ASHBURN — Driving up the six-lane Route 28 in Loudoun County, Virginia, there’s a dark blue one on the left. Further up the way in a small clearing of trees, there’s a gray one on the right. Across the landscape, metal cables criss-cross in every direction to connect power to the sprawling buildings.

They’re not big-box stores like Ikea or Target. They’re bigger. They’re data centers that house the computers processing the internet and artificial intelligence. And they’re all over these suburban counties outside of Washington, D.C.

Virginia, especially Northern Virginia, leads the world in development, far outpacing other top markets such as Beijing.

So how did it happen that this region came to dominate data centers, an industry whose growth now fuels debates about electricity bills, c

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