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What’s It Like Inside a Data Center?

Northern Virginia is laden with structures that house data for Fortune 500 companies. I went inside just one of those monstrosities that bothers its neighbors.

What’s It Like Inside a Data Center?

Northern Virginia is laden with structures that house data for Fortune 500 companies. I went inside just one of those monstrosities that bothers its neighbors.

A server room at a data center.

The sun was beating down as I made my way through a quiet community in Ashburn, Virginia. The roads were wide and lined with cars; there was a nice central playground with no one playing in it; the houses seemed monstrously large; and there were ample trees dotting the clean-cut lawns of the neighborhood.

In so many ways, it felt like your typical US suburb, until you looked past the thick wall of trees that defined its boundaries. The white walls of a large facility peeked out from above the deep green foliage. It ran on in the distance, the large houses making it impossible to see its full extent. Towering above it a little farther away were the high-voltage transmission lines that fed it with electricity. The trees acted like a shield, allowing those who lived in the community not to think about what stood on their doorstep and the growing demands that came from the surrounding industrial expansion. I’m talking, of course, about hyperscale data centers.

No location on the entire planet has more data centers than Virginia. The state holds more than 13 percent of global hyperscale capacity—double that of Beijing, which comes in second. There were nearly 600 data centers within the state’s boundaries in 2025, about 150 of which were hyperscale—the monstrously large variety that have become much more common since the advent of generative AI—and most of them were clustered in an area in the north of the state around Ashburn, which has since been dubbed “Data Center Alley.”

Data centers are unavoidable in Northern Virginia. When I sat on a bench next to a neighborhood lake, a hyperscale data center owned by Microsoft stared back at me from the opposite bank. As I drove through industrial parks, they were dotted throughout. When I pulled into a shopping area to grab a bite to eat, facilities that powered Amazon Web Services loomed behind the strip mall. I could even feel their influence in the street names: Cloud Plaza, Performance Circle, and, worst of all, Growth Mindset Lane. We can thank Microsoft for that one.

In short, they were everywhere when I visited in 2025, and following them wherever they set down were the high-voltage power lines needed to keep them running. Data centers were remaking the fabric of a whole region; there seemed to be no end in sight for their expansion. They had become a major industry, and neither worries over local resource demands nor growing concern from residents seemed able to stop the ambitions of some of the most powerful companies on the planet.

It’s hard to generalize about the data centers themselves. They come in many shapes and sizes, operate at various scales—from rooms in a nondescript building to entire parks of warehouse-sized facilities crammed with thousands of servers apiece—and seem to be getting bigger with every passing year. Some of them exist to serve the companies operating them; others exist as places where many different groups can rent space for servers of their own. Certain facilities are cooled with air-conditioning, while others depend more on water-based cooling, and even the way those systems are implemented can differ. I guess what I’m trying to say is that one description of a data center will never cover the gamut: There is some standardization, but there is also a lot of room for operators to put their own stamp on how their facility or network of locations is going to work.

The interiors of some Google data centers have clusters of brightly colored tubes running throughout them—echoing the primary colors present in the company’s branding—while the average Microsoft or Amazon facility might appear more utilitarian. Digital Realty is one of the largest data-center operators in the world. The company has two major lines of business: It builds entire facilities that then get leased to other companies, including the major cloud providers, but it also offers colocation services. Those are facilities where Digital Realty runs the data center, renting space in racks to other companies that they can then fill with their own servers. I stopped to walk the length of one of its facilities in Northern Virginia. The simplest way to describe it is to say that it looks like a massive box. The company’s logo was visible near the upper portion of the building, and it had some different........

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