The Digital Realty Innovation Lab, located in Loudun County, Virginia, hosts nearly 200 data centers and is at the heart of the so-called AI Alley.
On our daily commutes and regular trips to the grocery store, we often don’t take a moment to look at some of the buildings along the way. They just flash past along the side of the road. Usually, they’ll be apartment buildings, office blocks, and other everyday sights. One particular building complex in DC (Virginia’s Loudon County, to be precise) may not catch the eye as you pass, but the vast complex turns out to be the home of one of the most significant movements in technology today.
It seems to be a habit for some of the most important names in technology to house their headquarters and vital sites in seemingly ordinary buildings. Let’s not forget, for instance, that one of the internet’s most important websites works out of a former church in San Francisco. Now we have the story of this Virginia landmark, which doesn’t look like anything extraordinary but, despite that, contains a lot of the technology required to keep the United States a global powerhouse in the field of AI — and to keep the internet (or much of it) functional.
This is the mighty Digital Realty Innovation Lab, the site of the largest group of data centers anywhere on Earth. In short, it’s a real hub for the AI movement, and for the enormous amount of traffic that flows through the Internet’s most popular websites every single day. Here’s a closer look at this enigmatic facility.
