Nobody Chose Northern Virginia, Says the MAE-East Engineer Who Watched Everybody Move In

We tend to picture the internet the way we picture weather: everywhere at once, owned by nobody, arriving from somewhere overhead. Sometimes it's more useful to picture a county.

Loudoun County, Virginia, has somewhere between 230 and 250 data-center buildings, depending on who's counting and what counts as a building.¹ They now carry so much of the local budget that the county's real property tax rate has dropped from $1.145 per $100 of assessed value in 2016 to $0.805 in 2026.² In March 2025, the Board of Supervisors stopped letting new ones go up "by right," which means automatically, as long as the zoning fit. Now every project gets a public hearing and a vote.¹

That is a lot of weather for one county.

How did a commuter belt outside Washington end up holding this much of the network? The folklore points to a parking garage near Tysons Corner. There, in the 1990s, an exchange called MAE-East stitched the young commercial backbones together. The documented version is less cinematic. I'd argue it's the better story, because almost nobody in it is trying to make history.

To walk the thread, we sat down with Gigi Switchwell, who tended MAE-East's switches through the 1990s. Or would have, had she existed. Gigi is stitched together from mailing-list archives, county filings and a well-thumbed Wikipedia page. That is roughly how the exchange came together too. In that page's wonderfully passive phrasing, its central nexus "eventually formed."³ She insisted we meet on level P1 of a garage off Gallows Road. She arrived with a folding chair, a thermos, and a fleece she describes as "the only piece of 1997 I kept."

Of all the rooms in America, why a parking garage?

Gigi: Because somebody had a room. I'm sorry. I know you wanted a visionary with a map and a laser pointer. I wanted one too, for about thirty years.

Metropolitan Fiber Systems, MFS, had been pulling fiber to business customers around here since 1988.⁴ They had glass in the ground and a cinder-block box on P1 at 1919 Gallows Road, with more ports across the street at 8100 Boone Boulevard.³ Nobody would have called it glamorous. Anybody could have called it available. Only one of those virtues ever gets you a documentary, and it's the one that doesn't route packets.

Everyone quotes the founding story. Why does it involve beer?

Gigi: Steve Feldman's line, yes. "A group of network providers in the Virginia area got together over beer one night and decided to connect their networks."³ I treasure that it's written down. Most great institutions have a founding charter. Ours is, functionally, a bar tab. I've always wanted to know who paid. It would tell you more about the next decade than any charter could.

So who chose Northern Virginia?

Gigi: Nobody.

(She pours coffee. That appears to be the whole answer.)

The government was handing the backbone to commercial carriers, and in 1993 the National Science Foundation named MAE-East one of four official Network Access Points to keep them connected. Isn't that choosing?

Gigi: It brought money and legitimacy, sure. A federal stamp does wonders for a garage. But one account puts it well: the NSF "wasn't picking Northern Virginia as much as recognizing what was already happening there."⁴

Even the name was improvised. It started life as Metropolitan Area Ethernet, which is what you call a thing when you're still mostly describing the wiring. Then MAE-West opened in '94, and the E got promoted to Exchange, East, so the pair would sound like somebody had planned them.³ We were backronymed into destiny.

What did the work actually involve?

Gigi: Cables.

(She waits to see whether that will do. It won't.)

Fine. Properly, then, because the cables really are the whole story.

The exchange part was simple. Shared Ethernet first, then a faster technology called FDDI running through those DEC GigaSwitches, then ATM.³ Each one quicker than the last, none of them the interesting part. The interesting part was that showing up obliged you to nothing. There was no multilateral agreement. Every network negotiated its own peering, its own deal to swap traffic, one handshake at a time.³ So the value of being in that room was entirely who else was in it. Picture a dinner party with no host, where you introduce yourself to every guest individually and some of them pretend not to hear.

Here's the part people skip. Once two companies have racks a few feet apart, the cheapest way to trade traffic is a cable strung between them. That's a cross-connect. In '97 somebody on NANOG, the operators' mailing list where all of us argued, claimed that ten feet of five-dollar Ethernet went for two thousand dollars a month.⁵ That's one guy on a mailing list, so don't engrave it. But the shape is right. The short cable was the prize, and you cannot run ten feet of cable to Ohio.

So every arrival made the room more worth arriving at.

And here's the bit that kills me now. Same poster said the only equipment rule was "no computers on the MAE EAST LAN for security reasons."⁵ The room was supposed to be pure plumbing. (She points northwest, toward Loudoun, the way you'd point out a cousin who did unexpectedly well.) The place that banned computers grew up to host more of them than anywhere on earth.¹

By late 1997, NANOG was openly mocking the garage. Did that sting?

Gigi: It was affectionate. Mostly. Kent England announced a "new MAE-East." He'd "rented a parking place" by the door for a U-Haul with a switch inside, powered by "an extension cord to the ceiling light," since the lights in there never go off.⁶ Somebody replied that it was "getting damned cold in the garage this time of year."⁷

(She zips the fleece to her chin.)

That was a joke. It was also the most accurate site report anyone filed that winter.

The carriers wanted out from under MFS and asked for neutral ground. How did the neutral ground end up next door?

Gigi: (Long pause.) Yeah. That's the one I still chew on.

