Ashburn’s AI Data Centers Took 3,800 MW Off the Grid

Nine months after cameras toured Digital Realty’s Loudoun County lab, U.S. household power prices are climbing on the back of AI data centers. On September 9, 2026, the U.S. Energy Information Administration put 2026 electricity sales at 4,135 billion kilowatthours, with those halls and new factories doing most of the lifting.

The December 10, 2025 walkthrough sold a clean story: gray boxes near Dulles Airport, two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic, a rare look inside. The part that did not fit in three minutes is now on the bill in 13 states, in town-hall fights over water, and in a Texas freeze on new grid hookups.

Cameras Walked a Lab That Keeps Growing

The set was the Digital Realty Innovation Lab in Ashburn, the company’s first proving room for dense AI and cloud gear, in a hall tagged ACC6. Andy Power, Digital Realty’s chief executive, stood in the aisle and made the pitch that every streaming app, office login, and morning show feed had already passed through rooms like it.

We are literally standing in the power center for the cloud right now.

Andy Power, chief executive, Digital Realty, December 2025 facility tour

The tour put the company at 300 data centers worldwide and compared one Loudoun building to two aircraft carriers, more than a million square feet. Digital Realty’s own Northern Virginia brief is smaller and more specific: more than 30 of its halls in that market and more than 725 megawatts of IT load, tied into Ashburn’s internet exchanges.

That lab is a test bed, not the whole campus. Partners bring GPU racks into a live hall, check cooling and power at the densities AI actually uses, then copy the design into production rooms. Digital Realty lists sibling labs in London and Tokyo, with a São Paulo site due in September 2026 and Singapore later in the year.

In January 2026 the company went back to the Army Corps of Engineers for Digital Dulles off Old Ox Road in Sterling, asking to add two buildings, grow two substations, and widen a transmission easement. It has billed that campus as the world’s largest multi-tenant site, as much as 11.7 million square feet and up to 1 gigawatt. The gray wall the cameras called easy to miss from the air is still adding bays.

PJM Hit the Cap, and the Meter Moved

Loudoun sits on PJM Interconnection, the grid that moves power for 67 million people from Virginia Beach to Chicago. That is also Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, the densest cluster of these halls on earth, which is why a local tour became a regional rate problem.

PJM’s capacity auction pays plants to be available a year or more ahead. For 2024/2025 the RTO price was $28.92 per megawatt-day. For 2025/2026 it jumped to $269.92, an 833 percent rise. For 2026/2027, the delivery year that began June 1, 2026, every zone cleared at $329.17 per megawatt-day, the federal cap. Forecast load in that auction rose 5,446.1 megawatts. The sale locked 134,310.8 megawatts of unforced capacity.

PJM CAPACITY PRICES, FOUR DELIVERY YEARS

The 2027/2028 sale, run in December 2025, was the first miss since the market opened in 2007. PJM still held a 14.4 percent reserve margin, but the gap is the point: new forecast demand is outrunning new plants. Monitoring Analytics, PJM’s independent market monitor, has tied about 40 percent of that 2027/2028 clearing cost, about $6.5 billion, to data-center load, most of it from halls not yet built. Across the last three auctions, the monitor’s running tally on that load is $21.3 billion.

David Mills, PJM’s president and chief executive, said demand is growing faster than supply. Market-design fights sit next to that load, not instead of it. A 2024/2025 price of $28.92 and a 2026/2027 cap of $329.17 can both be true, and households have been paying the higher number since June.

What Virginia Households Are Now Covering

A 2026 Department of Energy study, summarized in a September 1 Congressional Research Service brief, found U.S. data centers used 192 terawatt-hours in 2024, 4.7 percent of U.S. electricity in 2024. The same study puts 2030 use between 521 and 843 terawatt-hours, or 9.5 to 15.3 percent of the country’s power. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, in May 2026, still expected summer peak demand 11 gigawatts higher than in 2025, largely from these loads, even after some operators cut their forecasts because projects were connecting slower than the paperwork implied.

THE LOAD BEHIND THE TOUR

• 2024 use: 192 terawatt-hours, 4.7 percent of U.S. electricity, per the 2026 Energy Department study.
• 2030 range: 521 to 843 terawatt-hours, 9.5 to 15.3 percent of U.S. use, same study.
• 2026 home price: 18.2 cents per kilowatthour, up from 17.3 cents in 2025, per EIA, about 5 percent.
• PJM reach: 67 million people, with Loudoun’s halls on that system.

EIA’s September outlook puts the 2027 residential average at 18.6 cents. That is a national mean, so a Dominion customer in Virginia and a co-op customer in Ohio will not see the same line item. The direction is not a mystery. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory counted $18 billion in investor-owned utility rate-increase filings in 2025, the most since the mid-1980s. A North Carolina State University modeling study, cited by CRS, found data centers and crypto mines could lift national average electricity costs 6 to 29 percent, and as much as 57 percent in some regions, depending on how the buildout lands.

Virginia is splitting the tab on paper. A new large-load class for data centers is due in 2027, meant to stop households from carrying quite so much of the transmission and generation that the halls require. Until that class is live, the old split still applies: homes take the largest single share of new transmission cost even though they use about a third of the energy. The White House answer is a Ratepayer Protection Pledge, with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, OpenAI, and xAI on the first list, and a claim that firms putting up their own plants will pull household bills down.

"President Trump is promising to make companies pay for data center energy costs with his Ratepayer Protection Pledge." 🇺🇸

This is what protecting American consumers looks like. WATCH the local coverage. 👇 pic.twitter.com/1uu4iVrz5v

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) July 26, 2026

Capacity charges already locked at the cap through the 2027/2028 delivery year do not unwind because a pledge is signed. A plant a company builds for itself can cut what it draws from PJM. It does not erase the 5,446.1 megawatts of extra forecast load that helped push the last full auction to $329.17.

