How Much of the Web Runs on Virginia's Grid? 3.5% of 290 Million Websites — and Nearly Half Answer From No Single Grid at All
Data centers are fighting over power, and Northern Virginia is the prize. We located every address behind the website record of every registrable domain in 29 crawls, April 2023 to September 2026 — by cloud region tag, geofeed, geoIP and 132 speed-of-light RTT measurements — and mapped it to a metro and a grid operator. Northern Virginia serves 3.5% of the world's websites, more than any country except the United States and Germany, and one in five of those we can place in the US. Its share has not grown: it fell for live sites, while its biggest tenant became a domain-for-sale marketplace. The fastest-growing place on the map is no place: 47% of websites now answer from anycast and CDN front doors, up from 31%. For energy and policy reporters, utility and grid analysts, cloud-resilience engineers and Internet measurement researchers.