In the quiet suburbs of northern Virginia, Bala Thumma gazed from his well-kept garden toward a soon-to-be-constructed colossal data center. “It’s going to be enormous,” Thumma shared with the Daily Mail. “It’ll be three times the size of my house. We’re just 500 feet away, and when the generators are running, the noise will exceed 90 decibels.”

Thumma, who lives in a serene neighborhood lined with million-dollar homes, now faces the prospect of being encircled by these imposing structures. Already, a massive black and red edifice stands at the end of the cul-de-sac. Bulldozers are currently at work on a sprawling 200-acre plot at the street’s opposite end, tearing down a historic barn and grain silo that once dotted the pastoral landscape.

Although Thumma, a 47-year-old IT consultant, acknowledges the value of progress, he expressed his concerns. “I’m not against advancement—technology is my livelihood,” he remarked. “But there’s nowhere else in the country, or even the world, where you see this happening.”

This corner of Northern Virginia, once a peaceful retreat about an hour’s drive from Washington D.C., is now home to hundreds of data centers, transforming the area’s character and leaving residents like Thumma grappling with the rapid changes in their environment.

‘I’m not opposed to progress, said Thumma, a 47, an IT consultant. ‘Tech is my bread and butter. But you don’t see this anywhere else in the country.’

Or, indeed, on the planet. There are hundreds of data centers in this previously serene corner of Northern Virginia, about an hour west of Washington D.C.

Staggeringly, two third’s of the world’s internet traffic passes through them.

On Monday, the web faced a massive three-hour disruption across the world that hit a litany of services including including social media, gaming, food delivery, streaming and financial platforms. Those affected included Netflix, Disney+, ChatGPT, Fortnite and Roblox.

An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center in its US East 1 region, where the recent global outage was traced to

Bala Thumma in his garden which will soon have a 60ft high data center looming over it

The problem was traced to Amazon Web Services’ US-East-1 region, its biggest cluster of data centers, in northern Virginia.

AWS provides behind-the-scenes cloud computing infrastructure for many of the world’s biggest online businesses, along with government departments and universities.

While it’s not possible to determine which particular center was the source, one of them is a stone’s throw from Laura Thomas’s back porch, and looms over a nearby Greek orthodox church and preschool.

‘It’s a pain in the ass,’ Thomas, 69, told the Daily Mail. ‘The traffic means I can’t see to get out of my neighborhood. It used to be woods. There were deer. I would rather have had the woods and the wildlife.’

She added: ‘It’s ugly. When they first built it I said what is this thing and the security guy said, I can’t tell you. I thought it must be the CIA. If it’s a data center why so secretive, who cares?’

Indeed, security around the brown and gray monolith is tight. It is protected by iron fencing, a security barrier, an array of cameras, and even along one stretch a moat.

The proliferation of data centers has helped make Loudoun County the wealthiest in the United States, and brought it the unofficial titles ‘Data Center Capital of the World’ and ‘Data Center Alley.’

Campaigners are warning about how much power data centers take up in northern Virginia where two thirds of the globe’s internet traffic passes through

Amazon Web Services was hit with a worldwide outage that impacted hundreds of websites that use the company’s cloud-hosting service

It was fueled by several factors including being the base for AOL in the 1990s, closeness to the federal government in Washington, and an aggressive local policy of nearly $2 billion in tax breaks for data centers.

Now, when information is saved to ‘the cloud’ there is a good chance it is stored there.

AWS’s US-East-1 began in 2006 and services everything from streaming and gaming giants to news websites.

However, the outage this week was just the latest in a string of problems traced to the rolling fields of northern Virginia.

That included a huge internet meltdown in 2021 when everything from airline reservations and auto dealerships to payment apps and video streaming services were affected for more than five hours. There were other problems in 2017 and 2023.

Local campaigners against data centers are now warning that, as the AI surge hits, there will be yet more data centers built in the area, requiring even more power, and potentially leading to disaster.

Already over 25 percent of all power produced in Virginia goes to data centers, and it could rise to 46 percent by 2030. One data center uses as much water as 1,000 houses.

