In July 2026, Virginia Mom Julie set off for a self-guided tour of Data Center Alley in Loudoun County, Virginia. This is the worldwide hub of data center development. Tech companies flocked to Northern Virginia after AOL opened its headquarters here in the 1990s and haven’t looked back.
Virginia has an astounding 680 data centers in operation, under construction, or planned, and most are in the northern part of the state. These are basically server farms that power the internet, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, and now, most often, artificial intelligence (AI).
For the tour, Julie and a friend followed a route provided by the Loudoun Climate Project, one of the many local environmental organizations in Virginia’s Data Center Reform Coalition. This wasn’t her first drive through the data center corridor—she grew up nearby and still lives there with her family. And at this point, she's well versed in the many climate and health impacts of fossil-fuel powered data centers. She didn’t expect to be surprised by what she saw. She was so very wrong.