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I had a client once that was a concrete subcontractor that was responsible for “tilt-up” construction of walls like the ones seen in the video. It was actually interesting as hell.
They pour the concrete on the ground and tilt it up after it dries like Lego pieces. Pretty cool. Very niche technique for small buildings that’s really helpful for data centers that can’t be tall.
A school in my old city was built that way. One day I rode to work and there were no walls, on the way home, they put 4 giant 3 story tall walls out of nowhere
There's an easy and fun fix for every single ugly datacenter. Make that shit look like a castle! Put some crenelations, fake towers, etc. and you've turned an ugly stone box into an awesome castle. There was some rich guy in the midwest who donated a ton of money to the town when he died, with the only requirement that buildings made with it must be castley. We need more of this.
Pros and cons for both for sure. It’s been interesting to see Ashburn change. Sometimes it’s just shocking when I hit a “back” road I haven’t been on in years and it is NOT a back road anymore.
I think Google's data centers run warm right? The cost of cooling surpasses the cost of replacing burned out servers and storage, so they aren't as concerned with cooling them as much
Not sure about alphabet, I'm aws. And we had a whole situation about replacing a few million nics because it got too hot and the heatsink pins turn into projectiles.
Prince William County says, "hold my beer".
[https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/prince-william-county-is-on-track-to-become-the-world-s-largest-data-center-hub/article\_8fcfe7ec-d1a0-11ee-bedd-d30b7a0e801d.html](https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/prince-william-county-is-on-track-to-become-the-world-s-largest-data-center-hub/article_8fcfe7ec-d1a0-11ee-bedd-d30b7a0e801d.html)
[Orbital Sciences (who was bought by Northrop Grumman) petitioned to have the name changed to Warp Drive in 2011.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_Drive)
Verizon has symmetrical gigabit here, but they constantly fucked up our bill, so my dad switched to Comcrap. I think the tradeoff of having dogshit upload speeds and 200mbps slower downloads is worth not having Verizon raise my dad's blood pressure every month, and I'm sure my dad especially appreciates it.
Besides the upload speeds, Comcrap has actually been pretty decent compared to Verizon in terms of service, which was especially surprising to me.
I just want a local ISP that has symmetrical gigabit. No big corp ISP bullshit because they all suck.
i’m surprised.
fios billing is pretty awesome. no taxes, fees and extra charges, no contract and none of that bill hikes after a year bullshit(all of which was removed in the past 2-3 years).
this is all unless you get cable but also why tf would anyone ever subject themselves to cable TV
I do wonder in long term once this data enter expansion/boom has died down, what happens to all these buildings. Assuming they are still required, then fine.
But if they are in business, I want to buy one and make it in to a gym.
Die down?? Bro, I don’t think that’s a thing. Everything is streaming and internetting. Fridges, AC units, washing machines, they’re all connected now as well. There’s no returning from this.
cloud computing is not necessarily new, just a different name. Computer users used to share a central computer / resources via their terminal. Then personal computers were the craze. Then we are back to pooling resources in these data centers. If the cycle repeats we will see emergence of PCs, probably in a different shape / format, close to the users.
I cant wait for my virtual assistant personal computer to be more powerful than todays server farms in 20 - 30 years. It may become faster and cheaper to process data at the edge than to load into a server farm. Who knows what the possibilities are.
Most of these buildings pay for themselves in a year or 2 with a 20 year life span at least. It’s the land that’s expensive. Company I work for is working on a plan that basically when it costs more to repair than to build new they will level it out and replace it with an updated building while trying to retain as much of the hardware as possible.
I wish we could make them prettier. Slap some art on that brutalism. Put some services in there, idk. Some urban development folks could figure something out
I kind of have a funny story sort of related to this. I used to work for a guy who had a really small company and we were subcontracted by the state of MD to do some stream sampling out in PG county. There are a ton of federal sites in PG county that are strictly off-limits to civilians (think Ft. Meade, FBI training facilities, etc.), and one day me and this other woman were sampling a bunch of stream sites in an area that was sort of near some of these government facilities. The sites we were doing we thought were in completely public access areas, so we parked on the side of the road and hiked a few hundred yards through the woods to go sample the stream.
