How close are you?

Every count, distance and square footage above is read from data/facilities.geojson — the 224 data center parcels this site mirrors from Loudoun County GIS's Existing_Data_Center_Parcel and Pipeline_Data_Center_Areas layers, the same file behind the map and the statistics page. The date the county last published it is printed on the result.

Distance is measured to the nearest parcel, never to a campus average. A campus like Beaumeade is nineteen separate parcels, and the average of nineteen points can land outside every one of them — which would rank a building visible from the window below one two miles away. So each campus is measured at whichever of its parcels is closest to you.

The county publishes a centroid and an acreage for each parcel, not a polygon, so a parcel counts as inside a ring when its centroid is inside it. On a large parcel the fence line can therefore be several hundred feet nearer than the number says. Treat these as good to within a block, not to the foot.

Floor area is the county's sqft figure summed over the parcels in each ring. Where the county records no square footage for a parcel — which happens on some proposals — that parcel still counts toward the facility count but contributes nothing to the floor area, so the area figure is a floor, not a ceiling. Nothing here is modelled or estimated; if a figure is not in the county's file, this page says it is not known rather than filling the gap.

Statuses are the county's, matched loosely on its own wording. One county record carries the typo BULT/UNDER CONSTRUCTION, so the match looks for the phrase inside the text rather than for an exact spelling — that one parcel is counted as under construction, which is what the county meant.

The rings are a diagram, not a map

The circles are drawn evenly spaced so the inner ones stay readable on a phone, which means the picture is not to scale: the gap between the half-mile and one-mile rings is drawn the same width as the gap between two and five miles. Each dot sits at the true compass direction of a facility and inside the correct ring, but its exact distance from the centre is not readable off the drawing. The numbers beside it are the exact ones. For real geography, use the map.

What is sent where

• Your device location and district picks: nothing leaves this page. The parcel file is already downloaded, and the arithmetic happens in your browser.
• Address search: the text you type goes to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim, because coordinates have to come from somewhere. Nothing else is sent with it, the result is not stored, and it is not put in the URL. If you would rather not do that, the other two routes never touch it.

Filing a report works differently again, and more carefully: a published report pin is deliberately offset from the address given, and reporter names, emails and phone numbers are never sent to a visitor's browser at all. See the privacy policy.