‘This industry is a threat to humanity. Virginia is the canary in the coalmine,’ Elena Schlossberg, who has been campaigning against the rise of data centers for a decade, told the Daily Mail.

In the ‘data center capital of the world’ in northern Virginia they have been built close to houses

Anti-data center activist said the rise of data centers amounted to greed and warned of problems ahead 

‘To me it’s the height of avarice and greed and the rest of the seven deadly sins. It’s an abomination. What happens when an industry like that collapses? It’s not just a state impact, its a global impact.

‘From a business perspective, you’ve got most of the world’s internet concentrated here. Who thought that was a good idea? People talk about terrorist vulnerability, maybe that’s not a good idea. Isn’t it ripe for some kind of sabotage?’

She added: ‘What happens when there’s stress on the grid in peak time and the grid goes down? The worst case scenario, there are cascading blackouts, the diesel fuel on site lasts 24 to 48 hours. We’re not going to have enough power.

‘If the world wants to sacrifice the state of Virginia they need to put in a trillion dollars. The the world needs to pout more skin in the game. Virginia is a microcosm of what will happen to the rest of the globe.’

The U.S. has 10 times the number of data centers as its nearest rival Germany.

The data centers in Loudoun currently cover around 50 million square feet and contribute $9 billion a year for the county’s economy, supporting over 70,000 jobs.

According to a recent estimate by the U.S. Department of Energy data centers could use up to to 12 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2028, up from 4.4 percent in 2023.

The outage also affected Amazon services including Amazon.com, Amazon Alexa, Ring and Amazon Prime Video. Pictured, Amazon.com on Monday

Speaking this week, David Rosner, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates the sale of electricity, said: ‘I see our grid as needing every single megawatt, every single electron and every single molecule we can get to meet demand on those peak days and peak hours.’

Amazon is among those looking to expand amid the rise of AI but opposition in northern Virginia is growing, and there have been emotional public meetings over proposed new sites.

‘The status quo is not sustainable,’ Democratic Virginia state senator Russet Perry said. ‘If we fail to act, the unchecked growth of the data center industry will leave Virginia’s families, will leave their businesses, footing the bill for infrastructure costs, adjoining environmental degradation and facing escalating energy rates.’

State senator Russet Perry said the situation with data canters was ‘not sustainable’

Cybersecurity experts also warned about the potential consequences of allowing a handful of big tech companies to dominate key internet operations.

‘The world now runs on the cloud,’ said Patrick Burgess, a cybersecurity expert at U.K.-based BCS. ‘So much of the world now relies on these three or four big (cloud) computing companies who provide the underlying infrastructure.

‘It’s very difficult for users to pinpoint what is happening because we don’t see Amazon, we just see Snapchat or Roblox.”

According to John Scott-Railton, a cybersecurity researcher at Citizen Lab, Amazon’s US-Eeast-1 data centers are the backbone for ‘so many services that when things go screwy, domino effects around the internet as we know it are enormous.’

The U.S. currently has 10 times the number of data centers as its nearest rival Germany.

The data centers in Loudoun currently cover around 50 million square feet and contribute $9 billion a year for the county’s economy, supporting over 70,000 jobs.

Amazon is among those looking to expand amid the rise of AI, but opposition is growing and there have been emotional public meetings over proposed new sites.

‘The status quo is not sustainable,’ Democratic state senator Russet Perry said. ‘If we fail to act, the unchecked growth of the data center industry will leave Virginia’s families, will leave their businesses, footing the bill for infrastructure costs, adjoining environmental degradation and facing escalating energy rates.’

Some of the platforms affected on Monday morning included Amazon services like Amazon.com and Ring as well as gaming platforms like Fortnite and Roblox 

In an explanation of the latest outage, which contained tech jargon, AWS said the source of the problem was the ‘DynamoDB endpoint in the US-East-1 Region.’

DynamoDB is a centralized database service used to track user information and store key data

“DynamoDB isn’t a term that most consumers know,’ said Mike Chapple, an IT professor at the University of Notre Dame. ‘But it underpins the apps and services that all of us use every single day.’

‘It’s one of the record-keepers of the modern internet. But it stopped working and we saw the effects of that outage ripple across the internet. Amazon had the data safely stored but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data. It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.’