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Have you ever wondered what “the cloud” actually looks like? It’s a lot more physical than it sounds.

This Google Maps screenshot shows the so-called “Data Center Alley” in Ashburn, Northern Virginia—a cluster of warehouse-sized data centers located between a golf course and a few suburbs that look like they’re straight out of an American movie. AWS’s famous us-east-1 lives here, along with data centers from Microsoft, Google, Meta, IBM, Oracle, and many others. According to a frequently cited estimate from the local economic development office, around 70% of the world’s internet traffic passes through here. I have some doubts about whether this estimate is still accurate, but it is likely the world’s largest concentration of digital infrastructure.

As a software engineer or AI builder, it’s easy to forget that whatever services you call or build on, your code is actually moving photons through optical fibers and electrons across silicon somewhere, drawing real power from an electrical grid. AI is progressing really quickly right now, but the underlying physical infrastructure imposes constraints on how much of that progress is actually deployable.

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