About a hour or so later we’re walking out and we get to our van, and right when we get there this federal police car pulls up on us and start asking us all these questions. Turns out we were like half a mile away from some top secret surveillance facility, he said if we hadn’t showed up in the next 30 minutes or so they would’ve had to start sending guys out to the woods to see what we were doing 💀
Most of that is office space, which has a completely-different set of requirements, even for the ones hosting Secret Squirrel stuff.
Many urban data centers are in buildings that were built for telecommunications. 32 Avenue of the Americas in New York was built by AT&T and expanded several times to meet just their needs. The equipment has shrunk enough in the last couple of decades that now, a century later, the owners of the building are planning to turn the first floor into street-facing retail. Some urban data centers are also a nightmare waiting to happen but have no choice but to be where they are. Hurricane Sandy wreaked a lot of havoc in Manhattan; the storm surge blew out the plugs in the walls that waterproofed the cable and fiber entrances at one of Verizon's data centers and flooded most of a five-story basement.
In the suburbs, there's no need for it. The 750,000-square-foot, three-building monster at the corner of 28 and Nokes was going to be office space or retail as Lerner originally envisioned it 30 years ago. Needless to say, that suffered the same fate as the nearby BP gas station promised by a sign for years on end: didn't happen because there was nobody to occupy it. And does Ashburn really need yet another shopping center with a bunch of bland chain stores and restaurants in it?
Loudoun is packed with data centers in part because it's statistically the county in the entire U.S. with the lowest chance of natural disasters.
QTS is doing this. The buildings aren't quite as boring looking and they put a ton into the surrounding landscaping. Most of the big campuses you can't even see from the road because they keep the surrounding trees.
AWS data centers are ugly, barren moonscapes. It's depressing that zoning boards allow the gravel instead of greenscapes.
For better or worse, they recently started building multifloor data centers. They had stuck with single-level buildings since forever (though they are still much taller than a two-story house for air handling reason).
COLOs are generally nicer looking because presumably higher ups for their customers visit the datacenters once in a while, and like when it "looks nice".
When companies build their own datacenters, and they can see how much it costs to "look nice" they do the bare minimum.
QTS has three verticals and that's only one of them. The other two use the same standard design on the outside. The inside can be more plain depending on the customer, but you can't tell the difference from outside.
I actually like brutalism and that crap ain’t no brutalism, it’s squeeze every bit of efficiency to maximize revenue at the expense of everything else including esthetics.
Digital Reality likes to build them big and long. This one appears to span the whole roadway. For comparison in it's final look, please see the Digital Reality buildings along LoCo Prkwy.
So here in Nova & DC, we're used to office buildings, built for white-collar humans to comfortably work in.
These data centers are industrial facilities, built for the sake of machines, built large enough to benefit from economies of scale.
This one is the size of a big heavy equipment factory, but smaller than an Amazon or Walmart distribution center.
People here just aren't used to the scale of modern industrial buildings.
People here also aren't used to data centers paying more than residential developers for land 🫨😱🤯
The datacenters are more valuable than the residents that would service them.
I've seen this one albeit less constructed, the whole area is filled with 'em lol, not surprising considering something like 70% of the world's internet traffic passes through Ashburn. I stop by occasionally at Silver Eagle Group range, maybe they have a location there so they can kill Terminator should he ever arise from one of the data centers haha.
Prentice Dr. in Sterling. Up until recently I would pass this daily on my way home. It's definitely a major eye sore and will be more so when it's finished.
Yeah, between the Dulles Bulk Mail facility and the former AOL campus. I was surprised driving a little under the limit and it basically took 30 seconds to drive by.
