Dateline Ashburn: The Interplay Between IXPs and Data Centers
Data centers and internet exchange points in 'Data Center Alley' may be indistinguishable. However, they serve different purposes.
ASHBURN, Va., Sept. 9, 2025 – Ashburn, Virginia rose to prominence as the internet’s capital in part because of its unusually dense cluster of internet exchange points, the neutral hubs where networks trade traffic.
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Today, with hundreds of data centers crowding the same corridor, those exchanges and the facilities that host them have become nearly inseparable, with many of Ashburn’s largest data centers now operating exchange fabrics of their own.
As artificial intelligence fuels a fresh wave of hyperscale construction, modern exchange points were being tested and adapting in new ways to keep pace with soaring workload demands.
Ashburn’s rise
Ashburn has by far the largest data center capacity in the world, a rise seeded in the 1990s when early IXPs like MAE-East were established in Ashburn, Reston, Vienna, and Washington, D.C.
By 1998, MAE-East had been relocated from Tysons Corner to Loudoun County, cementing the area’s role as a neutral meet-point for carriers and content providers. But as internet traffic exploded in the late 1990s, the aging exchange struggled with congestion and reliability issues.
Into that gap stepped Equinix, which had launched in 1998 with the explicit goal of creating carrier-neutral interconnection hubs. The company built large facilities in Ashburn that combined colocation space with their own switching fabric, allowing networks, enterprises, and content companies to interconnect directly under one roof.
At the same time, other commercial players like Digital Realty began scaling up wholesale data center campuses across Loudoun County. Together, these operators offered a more reliable and scalable alternative, and many networks that had previously connected at MAE-East or smaller sites migrated their interconnection into Equinix Ashburn. Within a few years, the town had become the de facto core of the U.S. internet exchange system.
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