Loudoun County, DC | April 5, 2024
When Raj Chintala and his family moved into their house in the Loudoun Meadows neighborhood in 2015, they used to watch beautiful sunrises from their windows. “It’s too dark in our house for us now,” said Chintala, whose view is blocked by and house is in the shadow of the Amazon data center built just behind his property line. An area known as “Data Center Alley” in northern Virginia, once known for its bucolic farmland and encroaching D.C. suburbs, now boasts the largest concentration of data centers in the world. With over 25 million square feet of space already in use, and millions more square feet on the way, the energy usage is a strain on the power grid and the demands to keep up are immense. (Melissa Lyttle for the Wall Street Journal)