7: Loudoun County gets a billion dollars a year from the 200 data centers that are in Loudoun County. That means that every data center in Loudoun County generates about five million dollars a year in tax revenue. [00:03:28] Speaker 4: Well, they're planning on building a strong, like, something that is huge. Oh, is this the power line thing? Like, the 450? Yes, yes. [00:03:36] Speaker 1: So, they want to build a massive power tower here? Yes, yes. [00:03:40] Speaker 4: People losing their mind, rightly so. [00:03:43] Speaker 1: Yes. [00:03:43] Speaker 4: I would not want my kids to be exposed to that kind of... [00:03:46] Speaker 6: Yeah. [00:03:48] Speaker 4: And it's dangerous. I mean, kids are kids. Yes. They may touch it. They get electrified. I mean, they are children. I'm going to share my opinion. I'm happy to share it. But I don't think it matters because I'm not the big dog. I'm no one. [00:04:00] Speaker 1: So, simply put, for people wondering, they're deciding on building this massive tower. [00:04:05] Speaker 4: Yeah. [00:04:05] Speaker 1: And, of course, Amazon's putting money to support it. [00:04:08] Speaker 4: Yes. [00:04:09] Speaker 1: Residents may not support it, but you're saying that Amazon's probably going to win that fight. [00:04:13] Speaker 4: I mean, I don't see how not. [00:04:15] Speaker 1: Have you seen electric prices go up? Have your electric bills... [00:04:19] Speaker 4: Yes, insurance prices, everything went... Yeah. To the point that I noticed HOA, everything got higher every... Almost every three months. [00:04:27] Speaker 1: Literally, Butt's campaign is running on underground power lines. That's how big of an issue these power lines are here. So, we're seeing a lot of petitions like this one, nopowerlines.org, of people saying too much power infrastructure. We're tired of it. [00:04:43] Speaker 3: I don't know a single person in this area, at least my neighborhood, who works in the data center, actually. [00:04:48] Speaker 1: What's your take on the explosion in data centers around here? [00:04:52] Speaker 3: You know, I really did not expect this to happen. I moved here, like, maybe 15 years back. When I came through Lorden County to this community, that place was completely empty, but it's all data centers. I know the people here are really concerned about, you know, the noise pollution or electricity rates going up, water problems, maybe in the future, because of the usage of the data centers. So, a lot of concerns, but then I know, I think I'm somewhere in the middle. You need development at the same time. You cannot be concerned about things that you really don't know what's going to happen. So, there are two things, right? Again, to where the data centers contribute a lot to the tax, which has helped Lorden County keep the property taxes low. But at the same time, you know, with the power lines running through the communities, it's surely going to bring down the value of the homes. The power lines are going to run through Lorden County Parkway. It's a nice road right now. If those 500 kV power lines are going to be laid out there, it's not, it's going to look ugly, basically. You know, other than the health concerns. The data centers don't employ a lot of people. They employ very, very little people. So, it's like, you know, to run a huge data center, you may need, like, 40, 50 people. But it's not like, you know, a 100,000 square foot facility. You know, you don't have thousands of people working for that. [00:06:09] Speaker 1: It's true. He's exactly right. Data centers typically employ 50 full-time workers in their 250,000 square foot facilities. The majority of jobs they do create are temporary construction jobs, up to 1,500 per site. Building one will employ roughly 1,500 workers. So, what are the perspectives of homeowners [00:06:30] Speaker 8: who live around here? The perspective is the value of the homes going down. That's the main focus. They don't want the high wires. And as a parent myself, I'd be worried about it. Yeah. You know, how close to the school system is it going to be? Because you know that puts off a sound. Yeah. So, what's the vibration? How bad is the vibration? It's like living next to the airport. When you take off, you hear that plane take off. You're like, we hear about it and we get complaints about it. But it's not much we can do. It's not that big a vast of employment. Yeah. With data centers. It's just storage. Yeah. That's what you get. Yeah. [00:07:08] Speaker 1: But the real question is, why are they all in northwestern Virginia? We met up with the Roka reader and local name Patrick to discuss. [00:07:17] Speaker 6: Pressure makes diamonds, Max. Oh! See, I was always curious when the data centers popped up like five years ago I noticed them. I was like, why are they building them here? There's a thing called Data Gravity. My brother works for Amazon Data Guy. And it's like, it's cheaper and faster if you're closer to all the data that's already there. [00:07:37] Speaker 1: It's not just Data Gravity that makes Ashburn, Virginia the nucleus of the data center industry. Other reasons include its proximity to DC and all of its government and national security work. The area is a rich internet history that dates back to government projects in the 70s and Netscape and AOL in the 90s. And also the fact that this area is relatively safe from natural disasters. That makes outages like the recent AWS one, which by the way took place in data center alley, rare. Did the camera pick that up? Is there a lot of opportunity out here? Do the data centers create a lot of jobs? [00:08:12] Speaker 6: Yeah, my buddy actually works for QTS, which is like a construction data center thing. [00:08:18] Speaker 1: Don't quite get the lock you're getting on, Matt. Have you seen or heard about electricity prices going up around here? [00:08:25] Speaker 6: So it has gone up a little bit, obviously, I mean, 25% of the state's energy right now. And then they're saying by like 2030, it'll be up to 50% of the state's energy. So that's definitely a consideration, like one of the bigger implications, I would say. [00:08:40] Speaker 1: By the way, this isn't Patrick's first time in front of a big internet audience. He went mega viral years ago with this high school goal. By the way, we did not cherry pick