Northern Virginia holds 4,497 MW of data-centre inventory. Every African market tracked here — Johannesburg, Cape Town, Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Casablanca — comes to 505 MW between them. One American county carries roughly 9× the capacity of a continent of 1.5 billion people.
The gap is widening, not closing. Northern Virginia added 1,450.4 MW in the fifteen months to H1 2026 — more than the entire African, Latin American and Middle Eastern operating base combined — and did it at 0.2% vacancy, the tightest market anywhere on earth. Of 4,496.5 MW built, 10.8 MW is actually available to lease. McKinsey projects all of Africa reaching 1.5–2.2 GW of demand; Northern Virginia is past 4.5 GW today.
It is no longer the fastest-growing market, though. Atlanta now has 2,882 MW under construction against Northern Virginia's 2,420.2 MW, and cut its vacancy from 3.6% to 1% in a year. The concentration is spreading to a second county, not dispersing.
This is the single most important fact about the geography of AI compute, and it is why the physical and ownership bases draw such different maps. Capacity is not being distributed. It is being concentrated, in a handful of counties, on a handful of grids.