The earliest cases
Each parcel in the county's record carries a case number. The county's land-development file gives most of those cases a filing date, and that join is the only chronology in this data. It dates the application, not the concrete.
All of it in one strip
Loudoun runs from the Blue Ridge to the Potomac. The data center parcels do not. They sit in a band along the county's eastern side, and the record says what the land there is zoned as — though not why it ended up that way.
The shape of it, year by year
Every parcel with a dated case, sorted into the year that case was filed, and coloured by what the county says the parcel is now. The undated parcels are shown as their own bar underneath rather than being dropped or spread across the years.
Eight districts, one denominator
Loudoun's election districts are drawn to hold roughly the same number of people, which makes population an unusually clean denominator: the districts are near enough identical on the left of this graphic and nothing like it on the right.
Being built now
The county flags parcels it records as under construction. That flag moves on the county's clock, not on the ground's: the parcel layers are republished every month or two, so a site can be visibly active while the record still calls it something else. The date the county last edited the layer is below.
Asked for, not yet built
A separate county layer holds the pipeline — land where somebody has asked to build and the county has not recorded a building. Some of it is approved, some is still in review, and the layer says which.
Counting floor area instead
Parcels are not the same size, so counting them undersells what is coming. The county records a square footage against each one. Adding those up changes the picture, and it is the single figure on this page most worth sitting with.
What is collected, what is not
Two governments tax this equipment and they pull opposite ways. Loudoun County charges a local personal property tax on the machines inside the buildings every year. Virginia forgoes a state sales and use tax on the same machines when they are bought. Different taxes, different governments, different years — these two bars do not net off, and setting one against the other shows scale, not balance.