ASHBURN, Va.—Driving up the six-lane Route 28 in Loudoun County, Virginia, there’s a dark blue one on the left. Further up the way in a small clearing of trees, there’s a gray one on the right. Across the landscape, metal cables criss-cross in every direction to connect power to the sprawling buildings.

They’re not big-box stores like Ikea or Target. They’re bigger. They’re data centers that house the computers processing the internet and artificial intelligence. And they’re all over these suburban counties outside of Washington, D.C.

Virginia, especially Northern Virginia, leads the world in development, far outpacing other top markets such as Beijing.

So how did it happen that this region came to dominate data centers, an industry whose growth now fuels debates about electricity bills, climate change and the role of technology in our lives? The answer is a combination of government support, the presence of infrastructure used by internet pioneers such as America Online, cheap electricity and the availability of land.

We deliver climate news to your inbox like nobody else. Every day or once a week, our original stories and digest of the web’s top headlines deliver the full story, for free.

Our #1 newsletter delivers the week’s climate and energy news – our original stories and top headlines from around the web.

Dan Gearino’s habit-forming weekly take on how to understand the energy transformation reshaping our world.

A once-a-week digest of the most pressing climate-related news, written by Kiley Price and released every Tuesday.

Don’t miss a beat. Get a daily email of our original, groundbreaking stories written by our national network of award-winning reporters.

Go behind the scenes with executive editor Vernon Loeb and ICN reporters as they discuss one of the week’s top stories.