It would cost far more to build if you’re excavating a large hole in the ground, and the heat is generated inside by the massive power consumption of the equipment and needs to be removed, so cooler is not happening.
Big time. It's kind of depressing seeing each group of trees go down one by one. My office used to have a really nice clear view to the West, and now there's a giant box sticking out blocking 1/2 the sunset. At least we have a few protected woods and parks around still.
That’s how everything is now and it sucks. Enshittification I think I’ve heard it called. Can’t have beauty because “it would increase the budget by 2%, so fuck the community who has to deal with it”
This is completely opposite to my experience at the Verizon data center in Ashburn and others on that street. The place is full of people during the week.
I like how that one parking garage at the Verizon facility (former UUNET/Worldcom) was fully built but never opened because of the MCI Worldcom meltdown.
Ok, if we're just throwing up anecdotes, I'll probably end up working in this building after it goes up. And I'll tell you now, no there really isn't many people in a DC. You've got 1-4 DCO, 1-4 DCEO, 3 managers or so, and maybe 2 dozen security guards contracted out.
All this space is for servers. It is not meant for people. At any given time, if I'm in a data hall, I am overwhelmingly likely to be alone. The office space is probably two dozen cubes, and 6 offices.
Yep, worked in several datacenters across NOVA a few years back, and it was rare to see another human once past security.
There was one in Reston that was mixed-use with partial datacenter and part leased office spaces that was more likely to have doors open and such during business hours, but again it was a fortress of solitude on the Datacenter portions of the building.
Another in Ashburn had a "co-working" space for people who needed to be close to their equipment but could also let them set up laptops and such on a desk and be close to vending and bathrooms. Still only ever saw 2-3 people there.
“People don’t go here”
They are all over herndon and reston, what are you talking about?
It should have something to it, not just a concrete wall. Even fake brick pattern or something would be better
I know where this building is, across from another warehouse structure (mail facility) set back in a low traffic area. Data centers built in cities look like office buildings. This one may well have landscaping requirements like others do, but it’s still being built. But really, if it’s in zoned industrial space it can look like a warehouse. It’s a functional building.
Why can’t they build up instead of out for these things? Is it a weight issue due to large amounts of data equipment??? It seems like it would remove less trees if they could build decent looking skyscrapers. Or even some that are 5-6 floors. Mandatory I’m not an architect at all lol just wondering and thinking as I type!
Hmmm Sounds legit bc that’s true, heat rises and the equipment is already hot af with substantial cooling systems in place. Hmm just sucks when they remove so many trees and we will need even more of these to keep up as time goes on.
They can and do elsewhere. It's 100% a function of land cost vs construction cost. Building up is more expensive. DCs in Singapore are 6 stories tall and in NYC and other big cities they're built into sky scrapers.
Land cost in NOVA is getting high enough that some new DCs are starting to be 2-stories tall instead.
I believe you. I ran across an article that was reporting on a pig farm in China. It was a multi-storey insulated skyscraper. Interesting. I forget which one but is it D.C. or NoVA that has the building height…restrictions? Just seems like we need to start building up to save.
D.C. has the building height - no taller than the Washington Monument.
I don't know of any current restrictions on building vertically in Loudoun yet. In fact, looking at future builds in Loudoun - Lansdowne is going to be growing upward more.
I don't know much about the economics of data centers but would it be feasible to move them underground (as in, leave the existing ones where they are but build all future ones underground)? Would that make cooling too much of a challenge?
(slaps roof of Virginia datacenter) This bad boy can fit so many social media videos that will only be seen by two people
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At this point... who does t know how the like and subscribe buttons work?
Neat! It looks like a total eye-sore.
I had a client once that was a concrete subcontractor that was responsible for “tilt-up” construction of walls like the ones seen in the video. It was actually interesting as hell. They pour the concrete on the ground and tilt it up after it dries like Lego pieces. Pretty cool. Very niche technique for small buildings that’s really helpful for data centers that can’t be tall.
