Yard signs that read “No New Lines in Loudoun” are popping up like weeds along my commute to DC Byte’s office in Herndon, Virginia, from my home across the border in West Virginia. The signs protest high voltage transmission lines needed to support growth of the digital infrastructure industry in Northern Virgina, where around 70 percent of today’s Internet traffic flows through. Continued expansion of the industry in Northern Virginia, known as Data Center Alley, requires more power. The transmission lines would bring it, but area residents don’t want the power lines in their backyards. This NIMBYism is just one of the challenges our industry faces as we race to secure the power capacity needed to meet the surging demand for digital infrastructure around the world.
Today, the narrative around the data center industry’s power challenge is tightly coupled to the boom in generative AI. That’s true, but the roots of the problem stretch back to COVID-19. Data center construction, like everything else, slowed down for a few months as the world adjusted to the pandemic-induced shutdowns. As companies were forced to shift to remote work overnight, they became even more reliant on cloud services. This demand kicked off a tsunami of cloud consumption and a corresponding surge in data center expansion activity amid snarls in COVID-related supply chain disruptions. When generative AI arrived, our industry was still scrambling to keep up with demand for cloud computing.
