Some things we simply know to be true.
The sky is blue.
Two plus two equals four.
And 70% of the world’s internet traffic goes through Northern Virginia.
The state’s economic development website says so. Loudoun County’s website says so. The Washington Post says so. The Northern Virginia Chamber’s economic report last week said so. Pretty much everybody says so, because it’s such an easy and dramatic way to describe the explosive growth of data centers in the region.
Is it true, though?
Spoiler alert: probably not.
I realize that disputing this figure in Virginia is akin to saying that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t some demigod, he was a scheming, deal-dealing politician like all the rest — although the musical “Hamilton” has already said that. However, as data centers expand out of Northern Virginia, it’s natural to wonder: “Hey, if they’re getting 70% of the world’s internet traffic, how much are we getting?” The answer seems to be that the premise of the question is wrong.
Don’t blame me for exposing that this marketing slogan is a fraud. Blame Tim Stronge.
Stronge is chief research officer at TeleGeography, a company that provides analysis for the telecommunications industry. The firm has offices in Washington, London and Singapore and says that its teams of experts “build and maintain massive data sets that are used to monitor, forecast, and map the telecommunications industry.”
Beware of people with lots of data because they may prove your favorite fact to be wrong.
In 2019, Stronge published a report on the TeleGeography website that explained why the popular 70% figure simply can’t be true. You can read the whole thing here, but this is the key statistic: “Only 23% of the world’s international internet capacity connects to the United States. The rest connects to each other.” It’s hard to jump from there to 70%. “This means that it’s unlikely that at any point in the last decade did 70% of the world’s traffic flow through the U.S., much less northern Virginia,” Stronge wrote then.
I remembered reading his takedown of the 70% figure years ago but didn’t think much about it then because data centers were on the other side of the state. Now, some of them are headed our way — Botetourt County just announced that Google is buying 312 acres in the county’s industrial park for a data center complex — so I became curious if his analysis remained the same.
“Yes, it definitely still holds,” Stronge said, via an email that probably got routed through a data center in Northern Virginia. “In fact, the case against the myth is even stronger now. The U.S., as a whole, is less central now to the global internet than it ever has been. In 2019 (at the time of the last ‘MythBusters’ segment we presented), the U.S. accounted for 30% of total international bandwidth usage. That number fell to 25% by 2024, and probably is a little lower now.
“Furthermore, the Washington DC area is not the primary jump-off point for U.S. international links. Miami, New York, and Los Angeles all have more international circuits provisioned to them than DC.”
I was curious whether Stronge had gotten any kind of pushback when he disputed Northern Virginia’s status. “Nope, none. All of the industry insiders I’ve spoken to agreed with the assessment,” he said, again via an email that probably caused some data center in Northern Virginia to start smoking out of rage.
However, just as I’m not inclined to take the 70% figure without question, neither was I inclined to take Stronge’s word that no one had questioned him as the gospel, either. So I asked a bunch of people knowledgeable about the data center industry. Stronge is right: No one disputes him. Or, put another way, no one really believes that 70% figure, although it gets constantly repeated. The Northern Virginia Chamber, in its report, cited the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, which doesn’t know where or when that figure came from.
The Northern Virginia Technology Council sent me to Fletcher Mangum of Mangum Economics. He connected me with his technology specialist, David Zorn. “It’s one of those things that everyone says is true,” he said, but likely isn’t. “I wouldn’t want to put it in a report,” he said.
The General Assembly’s research arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, produced a 156-page report on data centers last year and intentionally didn’t mention that figure, said chief legislative analyst Mark Gribben. “While it is still widely quoted for some reason, we didn’t put any credence in it,” he said in another email that might have choked some proud Northern Virginia data center. “Also the ‘industry standard’ way to measure data centers is by [megawatt] capacity, not computer or internet traffic which are much harder to gauge. ‘Share of internet traffic’ may also be an increasingly outdated term. For example, does streaming Netflix count as internet traffic? How do you measure internet traffic anyway? Again not something we got into but another reason we stayed away from it.”
Everybody does agree on one thing that might help data center champions in Northern Virginia feel better: Northern Virginia has more data centers than anywhere else. Its claim to being the “Data Center Capital of the World” is quite secure. That JLARC report said that Northern Virginia’s data center capacity is more than twice the size of the next biggest competitor: Beijing, China. It’s three times the size of the next biggest American center for data centers: Hillsboro, Oregon.
Here’s how the Cushman & Wakefield 2024 Global Data Center Market Comparison ranked the world’s top data center markets, as measured by megawattage.
Northern Virginia 4,140 MW
Beijing 1,860 MW
Hillsboro, Oregon 1,600 MW
Phoenix 1,560 MW
Shanghai 1,400 MW
Dallas 1,290 MW
Columbus, Ohio 1,170 MW
Atlanta 1,070 MW
Tokyo 1,030 MW
London 1,000 MW
A more recent report, by JLL, says Northern Virginia’s data center capacity is now up to 4,900 megawatts but doesn’t have international figures, so we can’t use those to compute a percentage. However, none of these put the region anywhere close to the purported 70% figure.
On the contrary, that JLARC report put the region’s data center capacity at 25% of all the capacity in North America and 13% of global capacity. Zorn, from Mangum Economics, says it’s more like 22% — and the rest of Virginia puts the whole state up to 26% of the nation’s capacity. Factor in international locations of data centers, and those percentages go down; we’re just now sure how much.
Northern Virginia’s still easily No. 1, and that’s what we ought to focus on, not the fictional 70% figure.
So where did that figure come from, anyway? Nobody knows. The best guess (from Stronge and others) is that maybe it was true at one time. If so, that time would have been in the 1990s, when the Northern Virginia-based America Online ruled the online world — and we still had dial-up connections that screamed like a machine in pain.
I’m sorry to report that it’s not the 1990s anymore.
On the other hand, the last time I checked, the sky was still blue and two plus two was still four.
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