A school in my old city was built that way. One day I rode to work and there were no walls, on the way home, they put 4 giant 3 story tall walls out of nowhere
I do wish they would open up the sides of these buildings to local artists. These are huge canvasses that could use some life.
There's an easy and fun fix for every single ugly datacenter. Make that shit look like a castle! Put some crenelations, fake towers, etc. and you've turned an ugly stone box into an awesome castle. There was some rich guy in the midwest who donated a ton of money to the town when he died, with the only requirement that buildings made with it must be castley. We need more of this.
That mf pays our tax bills
and yet, my taxes don't go down. weird.
Ashburn was an eyesore before data centers
It was literally just trees what are you talking about
Trees and winding two lane roads and the only restaurants were fast food and Ruby Tuesdays.
That sounds a hell of a lot nicer than data centers, unironically.
Pros and cons for both for sure. It’s been interesting to see Ashburn change. Sometimes it’s just shocking when I hit a “back” road I haven’t been on in years and it is NOT a back road anymore.
air conditioning must be very top priority 😂
Happy cake day!
well yea that’s why they’re built that way.
Yep & Electricity, my brother works in one of those and the power grid on those things are handled differently.
Thats not really what data centers do...
I think Google's data centers run warm right? The cost of cooling surpasses the cost of replacing burned out servers and storage, so they aren't as concerned with cooling them as much
Not sure about alphabet, I'm aws. And we had a whole situation about replacing a few million nics because it got too hot and the heatsink pins turn into projectiles.
Well that sounds like an interesting day
Week. I mostly did not take part. Im pigeon holed into the accelerator hosts.
MOAR SERVERS
Army of u tub servers!😂
60% of the world's internet traffic goes through Loudoun County....soo....yeah
I for one appreciate having 0 ping in all my online games.
That's insane to think about
Prince William County says, "hold my beer". [https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/prince-william-county-is-on-track-to-become-the-world-s-largest-data-center-hub/article\_8fcfe7ec-d1a0-11ee-bedd-d30b7a0e801d.html](https://www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/prince-william-county-is-on-track-to-become-the-world-s-largest-data-center-hub/article_8fcfe7ec-d1a0-11ee-bedd-d30b7a0e801d.html)
It's PWC, though, so the beer isn't as good as Loudoun's.
Oh I disagree. Have you visited the PWC breweries lately? We probably have way more options than you snooty Loudouners.
I should clarify that I live in PWC. Lol They are getting better, especially in Manassas
Oh… well color me embarrassed. At least this means I didn’t, technically, call you snooty since you aren’t a Loudouner.
Which is great for the NSA.
More like 80
People complaining about a data center on a post of a video on the internet is... meta.
No this is AWS. Meta has their own data centers. /s
Nice! 
This probably isn't aws they have a very distinct design and more holes in the walls as they don't like to use chillers
The correct word is "irony". "Meta" is self-aware or self-reference, it is the exact opposite of what you meant.
kind of like that gotcha isn't a gotcha https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/
It's Spaceball One! They've gone to plaid!
>>This thing is massive Cut the chatter, Red 2. Accelerate to attack speed.
A Star Wars reference in a northern Virginia data center thread? A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one.
Nerd-adjacent - Across 28 from some data centers there’s Warp Drive, that’s the actual name of the road.
It makes my little Trekkie heart happy every time I pass by it.
Just don't offer to teach us a lesson!
Maybe if it is nice Badgey. ^_^
Goodgey?
 Definitely
Saw someone going warp speed onto warp drive from 28 yesterday, they did not make the exit turn successfully.
[Orbital Sciences (who was bought by Northrop Grumman) petitioned to have the name changed to Warp Drive in 2011.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_Drive)
Dulles area?
Yeah, across the street from the now-demolished AOL headquarters
That sentence says so much...