these conversations. Our mission at ROKA is to capture the world without bias or fear. And if you support that mission, please make sure to hit subscribe. Also consider becoming a member to support our original journalism by clicking in the link in our pinned comment or description. You'll get unbiased news delivered to your inbox daily or in our daily app. Now back to Ashburn. [00:09:08] Speaker 5: They're taking water from the Potomac and they are only sending 30% back. So the river is less water and it goes further downstream and more people have to use it too. She's not wrong. [00:09:22] Speaker 1: One thing about data centers that doesn't get talked about enough is how much water they use. So 2% of all the water used in the Potomac River Basin cools data center servers. In the summer, that goes up to 8% and if trends hold, it'll go to over 30% of the Potomac River Basin water. That's a lot of water. Indeed, the environmental costs of data centers are substantial. They affect locals both from an energy perspective and from a water perspective. And that's not just folding in Loudoun County, the home of Ashburn, but also in the nearby Prince William County where many new data centers are being built. We met up with the director of its conservation alliance named Ashley Studholm to learn more about these issues. [00:10:04] Speaker 9: We are in a situation where we are literally trading in our real world for a virtual one. There was an application for a data center to be built next to Prince William Forest Park, one of our national parks. Then comes in this other proposal, which was called the Prince William Digital Gateway. And that was being proposed by our other national park, Manassas Battlefield. And so all of a sudden, we have two national parks and they're both being threatened by data centers. From a conservation perspective, we just want them where it makes sense, where the infrastructure is, where the power lines already are. There are several water resources. We are here in front of one of them. This is the Occoquan Reservoir. Hmm. The data center industry is one of the richest industries that we've ever seen. [00:11:01] Speaker 1: The industry is extremely rich and includes the biggest companies in the world like Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, but also massive companies you've never heard of like Equinix, which is now one of America's 150 most valuable companies and more valuable than PayPal, Ford and Airbnb. So yes, tough competition. [00:11:21] Speaker 9: Initially, they were paying $1 million per acre. That has increased. Now they're at like, I think, like $4 million an acre. If the number keeps going up, if a data center is interested in that, how are we going to compete with that? They should be the ones paying for it, not us as rate payers. Because the way it is right now, all of the customers are paying for those infrastructure upgrades. You know, everything that I access on my phone right now, that's with data centers that currently exist. The ones that are going up now is largely driven by speculative, like what are the needs are for generative AI. We continue down this trend without any legislation to increase accountability and transparency. We are looking at doubling our rates by 2030. [00:12:12] Speaker 1: After talking with Ashley, we kept driving around and around. And despite seeing more of these data centers, the scale of all of it continued to blow us away. And we had never heard of any of these data center companies. You could look them up and see their multi-billion dollar enterprises, but they're all so secretive. We started Googling them and one of the first we did research on was this one. In a recent multi-billion dollar acquisition, BlackRock and a few other partners like Nvidia and OpenAI, they bought this company, Align Data Centers. And oh my goodness, look at how tall this building is. These data centers are massive. How you doing? Can I help you? No, sir, we're just making a YouTube video on data centers. [00:12:54] Speaker 2: The reason why I stopped you is we're not allowed to take photos. Data centers are what they are. Our biggest problem as a country, we post too much shit on YouTube. I understand that people don't like them. Maybe they don't understand them. [00:13:07] Speaker ?: Yeah. [00:13:07] Speaker 2: I just work here. [00:13:08] Speaker ?: Yeah. [00:13:08] Speaker 2: But that's also security. Yeah. Okay. It's our national security in the United States. [00:13:13] Speaker 6: Yeah. [00:13:14] Speaker 2: It's where we store our data. Those pictures you're posting on YouTube, if it weren't for that data center, you wouldn't be able to post them. I'm ex-military. Okay. I fought for my country. I fought for your right to take that picture. I appreciate that. However, if you post stuff on YouTube that goes to everybody in the country. I know a lot of people don't like the data centers. That's the biggest thing. I don't think they understand them. But everything that you see on the phone, your games, your videos, your YouTube, all that, where do you think it goes? Into there and it gets funneled out. It's just like the oil. Everybody's against the oil, but they don't understand it. Everything you're wearing is made out of oil. I think people need to be more aware of what's going on in our country, in the world. Someone called and said people are taking pictures. [00:14:05] Speaker 1: So despite all the water, power, health, societal, and other costs of these data centers, this construction manager is right. You depend on data centers for your daily life. You wouldn't be watching this video without these data centers, and our national security does largely depend on them. Though the fact that these employed so few people, cost so much in resources, and enrich just a select few did make us feel that the debate's not going anywhere. And our job at ROCA is to investigate major issues like this. Without an agenda, talking to locals, and reporting on the facts. Now, our next video leaves data center alley and goes to a place that's pretty much the opposite. The national radio quiet zone in West Virginia, where most people don't even have cell phones, much less access to chat GPT in their daily lives. To watch our video in the quietest place in America, hit subscribe. And thank you for watching.