Northern Virginia holds 4,182 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 8× the capacity of a continent of 1.5 billion people.
The gap is widening, not closing. Northern Virginia added 1,135.9 MW in the twelve months to Q1 2026 — more than the entire African, Latin American and Middle Eastern operating base combined — and did it at 0.3% vacancy, the tightest market anywhere on earth. McKinsey projects all of Africa reaching 1.5–2.2 GW of demand; Northern Virginia is past 4 GW today.
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.