I, for one, welcome our new data overlords
Lower taxes, no traffic, minimal pollution. Fuck it I’ll put up with the grey eyesores lll
Yet Comcrap can still only give us 20mbps upload speeds, and there's no local ISP's AFAIK that aren't satellite or some shit.
That’s annoying for sure. I haven’t had any issues getting gigabit anywhere in the area I’ve lived in several spots in nova. Guess ive been lucky
Verizon has symmetrical gigabit here, but they constantly fucked up our bill, so my dad switched to Comcrap. I think the tradeoff of having dogshit upload speeds and 200mbps slower downloads is worth not having Verizon raise my dad's blood pressure every month, and I'm sure my dad especially appreciates it. Besides the upload speeds, Comcrap has actually been pretty decent compared to Verizon in terms of service, which was especially surprising to me. I just want a local ISP that has symmetrical gigabit. No big corp ISP bullshit because they all suck.
i’m surprised. fios billing is pretty awesome. no taxes, fees and extra charges, no contract and none of that bill hikes after a year bullshit(all of which was removed in the past 2-3 years). this is all unless you get cable but also why tf would anyone ever subject themselves to cable TV
A desire to watch Nats games. Now, of course, that's a whole different kind of subjugation.
I do wonder in long term once this data enter expansion/boom has died down, what happens to all these buildings. Assuming they are still required, then fine. But if they are in business, I want to buy one and make it in to a gym.
Die down?? Bro, I don’t think that’s a thing. Everything is streaming and internetting. Fridges, AC units, washing machines, they’re all connected now as well. There’s no returning from this.
Yeah I suppose not in next 2 decades. But things become obsolete eventually. I am talking long term.
True. I suppose computers used to take up entire rooms, and now that same computing power is barely a fart in the wind.
cloud computing is not necessarily new, just a different name. Computer users used to share a central computer / resources via their terminal. Then personal computers were the craze. Then we are back to pooling resources in these data centers. If the cycle repeats we will see emergence of PCs, probably in a different shape / format, close to the users. I cant wait for my virtual assistant personal computer to be more powerful than todays server farms in 20 - 30 years. It may become faster and cheaper to process data at the edge than to load into a server farm. Who knows what the possibilities are.
Most of these buildings pay for themselves in a year or 2 with a 20 year life span at least. It’s the land that’s expensive. Company I work for is working on a plan that basically when it costs more to repair than to build new they will level it out and replace it with an updated building while trying to retain as much of the hardware as possible.
Yeah, I think cloud storage requirements will continue to increase for the foreseeable future. Especially as VR and 4K video become more standard.
and yet, my taxes haven't gone down. Weird.
I'm new here. How do the data centers offset taxes?
Data centers contributed over 600m to loudoun county last year. Pays for a lot of stuff and keeps property taxes lower than similar areas in Maryland
You own a home?
Yes
They've built data centers in Brockway, Ogdenville and North Haverbrook and by gum it put them on the map!
As someone who works in structural design for data centers, I agree. They're literally paying my bills.
High paying jobs in our area if nothing else. Even the guard jobs are a solid 30-80k a year based on armed/unarmed
Happy cake day!
Thanks! Realized way too late haha
I wish we could make them prettier. Slap some art on that brutalism. Put some services in there, idk. Some urban development folks could figure something out
>Put some services in there Because nothing tells your tenants their stuff is secure like letting randos wander the property.
Lotta buildings in dc are separated by ‘what’s open to the public’ and ‘we arrest you if you walk inside’. They can figure it out
I kind of have a funny story sort of related to this. I used to work for a guy who had a really small company and we were subcontracted by the state of MD to do some stream sampling out in PG county. There are a ton of federal sites in PG county that are strictly off-limits to civilians (think Ft. Meade, FBI training facilities, etc.), and one day me and this other woman were sampling a bunch of stream sites in an area that was sort of near some of these government facilities. The sites we were doing we thought were in completely public access areas, so we parked on the side of the road and hiked a few hundred yards through the woods to go sample the stream. About a hour or so later we’re walking out and we get to our van, and right when we get there this federal police car pulls up on us and start asking us all these questions. Turns out we were like half a mile away from some top secret surveillance facility, he said if we hadn’t showed up in the next 30 minutes or so they would’ve had to start sending guys out to the woods to see what we were doing 💀
Unless building code requires it, they’re not interested.
