Ashburn's Data Center Alley — 54 gigawatts contracted, 4.8 consumed and the fight over who pays for the grid

Ashburn's Data Center Alley has not stopped growing, but it has entered the phase in which someone has to pay for the grid it consumes, and in 2026 that bill became a political issue.

This analysis answers three questions: why so much computing power gathered in a single Virginia county, what broke in the past two years and what is now changing in the rules. We add what we see, from our own server logs, about the traffic leaving Ashburn, and what Romania should take away before its own wave of investment.

The testable thesis: the real limit of the Alley is no longer land, nor fibre, but megawatts, and the dispute has moved from "where do we build" to "who pays". If Virginia manages to shift the cost of the grid onto data centres without driving them away, Ashburn remains the centre of the world for another decade. If not, growth moves to other states, and the county is left with the existing buildings and a tax base that no longer grows.

Why Ashburn

The story begins in the 1990s, with the infrastructure of the American internet. The MAE-East exchange point, started in 1992 in the Washington area, spread to Vienna, Reston and Ashburn. AOL built a technical centre near Dulles airport, and in 1998 Equinix opened its first Ashburn data centre, neutral towards carriers, where the large networks could connect to each other, according to Data Center Knowledge.

The rest came from the network effect. Where the cables and exchange points already are, latency is low and connecting is cheap, so the cloud companies come too. Amazon Web Services placed its us-east-1 region in Northern Virginia, the oldest one and the one many customers use by default. Farmland near Dulles was cheap, electricity was among the cheapest in the United States, and the county offered low taxes and fast approvals. Since 2010 the state has added a sales-tax exemption for data-centre equipment.

The result is the largest concentration of data centres in the world. Virginia's legislative audit commission, JLARC, estimated in 2024 that the region holds about 25% of North American capacity and 13% of global operational capacity, according to Cardinal News. On Cushman & Wakefield data for 2024, Northern Virginia had 4,140 MW, more than twice as much as Beijing, the world's second market, with 1,860 MW.

One figure that has circulated for a decade needs to be taken off the table. The claim that "70% of the world's internet traffic passes through Loudoun" has no identifiable source. TeleGeography, the firm that measures international cables, showed as early as 2019 that only 23% of the world's international internet capacity connects to the United States, taken as a whole, not just to Virginia, according to TeleGeography's analysis. The Alley is the world centre of computing capacity, not of traffic.

How big it is now

In mid-2026, the Northern Virginia market had 4,496.5 MW of capacity in operation, more than a gigawatt above a year earlier, according to the CBRE report published on 8 September 2026. The vacancy rate fell to 0.2%, from 0.7% a year earlier. Of all existing capacity, only 10.8 MW was free. Another 2,420.2 MW was under construction, and in the first half tenants took up 467.6 MW, the most of any large North American market.

"Power is the deciding factor in Northern Virginia right now," said Stu Dyer of CBRE in the same report. In other words, whoever has a power contract also has tenants, and whoever does not has nothing to lease. For comparison, Romania has in total about 100 MW installed in private data centres and roughly another 100 MW in the public sector, according to Ziarul Financiar. In the first six months of 2026 alone, Northern Virginia took up more than twice as much capacity as all of Romania has.

The grid: 54 gigawatts promised, 4.8 consumed

The most important document of the year is not a real-estate report but a presentation by Dominion Energy, the utility that powers the Alley, given on 29 September to the grid operator PJM. According to Dominion's presentation, the company has contracts for about 54 GW of data-centre capacity, with 55 companies connected and about 500 metered accounts. Their billed peak demand, however, was 4.8 GW in August 2026, against 462 MW in 2013.

The gap between the two figures says almost everything. Of the 54 GW, nearly 12 GW are firm electric service agreements and 9.4 GW construction authorisations. The remaining 32.5 GW are only engineering authorisations, and Dominion has removed 19 GW of them, or 59%, from its forecast, because it does not believe they will be built on time. The company also shows that a new data centre reaches, on average, after five years, only 63% of its contracted power.

The problem is not that data centres already consume 54 GW, but that the grid must be planned for part of them. Transmission lines and power plants take five to ten years to build, and if the demand does not come, the cost stays with other customers. As early as July 2022, Dominion announced it could no longer connect new data centres in eastern Loudoun County on time, and some connections were delayed by years, according to Data Center Frontier.