Remember who owned the room. MFS sold the fiber, the ports, the cross-connects. Then in '96 MFS bought UUNET, one of the founding networks, and WorldCom bought MFS that same year.⁸ So your landlord is also your competitor, and the competitor just got a great deal bigger. It's like renting a market stall from the man who runs the stall across the aisle. Of course the carriers wanted a building that "would not be controlled by Metropolitan Fiber Systems."⁹ The company that won that business put the wish right in its name. Equinix: "equal, neutral internet exchange."¹⁰

And where did it build, in 1998? Ashburn. Just north of a former UUNET facility that had been a key MAE-East hub.¹¹ AOL had already moved its headquarters to Ashburn in '96.¹²

Which was perfectly rational, I think. What they were fleeing was one company. What they needed was everybody else. You can change landlords with a lease. Moving the neighborhood means persuading the entire neighborhood to pack on the same weekend, and good luck with that calendar invite. You can make a room neutral. Making it portable is another matter.

MAE-East shut down around 2009. Why didn't the region shrink with it?

Gigi: The reason died and the place didn't notice. By then other boring decisions had piled on top. In 2000, a county zoning administrator ruled that data centers could be zoned like office parks.¹³ One person, one ruling, and I'd bet nobody brought a cake. Around 2008, people started calling it "Data Center Alley."¹⁴

A spare room, a short cable, a zoning category, a slogan. If you set out to build the center of the internet on purpose, I doubt you'd do better. I'm certain you'd do it slower.

And the famous number? "Seventy percent of the world's internet traffic."

Gigi: (Groans into the thermos.) Back in the nineties, people said about half the internet went through MAE-East.¹⁵ I heard it at every conference. Nobody ever showed me the measurement. An independent researcher with a blog and admirable patience thinks it really meant AOL plus a few neighbors. Plausible, though nobody can prove it.¹⁶

Seventy is younger. That same researcher traced it to economic-development material from 2015.¹⁶ TeleGeography actually checked in 2019, found the D.C. metro carrying around 9 percent of U.S. international capacity, and called seventy a myth.¹⁷ People still say it on television.

The number behaved exactly like the networks did. It found a convenient spot and declined to leave.

Looking at Loudoun now, do you feel proud?

Gigi: Pride's complicated.

(She studies the ceiling light, which is, of course, still on.)

Data centers account for about 38 percent of the county's general fund.² According to a summary of Dominion Energy's filing, they took 28 percent of the electricity the utility sold in Virginia last year.¹ The county says they use about a tenth of its water.¹³ That's a great deal of a place resting on decisions that never felt like decisions when anyone was making them.

Now every new building has to stand up at a public hearing and explain itself.¹ I honestly can't tell whether that's a correction or just the bill for the beer finally arriving.

If you could go back to that cinder-block room, what would you tell it?

Gigi: Turn the lights off once in a while.

(Beat.)

No. Don't. Somebody's plugged into them.

Footnotes

1. Lakeland Gazette, summary of Loudoun County and Dominion Energy data (2026). https://lakelandgazette.info/news/2026/09/18/loudoun-county-virginia-reported-approximately-233-data-center-buildings-built-or-under-construction-as-of-march-2026-the-worlds-highest-concentration-as-rising-electricity-demand/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

2. Yahoo Finance, "Loudoun County raked in $1.1 billion in tax revenue from data centers" (Aug. 2026). https://finance.yahoo.com/real-estate/articles/loudoun-county-raked-1-1-163000239.html ↩ ↩²

3. Wikipedia, "MAE-East." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAE-East ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

4. DC Atlas, "How Ashburn Became the Center of the Internet." https://dcatlas.io/en/articles/trends/ashburn-internet-center-data-center-alley ↩ ↩²

5. NANOG list, Craig A. Haney, "Re: Info on MAE-EAST" (Jan. 15, 1997). https://diswww.mit.edu/charon/nanog/7009 ↩ ↩²

6. NANOG list, Kent W. England, "Announcing The New 'MAE-EAST'" (Nov. 7, 1997). https://diswww.mit.edu/charon/nanog/13491 ↩

7. NANOG list, Erik Sherk, "Re: Announcing The New 'MAE-EAST'" (Nov. 7, 1997). https://diswww.mit.edu/charon/nanog/13493 ↩

8. Wikipedia, "UUNET." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUNET ↩

9. Data Center Knowledge, "Equinix Doubles Down in One of Internet's Most Important Locations" (2015). https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/10/15/equinix-doubles-down-in-one-of-internets-most-important-locations ↩

10. Data Center Frontier, "Data Center Tours: Equinix DC12, Ashburn, Virginia." https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/colocation/article/55125540/data-center-tours-equinix-dc12-ashburn-virginia ↩

11. Data Center Knowledge, "The Internet's Busiest Intersection" (2009). https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/06/09/the-internets-busiest-intersection ↩

12. Loudoun County Government, "Data Centers: The Loudoun Story." https://www.loudoun.gov/6408/Data-Centers-The-Loudoun-Story ↩

13. NBC Washington, "How Loudoun County became the data center capital of the world" (July 7, 2026). https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/northern-virginia/how-loudoun-county-became-the-data-center-capital-of-the-world/4126916/ ↩ ↩²

14. City Journal, "Loudoun County, Virginia: The Heart of the Data-Center Boom." https://www.city-journal.org/article/loudoun-county-virginia-data-centers-construction ↩

15. Center for Land Use Interpretation, "8100 Boone Blvd. Data Center." https://clui.org/ludb/site/8100-boone-blvd-data-center ↩

16. Camilo Calvo-Alcañiz, "How Much of the Internet Flows Through Northern Virginia?" (Feb. 21, 2026). https://camilocalvoalcaniz.com/blog/virginia-internet/ ↩ ↩²

17. Tim Stronge, TeleGeography, "Does 70% of the World's Internet Traffic Flow Through Virginia?" (May 30, 2019). https://resources.telegeography.com/does-70-of-the-worlds-internet-traffic-flow-through-virginia ↩