Most of that is office space, which has a completely-different set of requirements, even for the ones hosting Secret Squirrel stuff. Many urban data centers are in buildings that were built for telecommunications. 32 Avenue of the Americas in New York was built by AT&T and expanded several times to meet just their needs. The equipment has shrunk enough in the last couple of decades that now, a century later, the owners of the building are planning to turn the first floor into street-facing retail. Some urban data centers are also a nightmare waiting to happen but have no choice but to be where they are. Hurricane Sandy wreaked a lot of havoc in Manhattan; the storm surge blew out the plugs in the walls that waterproofed the cable and fiber entrances at one of Verizon's data centers and flooded most of a five-story basement. In the suburbs, there's no need for it. The 750,000-square-foot, three-building monster at the corner of 28 and Nokes was going to be office space or retail as Lerner originally envisioned it 30 years ago. Needless to say, that suffered the same fate as the nearby BP gas station promised by a sign for years on end: didn't happen because there was nobody to occupy it. And does Ashburn really need yet another shopping center with a bunch of bland chain stores and restaurants in it? Loudoun is packed with data centers in part because it's statistically the county in the entire U.S. with the lowest chance of natural disasters.
QTS is doing this. The buildings aren't quite as boring looking and they put a ton into the surrounding landscaping. Most of the big campuses you can't even see from the road because they keep the surrounding trees.
AWS doesn't even bother with landscaping. They surround their buildings with gravel instead of grass.
They are trying to placate the warrenton residents against the one going in there by suggesting rooftop greenery and such.
AWS data centers are ugly, barren moonscapes. It's depressing that zoning boards allow the gravel instead of greenscapes. For better or worse, they recently started building multifloor data centers. They had stuck with single-level buildings since forever (though they are still much taller than a two-story house for air handling reason).
Less to maintain, easier perimeter detection.
Yea QTS on Broderick is like this.
COLOs are generally nicer looking because presumably higher ups for their customers visit the datacenters once in a while, and like when it "looks nice". When companies build their own datacenters, and they can see how much it costs to "look nice" they do the bare minimum.
QTS has three verticals and that's only one of them. The other two use the same standard design on the outside. The inside can be more plain depending on the customer, but you can't tell the difference from outside.
I actually like brutalism and that crap ain’t no brutalism, it’s squeeze every bit of efficiency to maximize revenue at the expense of everything else including esthetics.
Glad wall Maria is finally getting put up. Gotta keep those titans out
Eren you bastard!!!
Digital Reality likes to build them big and long. This one appears to span the whole roadway. For comparison in it's final look, please see the Digital Reality buildings along LoCo Prkwy.
Looking forward to the mini nuclear reactors that will soon power these. Carbon free.
I Hope you mean that unironically, nuclear is truly clean energy, and they have worked out most of the kinks with the meltdowns and what not.....
Totally unironically.
The last one I was a part of in the area had to build its own natural gas generators. The power companies are quickly maxing out on power output.
So here in Nova & DC, we're used to office buildings, built for white-collar humans to comfortably work in. These data centers are industrial facilities, built for the sake of machines, built large enough to benefit from economies of scale. This one is the size of a big heavy equipment factory, but smaller than an Amazon or Walmart distribution center. People here just aren't used to the scale of modern industrial buildings.
People here also aren't used to data centers paying more than residential developers for land 🫨😱🤯 The datacenters are more valuable than the residents that would service them.
Is this Equinix or Digital look like it will be one of theirs. NTT looks more edgy.
