Source: The Nation
by Alissa Quart
“I was hiking on a nature park that cuts through 45 miles of Northern Virginia, crisscrossing grassy terrain, wetlands, wooden bridges, and goldenrod, and then a dozen promontories offering the most unnatural of sights: indowless, hulking block-long data centers and their attendant transmission lines and substations. I heard ‘the hum’ of the centers before I saw them; their sound resembled a horde of cicadas on meth. I felt nervous, and somewhat overwhelmed, as I counted roughly 20 of them in just the two miles I walked on the Washington and Old Dominion Railroad Trail in Loudoun County. Here is the country’s thickest concentration of data centers—233 centers in all, over 3 percent of the county’s overall land mass. Data Center Alley, as it’s called, is a harbinger of what is to come in this country if tech hyperscaling continues unchecked.” (10/21/26)
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/accidental-activists-data-center-alley/