Northern Virginia · Energy & Infrastructure
The World’s Data Center Capital
Is Running Out of Power
An invisible empire of server farms is consuming a quarter of Virginia’s electricity—and the AI buildout is accelerating the pressure. How the grid that powers the internet is buckling, and who ends up paying.
Data analysis · April 2026
Ashburn, Virginia sits at the physical center of the internet.
Within a twenty-mile radius of this Loudoun County suburb, server farms the size of football fields quietly process Google searches, stream Netflix, and route banking transactions for billions of people daily. The region has earned the unofficial title of “Data Center Alley”—home to roughly 70 percent of the world’s internet traffic at any given moment.
For most of its history, this infrastructure was nearly invisible to the people who lived alongside it. Data centers pay property taxes, hire relatively few workers, and hum behind razor-wire fences. The tradeoffs seemed acceptable.
That calculus is changing. The electricity demand from Northern Virginia’s data centers has grown from roughly 3 gigawatts in 2015 to more than 9 gigawatts today—enough to power approximately 7 million average American homes. The AI buildout is accelerating it further. Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, projects this load could more than double again by 2030. The question of who builds the power plants, transmission lines, and substations to meet that demand—and who pays for them—has become one of the most consequential policy fights in Virginia.
A Decade of Exponential Growth
Until around 2018, Northern Virginia’s data center electricity demand was large but manageable. It was one big customer among many, and Dominion’s overall load growth had been relatively flat for years—a pattern common to mature utility territories where efficiency gains offset new demand.
Then came the hyperscale buildout. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Meta raced to expand capacity. Campus-scale facilities replaced mid-sized buildings. The machines got bigger, the cooling systems more power-hungry, and the leasing pipelines longer. Dominion’s internal projections, filed annually with Virginia’s State Corporation Commission, show what the utility calls a “fundamental change in load character.”
Virginia Electricity Demand by Type, 2015–2030 (GW)
Blue area = data center demand · gray area = all other demand · projected period shown at reduced opacity
Data center demand is no longer a line item—it is the dominant driver of Virginia’s electricity future. Under the reference scenario, data centers alone will consume nearly as much electricity by 2030 as the entire state did in 2015. Under the high-growth scenario—which accounts for accelerated AI infrastructure investment—they could reach 35 gigawatts by 2030, more than Dominion’s entire current generating fleet.
The Supply Side Can’t Keep Up
Here is the essential math: Dominion’s existing generation fleet can produce about 27.5 gigawatts at peak. Total projected demand by 2030, under the reference scenario, reaches 40 gigawatts. The 12.5-gigawatt gap must be filled with some combination of new power plants, large-scale battery storage, imported capacity from neighboring grids, or demand reduction.
None of those options is quick or cheap. The PJM Interconnection—which coordinates the grid across much of the eastern United States—has a backlog of over 2,600 projects waiting for connection studies. Many are in Virginia. Many serve data centers. The data center leasing pipeline does not wait for interconnection queues.
Generating Capacity vs. Projected Demand — 2030 (GW)
Dominion’s current capital plan calls for new natural gas peakers, offshore wind, utility-scale solar, and battery storage. Each requires regulatory approval, transmission buildout, and years of construction. Virginia’s grid was not designed for this scale—and the window for orderly expansion is narrowing.
The Cost Doesn’t Disappear—It Gets Spread Around
Building new generation and transmission infrastructure is expensive. Under Virginia’s existing regulatory structure, large customers like data centers pay demand charges for the electricity they consume. But the cost of transmission upgrades—the high-voltage lines and substations needed to deliver that electricity across the state—is spread across all ratepayers, including homeowners and small businesses.
In 2022, Dominion requested approval for more than $10 billion in grid investments through 2035, partly driven by the need to accommodate data center growth. Virginia’s State Corporation Commission approved a substantial portion. A share of those investments is being recovered through rider charges that appear on every Dominion customer’s monthly bill.
“The infrastructure cost of serving these customers is being socialized while the tax and economic benefits accrue primarily to the counties where they locate.”
Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, analysis of Virginia utility rate filings, 2023
Virginia lawmakers have taken notice. In 2023, the General Assembly passed legislation requiring Dominion to file detailed reports attributing rate increases to specific customer classes. It was the first formal legislative acknowledgment that data center growth was materially affecting what ordinary Virginians pay for electricity.
Residential customers in Dominion Energy’s Virginia service territory who share the cost of transmission upgrades required by data center and industrial load growth.
The debate is not whether data centers are economically valuable—they are, contributing billions in annual property tax revenue and supporting the digital infrastructure on which modern commerce depends. The question is whether the current pricing structure fairly allocates the costs they impose on the grid they depend on, and whether Virginia has the generation capacity and policy framework to meet what is coming.
Dominion’s own high-growth scenario—not the reference case, but the upper bound—projects data center demand reaching 35 gigawatts by 2035. At that level, the problem does not yield to incremental fixes. It requires a fundamental rethinking of how Virginia plans, builds, and pays for its electricity system.
Most of It Is One County
The load figures above are spread across Dominion’s entire service territory. But the actual facilities are concentrated almost entirely in a few counties. Loudoun County alone accounts for more than half of all data center floor space in the region—an estimated 34 million square feet, the largest single-county concentration of data centers anywhere on Earth.
This geographic concentration has real infrastructure consequences. Power transmission lines and substations must be built or upgraded to deliver electricity to where the buildings are, regardless of where it might be cheapest to deliver it. Loudoun’s grid was not designed for this scale. Bringing it up to specification requires rerouting high-voltage corridors through a densely developed suburb—work that is expensive, slow, and increasingly contentious with local residents.
Data Center Floor Space by County, Northern Virginia (millions of sq ft)
Source: Northern Virginia Technology Council 2023 Annual Data Center Inventory Survey
Methodology & Sources
This analysis draws on public utility filings, federal energy data, and industry surveys. All figures should be understood as indicative of scale and trend rather than precise official measurements. Projections represent specific Dominion scenarios and do not constitute guaranteed outcomes. Where figures are estimated or modeled, this is noted.
- Load and demand figures (Charts 1 & 2): Historical load data (2015–2023) derived from Dominion Energy’s annual Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) filed with the Virginia State Corporation Commission. Projections use the 2023 IRP reference growth scenario. The high-growth scenario reflects the 2023 IRP alternative scenario analysis, which models accelerated data center adoption including AI workloads.
- Generation capacity (Chart 2): Approximately 27.5 GW nameplate capacity based on EIA Form 860 data (2023) for Dominion Energy Virginia’s service territory.
- Data center floor space (Chart 3): Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) 2023 Annual Data Center Inventory Survey. Floor space is a proxy for market concentration and does not directly translate to electricity load without knowing power density per facility.
- Internet traffic share: Frequently cited by industry analysts and Loudoun County economic development materials; precise methodology varies by source and should be treated as approximate.
- PJM queue: PJM Interconnection queue reports, 2023–2024.
- Ratepayer figure: Dominion Energy annual report (2023).
Additional context and reporting drawn from: The Washington Post, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory data center energy use research, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) Virginia utility analyses, and Dominion Energy investor relations disclosures.