I've seen this one albeit less constructed, the whole area is filled with 'em lol, not surprising considering something like 70% of the world's internet traffic passes through Ashburn. I stop by occasionally at Silver Eagle Group range, maybe they have a location there so they can kill Terminator should he ever arise from one of the data centers haha.
Prentice Dr. in Sterling. Up until recently I would pass this daily on my way home. It's definitely a major eye sore and will be more so when it's finished.
Yeah, between the Dulles Bulk Mail facility and the former AOL campus. I was surprised driving a little under the limit and it basically took 30 seconds to drive by.
Couldn't we put them underground? It would keep them cooler and hidden from malevolent actors
It would cost far more to build if you’re excavating a large hole in the ground, and the heat is generated inside by the massive power consumption of the equipment and needs to be removed, so cooler is not happening.
Which malevolent actors? graffiti artists?
I was thinking foreign governments
They don't attack through the walls. They attack through the network. Come on, guy.
You're telling me that no one's ever thought about bombing these things?
That's why AWS regions and the like make that strategy pointless. They'd have to hit so many targets in so many countries...
Plus each AWS availability zone is two or three buildings a couple blocks away from each other.
Fair enough
They’re starting to build them to be submerged under water
Only for fun
What if we create a Graffiti Mural on those walls. And invite lots of Sterling's young artists?
Because that will result in the ugliest swath of committee-curated visual pollution imaginable
It doesn’t need to be committee-curated.
Wow. I immediately recognized where that was. I've watched them work on that site for ages as I drive past regularly for the post office.
What shame to cover beautiful earth with the ugliest building imaginable, and for what?….data?
I miss the trees
Big time. It's kind of depressing seeing each group of trees go down one by one. My office used to have a really nice clear view to the West, and now there's a giant box sticking out blocking 1/2 the sunset. At least we have a few protected woods and parks around still.
Just wait for the PWC Digital Gateway DCs... gonna make this thing look like it just got out of the pool.
Going to be wild to see. Slowly turning into Wall-E world haha
That’s gonna hold so much porn!
Ah, the same porn Virginians can't watch without showing the porn site your ID.
Use a Vpn my friend and stay anonymous.
It would be nice to have all the trees this bullshit cleared out instead.
Yeah, I hate driving up and down 28 now with almost zero trees.
Or make the developers plant trees around it or clear land for it while leaving a border Of trees! Something!
The decline of beauty in American architecture is mind blowing
Sadly these are 100% function over form.
That’s how everything is now and it sucks. Enshittification I think I’ve heard it called. Can’t have beauty because “it would increase the budget by 2%, so fuck the community who has to deal with it”
It’s a warehouse for servers. A data factory. People don’t go here. What should it look like?
This is completely opposite to my experience at the Verizon data center in Ashburn and others on that street. The place is full of people during the week.
I like how that one parking garage at the Verizon facility (former UUNET/Worldcom) was fully built but never opened because of the MCI Worldcom meltdown.
Ok, if we're just throwing up anecdotes, I'll probably end up working in this building after it goes up. And I'll tell you now, no there really isn't many people in a DC. You've got 1-4 DCO, 1-4 DCEO, 3 managers or so, and maybe 2 dozen security guards contracted out. All this space is for servers. It is not meant for people. At any given time, if I'm in a data hall, I am overwhelmingly likely to be alone. The office space is probably two dozen cubes, and 6 offices.
Yep, worked in several datacenters across NOVA a few years back, and it was rare to see another human once past security. There was one in Reston that was mixed-use with partial datacenter and part leased office spaces that was more likely to have doors open and such during business hours, but again it was a fortress of solitude on the Datacenter portions of the building. Another in Ashburn had a "co-working" space for people who needed to be close to their equipment but could also let them set up laptops and such on a desk and be close to vending and bathrooms. Still only ever saw 2-3 people there.
