Why is Ashburn the data center capital of the world? | Hacker News Reader

Why is Ashburn the data center capital of the world?

datacenters.com

48 pointsakshatjiwan42 comments

We operate nearly 900 servers, and I believe the capital of cloud infrastructure is Amsterdam, NL. The concentration of ASNs in Amsterdam is incredible. In contrast, Ashburn, Dallas, and LA seem to lack ASN diversity, primarily being dominated by singular big tech companies. Cities like Amsterdam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Istanbul, and New York, however, have a greater concentration of smaller cloud hosting businesses, offering more diversity.

Size and scale of an AS doesn't necessarily correlate with running a lot of data centers (as measured in megawatts). For instance cogent, hurricane, arelion and others have numerous worldwide POPs and are generally ranked in a top 15 list of AS by size and scale, but they're not building and running multi megawatt datacenters. Both Amsterdam and Frankfurt have a huge collection of ISPs, hosting companies, telcos and others, as evidenced by the traffic levels of the AMSIX and DE-CIX.

> In contrast, Ashburn, Dallas, and LA seem to lack ASN diversity, primarily being dominated by singular big tech companies

I don't think you understand the scale of the "Ashburn Metro Area." It is upwards of 250 buildings (maybe 50 of which are "big tech companies") compared to the 70 or so in Amsterdam.

Are you familiar with what ASNs actually are? That is like saying Delaware is the biggest US state by land mass because every large company is incorporated there.

You can both be right, and that's OK :) While you seem mostly concerned with "amount of served/handled data", parent seems to be more concerned with diversity, both are valid ways to judge what makes a "data center capital".

I don't think they're saying Amsterdam is the biggest country because of ASN diversity, but if someone says "What is the data center capital of the world?" both ways would be valid ways to understand the answer.

I just have to point out - looking out an office window to the the data center we use here in Amsterdam - that Amsterdam is a city and not a country.

But it was a very funny mistake to me, and I assume the best.

Next thing you know, I'll be calling Netherlands a continent and Holland a country :) Thanks for correcting the brain-fart (or future aspiration?)

This is 2025 diversity is thoughtcrime lol

The real answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East

Then the real real answer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUNET

I remember being awed by the size of the new data center at the Ashburn UUNET campus when we first occupied the campus. It was one of our new “NFL” sites. They were called that because the locations where we built the new large data centers matched up pretty well with cities with NFL teams. It now looks like a small garden shed in comparison to the newer data centers around it.

I thought for sure that was going to be AOL. Which I know doesn’t make sense, but they were huge in Loudoun.

Although it initially had no single central nexus, one eventually formed in the underground parking garage of an office building in Vienna, VA.

I had a chance to see this ~10 years ago. A data center where a fair amount of "servers" were rows of desktop computers. The top of the building had a whole bunch of antennas and satellite dishes. I never knew the history until you posted this link. :)

Whoah, that brings me back.

Yeah I was wondering where that part was. This article is missing the trees for the forrest.

It’s like saying trade port hubs are there because of the weather and ignoring the major river they sat on.

I worked as a developer for an enterprise hosting company back in 2005. I took servers out to Ashburn a couple of times.

I had visited many data centers in Michigan but this place was at a completely different level. High level of security and more cages than I had ever seen before. It was like a little town with street signs so you could find your cage. Lots of logos of famous Internet companies.

The fans were so loud my ears were ringing for hours afterward. This was before the common use of hearing protection and I have no idea how people worked in there all day.

MAE East is there.

If you wanted good interconnect to the west coast and the rest of the world, you needed to be in or near MAE East.

This is a 5-year-old article, and it's still very pertinent. This past summer I did a lot of bike-riding around Loudon County surveying trails for the Park Service (volunteer) and it's like riding through a cyberpunk future out there. Endless windowless buildings humming loudly, lots of electrical substations, and wires crisscrossing everywhere. The Washington Post reported that Dominion Power is now running electrical lines deep into West Virginia and bringing defunct coal plants back online to meet the energy demands (1), but a recent independent report found that it won't be enough as energy demands are going to double at a minimum (2).

I live in eastern Prince William County and the spread of datacenters is a hot-button topic here. People living on the Western side of the county, near Loudon, are getting rezoned for data centers, which means dramatic increase to their property taxes. The same report that highlighted energy demands also found that the increased tax revenue and jobs created are only really during the construction of the buildings, once completed they don't take many techs to maintain them.

I feel this last point may underestimate the jobs created because it doesn't consider all the folks connecting to these data centers to do work. For example, Amazon is expanding here to be close to the datacenters and my friends who work for Amazon have to be within driving distance of the campus. I could be overestimating this effect though.

