> my recent 20 mile bike ride in Loudon county was nothing but massive datacenters and crisscrossing powerlines to support them. The western side of neighboring Prince William County is now being consumed for data centers.
Is this actually true or hyperbole? Ireland has the same size and population as Virginia is described as a major location for data centres, but all the data centres on the island combined take up less than one square km [0]. By comparison, Dublin Airport is 10 square km.
Sounds like Virginia needs to be two orders of magnitude more dense in DCs, or have them developed exactly in a ribbon along your route, to really dominate the landscape like that.