Ashburn Data Centers

By David Gross

In Northern Virginia, many of our telecom carriers went bankrupt in the early-mid 2000s.   The region spent much of the last decade shifting its emphasis from being a leading hub for ISPs and CLECs, back to its more traditional role in government contracting.   However, data centers held on due to the unusually large amount of fiber optic capacity and interconnection points that already existed in the region, and centered in on one area - Ashburn - for their large expansions.

Ashburn sits in the middle of rapidly growing Loudoun County, a few miles to the north of Dulles Airport.   Anyone who has visited the Equinix (EQIX), Digital Realty (DLR), or DuPont Fabros (DFT) facilities there has seen the planes, including many European flag carriers, flying right over the data center clusters on Beaumeade Circle/Filigree Court and Devin Shafron Drive.

The first major facility to go up in Ashburn was Equinix's DC1 in 1999.   When it was built, many thought it was too far out, and that it might have been better off closer to the large MAE East NAP in Tyson's Corner, 15 miles east, which along with MAE West in Silicon Valley passed more Internet traffic than just about any location in the world.    And with interconnection the centerpiece of the co-location business, proximity to both fiber and existing peering locations were highly important.  But land costs are much lower in Ashburn, as are existing building densities, two factors which have made it conducive to large, 100,000+ square foot facilities, while the smaller data centers have tended to stay to the east in Fairfax County and downtown DC. 

Today, there is just over 2 million square feet of public data center space in the Ashburn area, including the Savvis-operated/DLR-owned facilities a couple miles away on Ridgetop Circle and Nokes Boulevard, which have a Sterling address.   Those facilities are adjacent to the Dulles Town Center mall, which itself was built in 1999, and are surrounded by shopping centers, and new apartment and townhouse developments.   Meanwhile,  the Ashburn clusters tend to be slightly more rural, sitting west of Route 28, which runs right into the Dulles Airport entrance, and used to mark the end of civilization for many DC area residents.

The primary hub for data centers in Ashburn is a collection of interconnected roads - Beaumeade Circle, Hastings Drive, Chillum Place, and Filigree Court, which are less than a mile down Loudoun County Parkway from the Washington Redskins training facility.    The large former WorldCom/now Verizon Business office complex is another mile down Loudoun County Parkway.    And if you continue another half mile down that road, you come to the DLR cluster at Devin Shafron Drive.

DLR's new data center at 43915 Devin Shafron Drive

On Devin Shafron, there is a small patch of dirt and grass with a Digital Realty "for lease" sign in front, while nearby on Red Rum Drive, office REIT First Potomac Realty (FPO) recently bought the Corporate Campus at Ashburn Center, 123,000 feet of which are leased to managed hosting provider Latisys, which held a grand opening there last Thursday.  Among the established properties, Equinix's DC2 has long been the place to be, with a long list of financial, media, and telecom clients including MasterCard, The Motley Fool, Level 3, Internap, Electronic Arts, BT North America, and Accenture.   Around the corner from there on Hastings Drive, DC-based DFT has attracted its own set of brand name clients with Rackspace, Facebook, Yahoo, and Match.com.

This tenant mix in Ashburn reflects that this is the leading east coast data center hub, bringing together some of the largest telecom providers and most highly visited websites in the world.   In the 2010s, Ashburn is carrying on Northern Virginia's 1990s legacy as the hub of ISPs and internet connectivity.

Ashburn Data Centers
		Rentable Sq Ft	Tenants
DFT	ACC2 44490 Chillum Place	53,000	Yahoo
	ACC3 Hastings Drive	80,000
	ACC4 44480 Hastings Drive	172,000	Rackspace, Yahoo, Match.com., Facebook
	ACC5 Phase 1	86,000	Facebook
	ACC5 Phase 2	86,000
		477,000
DLR	21561/21571 Beaumeade Circle	164,453	AT&T
	43881 Devin Shafron Drive	180,000	FAA
	43791 Devin Shafron Drive	132,086	Morgan Stanley
	43831 Devin Shafron Drive	180,000	Amazon.com
	43915 Devin Shafron Drive	132,000
	21110 Ridgetop Circle, Sterling	135,513	Savvis
	45901/45845 Nokes Boulevard, Sterling	167,160	Savvis
	44470 Chillum Place	95,440	Equinix (DC3)
		1,186,652
EQIX	44470 Chillum Place	Leased from DLR	DC3
	21715 Filigree Court	147,600	DC2
	21701 Filigree Court	92,000	DC5
	21711 Filigree Court	43,000	DC1
	21721 Filigree Ct.	148,000	DC6
	21691 Filigree Court	100,000	DC4
		530,600
First Potomac Realty
	21635 Red Rum Drive	123,000	Latisys
	Total	2,317,252