STERLING, Va. — Some of America’s largest corporations maintain major outposts in the bustling Washington suburbs near Dulles International Airport. Today, as McMansion communities expand ever westward toward the Shenandoah foothills, many of those same companies are constructing data centers in the region.
The massive rectangles of windowless server farms make up the largest concentration of data centers and computing power in the world. But it has also generated a sharp backlash in the surrounding communities, where energy bills are skyrocketing and noise complaints are increasingly common.
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