The grid has also shown signs of technical fragility. On 10 July 2024, a fault on a 230 kV line caused about 1,500 MW of data-centre load, from 60 connection points and 25 substations, to switch simultaneously to backup power, according to the NERC report, the North American grid reliability authority. For the operator, it was as if a large city had suddenly vanished from the grid. And on 7 May 2026, a thermal event in an AWS data centre in the same region disrupted cloud services, and the Coinbase crypto exchange was down for about seven hours, according to Network World.

Who pays: from the capacity market to the household bill

The cost is clearest in PJM's capacity market, where payment is made for the power plants that must be available three years ahead. The auction for 2028/2029, whose results were published on 14 July 2026, cleared at $325 per megawatt-day, the market cap, for the third time in a row, according to the PJM release. Without the cap, the price would have been close to $555. The capacity bought fell 6,831 MW short of the reliability requirement, and the total cost reached about $16.4 billion.

PJM's independent market monitor, Monitoring Analytics, attributes about $6.3 billion of this cost, or 38%, to data centres, according to Industrial Info Resources. Its argument is simple: data centres do not pay this cost alone, they share it with all customers in the 13 states and the District of Columbia served by PJM. That turns a local Virginia problem into a regional one.

In Virginia, the bill has already reached people's homes. On 25 November 2025, the State Corporation Commission (SCC), which regulates rates, approved for Dominion an increase in a typical household bill of $11.24 a month in 2026 and a further $2.36 in 2027, against about $21.43 a month requested by the company by 2027, according to Appalachian Voices. In the same decision, the SCC created a separate rate class, GS-5, for customers of at least 25 MW, from 1 January 2027.

The new class comes with obligations: large customers pay at least 85% of their contracted distribution and transmission demand and 60% of their generation demand, even if they do not use it. In August 2026, the SCC also ordered a tariff under which data centres pay in full for transmission lines built only for them, according to Virginia Mercury. The JLARC audit commission had estimated in 2024 that, without such changes, the bill of a household served by Dominion could rise, in real terms, by $14 to $37 a month by 2040, because of the new demand.

The county budget: dependence on servers

For Loudoun County, data centres are also the largest source of money. The budget for fiscal year 2027 projects about $418 million from the tax on data-centre buildings and land and $879 million from the tax on the computer equipment inside, according to calculations published on the basis of the county budget. Together, almost $1.3 billion, or around 45% of local tax revenue. Data centres, by contrast, occupy only about 4% of commercial parcels.

The mechanism explains why the county was so welcoming. Servers are taxed as personal property, at $4.15 per $100 of value, and are replaced every few years, so the tax base renews itself. With this money, Loudoun has cut its real property tax ten times in a row, to $0.805 per $100 in 2026. The county administration has nonetheless built its budget on the assumption that data-centre revenue will plateau in the early 2030s.

The state does the opposite calculation. The sales-tax exemption for data-centre equipment cost $928.6 million in fiscal year 2023, according to JLARC, and published estimates for 2025 range from $1.6 to $1.9 billion, depending on the source. The 2026–2028 budget, signed by Governor Abigail Spanberger at the end of June, kept the exemption but introduced a new tax of 1.1 cents per kilowatt-hour consumed by data centres, capped at $600 million a year and valid until 30 June 2028, according to the law firm Hunton.

The political reaction of 2026

The county began tightening the rules as early as March 2025, when the board voted 7 to 2 that data centres could no longer be built without a special approval. On 15 September 2026, the same board voted, with seven in favour, one against and one abstention, to draft a resolution suspending for up to 12 months any new legislative application for data centres and substations, retroactive to that date, except for projects needed for grid reliability, according to the county's announcement.

The county attorney said that an indefinite moratorium would not be legal, which is why the instrument is called a "pause". The final vote on the resolution was scheduled for 20 October; at the time of writing, we had not found an account of the result in a source we could check. The pause does not affect projects already approved, nor administrative applications reviewed only by staff, and the county wants to finish its new data-centre rules by the summer of 2027.

At state level, on 18 September 2026, Governor Spanberger signed Executive Order 22, the "Data Center Accountability Framework". According to the analysis by Holland & Knight, the order bars state agencies from signing non-disclosure agreements for data-centre projects, removes projects above 25 MW from site-readiness and fast-track permitting programmes, and calls for new rules on noise and on diesel backup generators within 180 days. The order imposes no moratorium and does not bind the counties, but the governor promises a bill for the 2027 legislative session that would require public hearings for large data centres.

