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| Data Centers in Ashburn, VA |
A Catholic diocesan bishop is responsible for all of Christ’s faithful in his territory whether they reside there or are visiting, according to Canon Law. He is instructed to act with humanity toward those who are not in full communion with the Catholic Church. He is also “to consider the non-baptized as commended to him in the Lord, so that the Charity of Christ, of which the Bishop must be a witness to all, may shine also on them” (Can. 383). He is also required to visit the whole of his diocese every five years.
On these visits, some bishops may have noticed cranes and new buildings sprouting up. Some bishops more than others. These very real new structures are what’s casually referred to as “The Cloud.” Who can claim to be Bishop of this Cloud? For now, it likely is the Most Rev. Michael F Burbidge, the Bishop of Arlington in Virginia.
Virginia has two Catholic dioceses and at least 319 operational data centers. The epicenter for these is in the city of Ashburn about 35 miles outside of Washington, DC. Ashburn was built as a planned suburban community in the 1980s. In the 1990s non-governmental internet infrastructure and fiber-optic cables were built up in Northern Virginia suburbs and with that AOL decided to locate its headquarters in Ashburn. Equinix soon helped establish Ashburn as a key point of traffic for global networks. In the 2010s, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google all joined the data center build out and a master planned suburban community became “Data Center Alley.”
The IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas indicated there are 309 operational data centers in the boundaries of the Diocese of Arlington. That is more than one in five of all U.S. centers and more than most other countries. As of the publication of this post, China had a total of 369 and India 296.
If you are on the East Coast of the U.S. and are sending a query to an AI model there’s a good chance it’s headed for data centers in the Diocese of Arlington. The map below shows the most recent known numbers of operating data centers by state in the U.S. according to the IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas (some states are too small for labels: NJ 53, CT 5, MA 3, DE 0, and HI 0).
The next map shows the number of operational and planned data centers by state according to Data Center Map at the time of this post being researched/published (some states are too small for labels: NJ 67, CT 52, MA 42, DE 18, and HI 9). While Northern Virginia remains the major hub, the arch/dioceses of Texas are gaining ground fast.
With the recent publication of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Catholics have been called to consider the implications of the development of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.
Pope Leo XIV writes:
“…[T]echnology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency. This paradigm has spread rapidly in recent years, fueled in part by the expansion of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology. In themselves, these innovations can greatly serve integral human development and the care of our common home. Yet precisely because of their power, they can also hasten the expansion of the technocratic paradigm and therefore require a new spiritual, ethical and political framework. More power does not necessarily imply something better.”
He begins his conclusion with the following:
“‘Let each builder choose with care how to build’ (1 Cor 3:10). With these words, Saint Paul encouraged the Christians of Corinth to preserve unity. Dear brothers and sisters, we have reflected on the world we are building, and we asked ourselves what it means to safeguard the human person in the era of artificial intelligence.”
The bishops of dioceses where these data centers have been and are being built are the Church’s eyes and ears over what the AI and technology companies are choosing to construct.
Pope Leo XIII was instrumental in navigating the Church through the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th Century. Rerum Novarum addressed the rights and duties of both capital and labor. Pope Leo XIV may have began the work to do something similar in the 21st Century as the AI/Automation Revolution begins with his aforementioned encyclical.
Being a “Bishop of the Cloud” may be an important individual on the ground for the Church as the changes ahead unfold. The current transition involves both environmental questions/care for creation and challenges to human dignity/dignity of work. These “clouds” are most notably now forming over bishops in Virginia, Texas, California, Illinois, and Ohio.