Water Stays Local Even When Cooling Loops Close

On Digital Realty’s own lab tape, staff walk the chilled-water plant and say the liquid is reclaimed water from Loudoun County, run in a closed loop so the same gallons cycle again. That is a real design choice, and it is the answer the industry wants on the tour. It is not the whole water ledger.

A Ceres study of power plants that serve data centers in Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, Georgia, Ohio, and Arizona put freshwater withdrawals at about 3.4 trillion gallons a year. Those seven states hold about half the country’s halls. The gallons are mostly at the generating station, not at the server aisle. A closed loop in Ashburn does not shrink the river intake at the plant that keeps the bus bars live.

Tucson’s council voted 7-0 in August 2025 to kill Project Blue, an Amazon-linked campus that would have used nearly 2,000 acre-feet a year and become the city’s largest water customer. Marana, Arizona, later barred its water department from selling potable water to data centers for cooling. Idaho now requires closed-loop cooling or a hookup to an existing municipal system. The fight is local because the aquifer is local, even when the workload is a model trained for users a continent away.

Moratoriums Spread Faster Than New Substations

By mid-2026, research tracking state and local rules found 34 states with some form of pause or freeze, and 208 local actions. Virginia led one project-level tally of blocked or stalled campuses with 11, then Indiana with 7 and Texas with 5. Water shows up in the public record more than any other single complaint, ahead of rates and noise.

WHAT TOWNS KEEP CITING

• Power bills: New substations and capacity charges land on everyone unless a large-load tariff says otherwise.
• Water: Cooling and the plants behind the plug, especially in drought counties.
• Noise and land: Generator tests, fans, and farmland converted to windowless halls.
• Secrecy: Shell LLCs, NDAs, and undisclosed end users at rezoning hearings.
• Jobs math: Huge capital, few permanent operators, more pressure on schools and roads than on local payrolls.

Austin’s council voted in late August 2026 to start drafting rules that could limit or bar new halls. San Marcos, Texas, had already written them out of its zoning. Durham, North Carolina, and Cave City, Kentucky, put up clocks. New York in July 2026 became the first state to pause environmental permits for new sites of 50 megawatts or more. House races in Pennsylvania were on the air in September 2026 with moratorium ads. The buildings the morning show called nondescript are now a door-knock issue.

Some of that is delay, not death. A pause to rewrite a zoning code can expire, and a hyperscale developer can wait. Grid gear cannot. Interconnection in crowded markets such as Northern Virginia can take years longer than a hall. The mismatch is why a lab that can stand up a GPU row in months still sits behind a substation queue measured in years.

Texas Froze 474 Gigawatts at the Interconnect

On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott told the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to run an audit of every data center in the queue before any project moved. He said ERCOT was looking at about 474 gigawatts of new load requests, more than five times the grid’s record peak, and that about 90 percent of those requests were data centers.

Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life. Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.

Gov. Greg Abbott, August 3, 2026 directive

ERCOT paused approvals to energize data centers and crypto sites of 75 megawatts or more. Seventeen large loads, 6,608 megawatts, had finished the operator’s process and were waiting on that last yes. The June 10 letter behind the freeze had already told regulators that data centers must pay for the wires they need, so the cost does not slide onto homes.

THE YEAR THE TOUR CAUGHT UP

1. December 10, 2025: Cameras walk Digital Realty’s Ashburn lab and call Loudoun the path for two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic.
2. January 2026: Digital Realty files to add halls and substations at Digital Dulles in Sterling.
3. June 10, 2026: Abbott orders Texas regulators to keep data-center grid costs off residential bills.
4. July 2026: New York pauses state permits for new 50-megawatt-plus data centers.
5. August 3, 2026: Texas stops new data-center interconnects until the audit is done.
6. September 9, 2026: EIA still forecasts record U.S. power use, with data centers in the first line.

Companies lined up in August to say they would meet the Texas standards: Microsoft, Amazon, Equinix, Hut 8, QTS, and others among them. Compliance language is cheap next to a 474-gigawatt queue. EIA’s own September note says that even with the Texas pause, the West South Central region still accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. electricity-sales growth in 2026 and about 40 percent in 2027. The freeze slows new plugs. It does not unbuild the load already in the forecast.

The Forecast Still Runs Through These Halls

EIA’s September Short-Term Energy Outlook is the dry afterword to the Loudoun tape. It expects electricity sales of 4,135 billion kilowatthours in 2026, up almost 2 percent from 2025, then 4,211 billion kilowatthours in 2027. Commercial sales, the bucket that holds these campuses, rise 3.3 percent in 2026 and make up 63 percent of the national increase. Industrial sales add 1.6 percent and 22 percent of the rise. PJM, the grid that serves the lab in ACC6, accounts for nearly 45 percent of U.S. generation growth in the outlook.

Natural gas stays about 40 percent of U.S. generation through 2027. Coal slips from 17 percent in 2025 to 16 percent in 2026 and 14 percent in 2027. Solar generation is forecast to jump 21 percent in 2026, a lot of it in ERCOT and MISO, which is another way of saying the new load is pulling new plants into the same counties that are arguing about the halls.

The December 2025 tour was not wrong about what sits in those rooms. Email, carts, bank apps, and model queries do run through Loudoun concrete. The reckoning is narrower. A three-minute walk down a cold aisle does not show the $329.17 cap on a 67-million-person grid, the 3.4 trillion gallons at the plants, or a governor locking 474 gigawatts at the meter. Those showed up after the cameras left, and they are the part of the AI buildout a ratepayer in Sterling or a water board in Tucson actually has to vote on.