The second front is the utility itself. NextEra Energy wants to buy Dominion Energy in a deal worth about $67 billion, filed for approval with the SCC on 15 July 2026. On 6 October, Lieutenant Governor Ghazala Hashmi became the first statewide elected official to formally oppose the merger, citing the risk to power bills. Public hearings are scheduled between 5 and 10 November, and evidentiary hearings begin on 17 November, according to FFXnow. The 180-day statutory clock would bring the decision by 11 January 2027, unless it is extended.

The clearest signal, though, comes from the neighbouring county. The Prince William Digital Gateway, one of the largest data-centre complexes planned in the United States, was voided in court in August 2025, because the rezoning had not followed the rules on public notice. The Court of Appeals of Virginia upheld the ruling on 31 March 2026, and in July 2026 the developer QTS withdrew its appeal, according to Virginia Business. A multi-billion project fell on a procedural point, and that changes the risk calculation of every developer.

The causal chain and the counter-hypothesis

The chain looks like this. Cause: a three-decade-old network effect and explosive demand for artificial-intelligence computing. Mechanism: companies reserve far more power in advance than they consume, the grid must be planned for part of it, and the capacity market and tariffs spread the cost over all customers. Effect: higher bills, a more fragile grid and, in 2026, a political reaction that tries to shift the cost onto data centres through separate tariffs, collateral and new taxes.

The counter-hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously: the Loudoun pause could be mostly symbolic. The county already has dozens of approved but unbuilt buildings, and the board chair, Phyllis Randall, acknowledged that no legislative data-centre application had been voted on in quite a while. The constraint that matters is the grid, not zoning. If Dominion builds the promised lines, growth continues on projects already approved, regardless of the pause. Weighing the two, we believe the pause changes the pace of the next two years less, and the rules after 2027 more, once the projects already approved are finished.

What olivLaw sees from Ashburn

We also checked what reaches us from the Alley. Between 5 July and 21 October 2026, the logs of the server that hosts olivLaw recorded 289,642 requests from 3,582 IP addresses located in Ashburn, according to a traffic analysis carried out with the defneo.com security platform. Volume rose from about 1,300 requests a week in July to 30,000–80,000 a week in October. In the past 30 days, Ashburn accounted for about 12% of all requests received by the server.

"Ashburn" here is a geolocation label, not a town full of readers. Location databases place the cloud regions of Amazon and Oracle in Ashburn, so practically all traffic from there is automated. Most visitors are declared robots: the Amazon crawler sent 71,125 requests from 432 addresses, the Semrush SEO tool 41,031, the robot of the Perplexity AI search engine 26,869, and the Meta crawlers around 7,000. Their identity was confirmed through the addresses and network names published by each company.

The biggest client, however, did not introduce itself. A single address in the Oracle cloud, running an automated browser that imitates Chrome, sent 119,729 requests, 41% of all traffic from Ashburn. Since 3 October, it has gone systematically, day and night, through more than a thousand alerts in our intelligence console, in all three editions, together with the associated analyses. We do not know who operates it. Separately, a few dozen disposable virtual machines, each active for a day or two, searched for configuration files and keys accidentally left exposed; they were blocked automatically.

For the thesis of this analysis, our figures say one simple thing: the capacity in Ashburn is, to a large extent, the capacity of the artificial-intelligence economy. The same data centres that ask Dominion for gigawatts also read, index and copy the Romanian press. The declared robots of Amazon, Perplexity and Meta together sent more than 100,000 requests to our server in three and a half months.

What it means for Europe and for Romania

Europe wants exactly what Virginia is now trying to keep under control. On 3 June 2026 the European Commission proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act, which aims to triple EU data-centre capacity in five to seven years and to grant permits within 12 months in dedicated zones, according to the Commission. The call for up to seven artificial-intelligence "gigafactories", launched by EuroHPC on 30 July 2026, accepts bids until 12 November, according to EuroHPC.

Ireland has already gone through the European version of the problem. After three years in which new connections in the Dublin area were practically blocked, the regulator decided in December 2025 that new data centres can connect only if they bring their own generation covering all their demand and if, within six years, they buy at least 80% of their electricity from new renewable projects in Ireland, according to the law firm William Fry. It is the European answer to the same question: if you want the grid, bring your own power.

Romania starts from a scale at least twenty times smaller than Northern Virginia, but with big ambitions. The Ministry of Economy announced on 23 June 2025 that it had submitted a letter of intent for an artificial-intelligence gigafactory on the Black Sea, with a first phase at Cernavodă and a second at Doicești, powered by up to 1,500 MW from nuclear and renewable sources, according to Agerpres. According to Ziarul Financiar, the market estimates that Romania can host more than 1 GW of data centres within five years, at a cost of about 7–8 million euros per megawatt.