(1) Gift WaPo article: Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal https://wapo.st/40A4SBm

(2) 2024 Data Centers in Virginia Report https://jlarc.virginia.gov/pdfs/reports/Rpt598-2.pdf

Convenient to CIA HQ and "Liberty Crossing"?

bold of you to assume the CIA needs physical proximity

No, but the FBI does. One time in a data center in Ashburn I read the label on a box in a mysterious cage, and it said WYLTK, LLC.

WYLTK means "wouldn't you like to know".

I did want to know, and discovered that it's a front for the FBI.

That's hilarious.

For anyone else wondering, it's AS27612 and the registered address is mentioned online -- unsurprisingly -- as the "CALEA Implementation Unit".

does it though? narratives can always be spun, enemies crafted, and people killed such is the way of the world no matter how much we pretend to live in a different reality

was it cool FBI at least? one of the many nodes for aggregating data perchance or same old SSO

How did you find out? (If you're able to share)

Open source intelligence. From the ASN to IP ranges, and onwards to old messages on mailing lists, where the headers leaked the fact that the person sent email from WYLTK, and the person was publicly associated with the FBI by way of speaking gigs.

Also bold to assume anyone working at Langley would think going to Ashburn is “convenient.” :-)

I know we are in AI cycle and likely need a lot more compute. But if we took out AI from the equation, would we still need that many datacenter , given the amount of compute and storage per server is increasing. By 2030 we should be able to buy a Dual Socket 1024 total CPU Core Server. 2 / 4 PB SSD per 1U space. CPU core getting faster. Even PHP is getting faster.

Surely someday, if it hasn't happened already compute density will outpace compute requirement growth ( Again excluding AI ). And we should have more Rack space than demand? Or is that still too far fetched?

The article states it is from 2019. So not sure if things have changed.

I'm surprised how many data centers there are in Hillsboro, Oregon. And they have more under construction at the moment. I wonder where Hillsboro ranks?

Yes, Ashburn is running out of space, so the data center industry is spreading into western Fairfax and northern Prince William Counties (neighboring areas, and PWC particular has lots of infill space available).

That's a link to Ashburn on Google Maps. Every large commercial building in the cluster north of Dulles Airport is a data center (slightly hyperbolic, but drive through and it's a pretty dystopian sight - just one giant windowless concrete box after another). https://www.google.com/maps/@39.0066627,-77.463925,6993m/dat...

But if you play any online games it is a utopia. ~5 ping all day

Things have changed since 2019. The data center capacity in the Ashburn area has increased significantly since then and much more capacity is currently in development.

Brings back memories of visiting northern Virginia as a teenager and recognizing all the town names from IRC servers, like Ashburn, McClean, Vienna, and several others.

I saw the VA governor speak at some point in the late '90s, and he touted Virginia "internet capital of the world". I naively thought it was because of all the IRC servers.

Same, but for me it was names in bang paths, the only one I seem to still be able to remember is ihnp4 (Indian Hills, Naperville)

Back then, there was a push to have NoVA be referred to as the "Silicon Dominion". Never caught on thankfully.

The formatting of the article ("Blog Image 3Until recently...") strongly suggests this was copied from somewhere else.

As for the content - I'd say a tl;dr is "first mover advantage" followed by network effects. Assume you wanted to provide a service to the Internet at large, so you went to where you can get the best and cheapest connectivity, and the first movers had all the advantage, at least in a time where latency didn't matter because all end-users had was a 56k modem. And ideally, you went to a place where you knew other big dogs are, because they will have ironed out the kinks, making it less risky for you - in a city where there are tons of existing large names you can expect a way more fault tolerant network than if you go to some small town in the outback where one drunk backhoe driver can take out the entire town's electricity or network.

These days the calculation is different - customers have high bandwidth these days but also they are highly sensitive to latency, so you gotta be as close to your audience as possible, and you build your entire architecture to be fault-tolerant as compute has gotten incredibly cheap.

> [...] surpass 1 gigawatt of overall data center capacity.

> [...] with only about half the capacity, at 559 megawatts (MWs) of inventory.

I didn't know that the physical unit for the rate of energy transfer, or more simple just power, is also an unit for computing power. After all it's the same word, right?

</s>

Energy consumption is directly correlated to heat production. The capacity of a datacenter is basically its capacity to keep servers cool. That's why datacenter capacity is measured in watts.

It was funny to me too talking to execs in the datacenter space for the first time and hearing them talk about computer in MW terms.

"Last quarter the team brought up X MWs in Y Chicago, good job everyone."

Tell me you don't datacenter without telling me you don't datacenter.

Yeah, I am just a programmer. TIL that datacenter capacity uses the unit Watt. I didn't believe it first, thought, again these journalists being confused about units. Not the first time.

Wait until you hear about the units they use for cooling.

BTU?

Or Watt, too?

Nowadays, it's true they usually use watts.

But not too long ago (and still very common in office-building server rooms) they use "tons of refrigeration", which takes its name from the amount of power it takes to phase change a ton of water in 1 day. It is 12k BTU/h.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com