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| Science & Technology | |
| Inside the nondescript Virginia warehouse that wiped out the internet with one outage | |
| 2025-10-25 | |
'It's going to be humungous,' he told the Daily Mail. 'Three times the size of my home. We'll be about 500ft away and the noise when the generators are on will be above 90 decibels.' Not only that, it means his once quiet residential lane of million-dollar detached houses will soon be surrounded on all sides by the sinister-looking behemoths. At the top of the cul-de-sac there already looms a giant black and red one. At the other end of the street bulldozers are busy excavating a massive 200-acre site for yet another. A traditional old barn and grain silo, relics of what used to be rolling farmland, are coming down. 'I'm not opposed to progress, said Thumma, a 47, an IT consultant. 'Tech is my bread and butter. But you don't see this anywhere else in the country.' Or, indeed, on the planet. There are hundreds of data centers in this previously serene corner of Northern Virginia, about an hour west of Washington D.C. Staggeringly, two third's of the world's internet traffic passes through them. On Monday, the web faced a massive three-hour disruption across the world that hit a litany of services including including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms. Those affected included Netflix, Disney+, ChatGPT, Fortnite and Roblox. The problem was traced to Amazon Web Services' US-East-1 region, its biggest cluster of data centers, in northern Virginia. AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure for many of the world’s biggest online businesses, along with government departments and universities. While it's not possible to determine which particular center was the source, one of them is a stone's throw from Laura Thomas's back porch, and looms over a nearby Greek orthodox church and preschool. 'It's a pain in the ass,' Thomas, 69, told the Daily Mail. 'The traffic means I can't see to get out of my neighborhood. It used to be woods. There were deer. I would rather have had the woods and the wildlife.' She added: 'It's ugly. When they first built it I said what is this thing and the security guy said, I can't tell you. I thought it must be the CIA. If it's a data center why so secretive, who cares?' Indeed, security around the brown and gray monolith is tight. It is protected by iron fencing, a security barrier, an array of cameras, and even along one stretch a moat. The proliferation of data centers has helped make Loudoun County the wealthiest in the United States, and brought it the unofficial titles 'Data Center Capital of the World' and 'Data Center Alley.' It was fueled by several factors including being the base for AOL in the 1990s, closeness to the federal government in Washington, and an aggressive local policy of nearly $2 billion in tax breaks for data centers. Now, when information is saved to 'the cloud' there is a good chance it is stored there. AWS's US-East-1 began in 2006 and services everything from streaming and gaming giants to news websites. However, the outage this week was just the latest in a string of problems traced to the rolling fields of northern Virginia. That included a huge internet meltdown in 2021 when everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services were affected for more than five hours. There were other problems in 2017 and 2023. Local campaigners against data centers are now warning that, as the AI surge hits, there will be yet more data centers built in the area, requiring even more power, and potentially leading to disaster. Already over 25 percent of all power produced in Virginia goes to data centers, and it could rise to 46 percent by 2030. One data center uses as much water as 1,000 houses. 'This industry is a threat to humanity. Virginia is the canary in the coalmine,' Elena Schlossberg, who has been campaigning against the rise of data centers for a decade, told the Daily Mail. 'To me it's the height of avarice and greed and the rest of the seven deadly sins. It's an abomination. What happens when an industry like that collapses? It's not just a state impact, its a global impact. 'From a business perspective, you've got most of the world's internet concentrated here. Who thought that was a good idea? People talk about terrorist vulnerability, maybe that's not a good idea. Isn't it ripe for some kind of sabotage?' She added: 'What happens when there's stress on the grid in peak time and the grid goes down? The worst case scenario, there are cascading blackouts, the diesel fuel on site lasts 24 to 48 hours. We're not going to have enough power. 'If the world wants to sacrifice the state of Virginia they need to put in a trillion dollars. The the world needs to pout more skin in the game. Virginia is a microcosm of what will happen to the rest of the globe.' The U.S. has 10 times the number of data centers as its nearest rival Germany. The data centers in Loudoun currently cover around 50 million square feet and contribute $9 billion a year for the county's economy, supporting over 70,000 jobs. According to a recent estimate by the U.S. Department of Energy data centers could use up to to 12 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4 percent in 2023. | |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2025-10-25 14:21 |
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