Internet infrastructure and data centers

As of 2009, greater than 50% of all U.S. Internet traffic travels through Northern Virginia. In his book Tubes, author Andrew Blum calls Ashburn, Virginia—a community within the Dulles Technology Corridor—"the bullseye of America's Internet". The Dulles Technology Corridor serves as headquarters for domain name registrar Network Solutions and network infrastructure company Verisign. The region contains the Internet Society, and used to contain the mainframe that houses the master list of all Internet domain names.

The Dulles Technology Corridor includes Ashburn, Virginia's "Data Center Alley", described by the Washington Business Journal as "an area that is quickly emerging as a national hub for data storage facilities". The corridor also has data centers in Sterling, Herndon, Reston, and Tysons Corner. The area is a growing home for major data centers including those of Amazon Web Services (AWS)'s US East region, where an estimated 70% of AWS IP addresses are housed. Wikimedia Foundation (parent of Wikipedia) has its primary data center in the corridor. According to U.S. News & World Report, "Northern Virginia remains popular, in part because it has some of the country's cheapest electricity rates."