Our digital lives need massive data centers. What goes on inside them?

By Antonio Olivo and William Neff. The Washington Post. September 17, 2024.

We toured a facility in Northern Virginia to see how it works and to understand why water use and energy consumption are such a concern.

The concrete black-paneled building known as DC12 looks like a regular corporate office, its tinted lobby windows reflecting the surrounding suburban landscape in Northern Virginia.

But beyond a double-locked entry chamber are the computer servers, fiber-optic cables and other technology that make up the infrastructure of our digital lives.

This 114,300-square-foot facility, owned by a company called Equinix, is one of the world’s nearly 7,000 data centers, which serve society’s insatiable addiction to smart technology. Thousands of computer servers here process bank transactions, stream movies, execute retail purchases or run algorithms for artificial intelligence software.

Equinix, which owns 264 data centers in 33 countries, offered The Washington Post a tour of one of its facilities in Northern Virginia — home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world — for a rare glimpse inside how the tech industry’s backbone works.

The data center industry has grown exponentially during the past decade, particularly in Northern Virginia, where some of the massive buildings are a short walk from surrounding homes.

More than half a million people in Northern Virginia live in a neighborhood that’s less than a mile from a data center. That’s more than 1 in 5 residents.

Satellite imagery of data centers in 2014, showing a few.

Satellite imagery of data centers in 2024, showing many more in the same area.

In 2014, there were about 20 data centers near where the Equinix facility that The Post toured now exists.

Ten years later, the area is transformed, with more than 50 data centers shown in this satellite image.

Different types of data centers meet different demands. Many are connected to one another via a labyrinth of underground fiber-optic cables that make up the public internet network, or to private cables that are accessible only to specific customers. All are geared to minimize latency, or the time it takes for data to get from its source to you, the end user. There are four main types of data centers:

• An “enterprise” data center serves the needs of the company that owns it. Think of a corporation that stores in-house information on its own computers.

• Larger “hyperscale” data centers, owned by companies such as Amazon or Meta, have computer servers that cater solely to the company’s customers.

• “Edge” data centers are smaller buildings in or near major population centers, where digital connectivity becomes almost instantaneous for, say, a passing driverless car.

• Equinix is among the world’s largest owners of “colocation” data centers. Those facilities lease space to other businesses that hook up their servers to cables that belong to the data center company.

Inside DC12 and an adjoining DC15 building — both named after the D.C. region they cater to — are rows of server “cages” that cover almost the entire floor.

Each one houses the servers of individual companies, whose technicians sometimes visit to check on the equipment, many wearing backpacks stuffed with laptops and tools.

Netflix is a customer. So are Zoom, Hertz, Red Bull, Nasdaq and several banks and health care companies.

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Companies come to colocation data centers “because they’re trying to communicate with others,” said Chris Kimm, Equinix’s senior vice president of Global Customer Care and Experience.

For example, a company with a retail clothing website would want its