US state of Virginia has more datacenter capacity than Europe or China

The state of Virginia has over a third of America's hyperscale datacenter capacity, and this amounts to more than the entire capacity of China or the whole of Europe, highlighting just how much infrastructure is concentrated along the so-called Datacenter Alley. These figures come from Synergy Research Group, which said that …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Who'd have thunk it

Half the worlds data storage is sited next to the HQs of the spy agencies of the world's only superpower

In other news - West Yorkshire has more Pontefract Cake production than Albania and Zimbabwe combined !

[Michael 66]

Sounds familiar

I lived in Fairfax County for 17 years, pretty much centered on the 90s, and I remember AOL employees claiming that most internet traffic went through their data centers. No idea if it was true. Of course, they all retired at 16 and bought islands, so I'm no longer in touch with any of them.

[Drew Scriver]

Oh - the irony

A bit ironic that more than 40% of Virginians in rural areas don't have access to broadband internet access...

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Oh - the irony

But 40% of the world's banjos ?

[Trigonoceps occipitalis]

Re: Oh - the irony

Ding-a-ding-ding-ding

[DS999]

Between

Being at the center of government - including all the government & military contractors - and fairly close to Fort Meade, MD where NSA's HQ is located, it isn't hard to guess at the reasons. It is also close to a number of major east coast population centers such as NYC, but far enough away it can serve as a redundant site for disaster recovery purposes.

[Gene Cash]

It's been that way since pre-WWW times. I remember most of IBM BITNET traffic going through a hub in Virginia, back in the mid-'80s

There was also a big hub for early internet traffic there too, run by MITRE. We used to joke that's where the NSA Trawler was. If only we knew...

[wvunathans]

MAE East

I think you are thinking of MAE East which was setup by UUNET and MFS and was originally setup around 1992 in a cinderblock room in the parking garage at 1919 Gallows Road and was shut down in late 2000's. As I remember most of the connections moved to an Equinox building close by.

MAE East is a big reason Northern VA is overrun with datacenters now because all the early players (AOL, UUNET, MFS, etc) were based in N.VA and connected to MAE-East so of course that is where you want to be close to or pull fiber to, or build the first Internet datacenters which begat the second internet datacenters and repeat ad nauseum.

[anothercynic]

Re: MAE East

The days of checking if MAE East or MAE West were causing hiccups! :-)

I remember those days fondly.

[TimMaher]

Re: MAE West

“Why don’t you come up to my room sometime?”.

Where’s the Paris icon gone?

[StargateSg7]

And WE up here in our (i.e. NCA - North Canadian Aerospace) inside-of-a-big-mountain northern British Columbia, Canada data centre, we have more data centre size and capacity that ANYONE ON EARTH!

17 YottaFLOPS within 20 Million Square Feet (1 858 060 square metres) running at 128-bits wide for all Integer, Floating Point, Fixed Point and RGBA/YCbCrA/HSLA Pixels!

TAKE THAT Virginia, and China and Europe and anyone else!

P.S. Looks like the answer really is 42!

V