The lesson from Ashburn has three parts. First: the separate tariff for large customers, with minimum payments and collateral, must be set before the first large contract, not after household bills rise. Second: power reservations must cost something, otherwise the grid is planned on paper; the gap between the 54 GW contracted and the 4.8 GW consumed shows how quickly declared demand inflates. Third: the permitting procedure must be transparent from the start, because, as Prince William shows, a project approved in a hurry can fall in court years later.

Three paths to 2028

Dominant scenario: slower and more expensive growth. Trigger: Loudoun rewrites its rules by 2027, and the GS-5 tariff and the dedicated-lines tariff take effect. Constraint: the grid, not demand. Consequence: the Alley keeps growing on projects already approved, but new projects move to counties in southern Virginia and to other states. Indicator: vacancy stays below 1%, and capacity under construction in Northern Virginia falls in the 2027 reports.

Plausible scenario: regulation and merger pulling in the same direction. Trigger: the SCC approves the NextEra–Dominion merger with tough conditions for data centres, and the legislature passes the public-hearings law in 2027. Constraint: demand for artificial-intelligence computing does not fall. Consequence: grid costs shift visibly onto data centres, and household bills rise more slowly. Indicator: the SCC decision and the first approved tariff for dedicated lines.

Tail scenario: demand breaks. Trigger: a correction in artificial-intelligence investment leads to a large share of the paper contracts being abandoned. Constraint: the lines and plants already started must be paid for anyway. Consequence: customers in the PJM region are left with a grid built for demand that does not come. Indicator: a fall in the contracted capacity reported by Dominion and a PJM capacity price below the cap.

Verifiable forecasts

Forecast	Horizon	Probability	How it is checked	Verification source
The PJM auction for 2029/2030 clears at the cap price in the Dominion zone	by 28.02.2027	70–80%	The published clearing price for the Dominion zone equals the cap	pjm.com
Northern Virginia data-centre vacancy stays below 1% in CBRE's year-end 2026 report	by 31.03.2027	80–90%	The figure in CBRE's half-yearly report	cbre.com
The SCC approves the NextEra–Dominion merger, with or without conditions	by 30.06.2027	55–65%	The commission's final order	scc.virginia.gov
Virginia's legislature passes a law requiring public hearings for large data centres	by 30.04.2027	45–55%	Final vote in both chambers	lis.virginia.gov
Virginia repeals or schedules the phase-out of the sales-tax exemption for data-centre equipment	by 30.06.2027	15–25%	Law passed and signed	lis.virginia.gov
Loudoun County adopts its new zoning rules for data centres	by 30.09.2027	45–55%	Vote of the county board	loudoun.gov
A project from Romania is selected by EuroHPC for an artificial-intelligence gigafactory	by 30.06.2027	5–15%	List of selected projects	eurohpc-ju.europa.eu

Method, definitions and figures

Capacity. The CBRE figures refer to the Northern Virginia market, which includes Loudoun, Prince William and Fairfax, and measure IT capacity in operation. Other firms use other definitions: JLL reported about 5.6 GW for 2025, and the difference lies in what is counted. Contracted capacity and the billed peak come from Dominion's presentation to PJM of 29 September 2026, and the contracts are as of July 2026.

The money. The county's fiscal 2027 revenues are budget estimates, not receipts. The 45% share is measured against local tax revenue; measured against the whole general fund, the share is lower. The cost of the sales-tax exemption differs between official sources, so we give a range. The attribution of $6.3 billion to data centres in the PJM auction is the market monitor's estimate, not a separate bill that anyone in particular pays.

The traffic. The Ashburn data come from the logs of the server that hosts olivLaw, read with the defneo.com platform: location by IP address, network operator, reverse DNS name and the decisions of the blocking system. The figures include all sites hosted on the same server, of which olivlaw.com and olivlaw.ro received more than four fifths of requests. The probabilities in the table are editorial estimates, in ranges of at least ten percentage points.

Limits of the analysis

We could not read the result of the final Loudoun vote of 20 October, nor the full text of some county documents, which are not accessible automatically. Capacity per cloud company in the Alley is not public, and the estimates in circulation vary widely. We have no access to the contracts between Dominion and the data centres, nor to the SCC's internal cost calculations.

The diagnosis would be invalidated by a sudden fall in the contracted capacity reported by Dominion, by a PJM capacity price well below the cap at the December auction, or by a visible rise in Northern Virginia vacancy. The natural reassessment comes after the PJM auction of December 2026, after the SCC decision on the merger and after the 2027 legislative session.