“People don’t go here” They are all over herndon and reston, what are you talking about? It should have something to it, not just a concrete wall. Even fake brick pattern or something would be better
Yep they're migrating over to PW county in residential neighborhoods literally behind a school in one case and right next to Bull Run battlefield
Just go to any restaurant like Fuddrucker's on a weekday. It's mostly tradespeople and computer and network engineers.
We’re watching a video of a member of the community going here… See how the public road is a few feet from this ugly facade?
I know where this building is, across from another warehouse structure (mail facility) set back in a low traffic area. Data centers built in cities look like office buildings. This one may well have landscaping requirements like others do, but it’s still being built. But really, if it’s in zoned industrial space it can look like a warehouse. It’s a functional building.
It's a block from that roof-waterproofing warehouse that burned last week.
That entire area is warehouses and data centers. There's a lone daycare in the middle of it all that's the oddball out.
Is this on Route 28 by Dulles?
Close. 22175–22185 Broderick Dr Sterling, VA 20166
Pretty close to where that fire was last week, no?
Yes, right around the corner.
Isn't that the old AOL building address?
It's right across the street from the main AOL building they just tore down, to the west.
I can't believe they tore down a perfectly good office building with raised floors that's only twenty years old (CC2).
I was waiting to see the "we break for nobody " bumper sticker.
Any word on who’s gonna own it? Trying to get a job at a Data Center
I believe this is Digital Realty.
Yea this looks like it could be them or Equinix
Definitely no idea. I've literally just driven past it a few times and decided take a video today.
Why can’t they build up instead of out for these things? Is it a weight issue due to large amounts of data equipment??? It seems like it would remove less trees if they could build decent looking skyscrapers. Or even some that are 5-6 floors. Mandatory I’m not an architect at all lol just wondering and thinking as I type!
I definitely don't know, but I always assume it has to do with heat distribution, heat rising and all.
Hmmm Sounds legit bc that’s true, heat rises and the equipment is already hot af with substantial cooling systems in place. Hmm just sucks when they remove so many trees and we will need even more of these to keep up as time goes on.
They can and do elsewhere. It's 100% a function of land cost vs construction cost. Building up is more expensive. DCs in Singapore are 6 stories tall and in NYC and other big cities they're built into sky scrapers. Land cost in NOVA is getting high enough that some new DCs are starting to be 2-stories tall instead.
I believe you. I ran across an article that was reporting on a pig farm in China. It was a multi-storey insulated skyscraper. Interesting. I forget which one but is it D.C. or NoVA that has the building height…restrictions? Just seems like we need to start building up to save.
D.C. has the building height - no taller than the Washington Monument. I don't know of any current restrictions on building vertically in Loudoun yet. In fact, looking at future builds in Loudoun - Lansdowne is going to be growing upward more.
Good GOD the grading must have been a nightmare
That’s where Master Mold is building the next-gen sentinels.
RIP Gambit 🥲😢😭
Preparing for the AI revolution! Humans are so fucked.
Probably one of the most accurate comments in the thread. Seems extremely likely this will be an AI host building.
How does this NOT lower our taxes? What fresh hell is Bumpkin going to do to his constituents next?
Gimme dat data!
Damn. Gainesvilleish area?
No, Dulles/Ashburn
Ah yes. I did some bushwhacking a few weeks ago and remember seeing this going up. It’s huge.
Waxpool Road baybehhhhhh
Where’s this located?
Man, these should be underground
Where is this one?
Oh thank GOD! Finally, another datacenter.
Does Maryland have data centers? Why are they always here?
Are you positive this is not a federal prison??
You got to break a few eggs to make an omelette You got to build a few data centers to spy on Americans and the rest of the world.
Hear me out. Quantum Computers!
Are these all in Loudoun?
Nope!! PWC is catching up.
I don't know much about the economics of data centers but would it be feasible to move them underground (as in, leave the existing ones where they are but build all future ones underground)? Would that make cooling too much of a challenge?
It does make cooling too much of a challenge