The heart of the World Wide Web: a city in the United States through which 70% of global Internet traffic passes
The town of Ashburn, Virginia, near Washington DC, was originally conceived as a safe haven for families who want to raise their children away from the noise of the capital, traffic jams and bustle. Today Ashburn has become the place with the highest concentration of fiber optic networks in the world, says "Voice of America".
“You'd be surprised how much cable is buried in our soil,” says county economic development director Buddy Reeser. “As a rule, we lay it on both sides of the road, and now we will also lay it under the highway itself.”
70% of global Internet traffic goes through this fiber. This is why Ashburn is known as the data center mall, or Silicon Valley in the eastern United States. Almost every email sent or received anywhere in the world is related to this infrastructure. If you store something in the electronic cloud, it is possible that this information is located in one of such data processing and storage centers.
“It's clear that the name 'cloud' means that your data is stored somewhere else,” says Reeser. “And this place is our Loudoun County.” In total, our centers cover an area of more than 1,5 square kilometers.”
Aol was one of the first to come to Ashburn back in the 90s and began building the power and cable infrastructure. A little later, MIA East moved to Loudoun County - this company has been providing Internet traffic exchange services since 1992.
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“One day, two friends over beer decided that they would allow each other to use the networks of small companies to pass traffic to each other,” says John Day, vice president of Sabey Data Centers.
Over time, dozens of other small providers have followed suit. And each participant in the network under construction has contributed its share to the development of today's mega-infrastructure.
Giants such as Google and Amazon also drew attention to Virginia later. The state sought to attract such a business with low land prices, low-cost power supply and access to water for cooling equipment. There are also hundreds of thousands of highly educated, experienced computer technology professionals living in Virginia.
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“The Internet is really made up of these powerful peer exchanges,” Day explains. — These points are located in data exchange and storage centers. Without such centers there would be no Internet. We want all our customers, wherever they are, to be able to continue to work online."
Each such center is under XNUMX-hour security and surveillance.
With the nondescript appearance of the buildings, they became a real chicken laying golden eggs for the state. So, only Laudon County will receive $ 230 million in tax revenue this year.
“For every dollar we invest in a data center, we get 15 dollars back,” says Buddy Reaser. “Agree, this is a good indicator.”
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