Cross-layer insight

Where AI demand collides with the grid

Northern Virginia's “Data Center Alley” — the densest cluster of compute load on Earth — sits on a grid it is outgrowing.

Loudoun County and its neighbours host the world's largest concentration of data centres, now joined by a wave of gigawatt-scale AI campuses. Each new hall is a step-change in electricity demand that lands in a single spot on the network.

Turn on the substations and transmission lines beneath the data-centre markers and the bottleneck is visible: the load is growing faster than the high-voltage infrastructure that feeds it, which is why utilities here are quoting multi-year interconnection queues and reviving fossil plants that were due to retire.

Layers in this view

Data CentresSubstationsTransmission Lines (≥380 kV)Power Plants

SOURCE: OpenStreetMap (data centres, substations, lines) · WRI Global Power Plant Database