AI Data Centers Are Reshaping the Landscape. Who Are Designing Them

Regional Analysis of Data Center Development in Ashburn, Virginia / Minghao Zhao

By Minghao Zhao and Zhimin Ma

On Prentice Drive, about sixty feet separate the road from the building. The ground between is mown lawn, with a band of gravel along the curb and a few electrical cabinets in the middle. The building is a windowless gray box with cooling equipment lined up across the roof, fully visible from the sidewalk. At eight in the evening, there is a low hum. It isn't loud, but it doesn't stop.

Half a mile north, the next buildings are handled a little differently. A low berm runs along the road, with a black metal fence behind it and a few deciduous trees inside the fence line. The lawn around the trees is empty, and the buildings are in plain view.

These two approaches account for nearly all the landscape in Ashburn, Virginia. One fills the gap with lawn and gravel and lets the building face the street. The other adds a berm, a fence, and some trees. Both are the most basic moves available. They differ only in how far the move is carried. This is Loudoun County, the largest concentration of data centers in North America. The W&OD Trail, a regional path on a former rail line, runs nearby and is used every day by people on foot and bikes.

Neither approach is really a design choice. Both are what the process produces.

In that process, landscape comes last. Power and fiber decide the site. Rack count and cooling decide the building. Fire access, the substation, and circulation decide the layout. By the time the landscape arrives, everything else is placed, and what it inherits is the space in between.
Data center under construction in Ashburn, Virginia / istockphoto.com, Gerville

The task itself is written in advance. Zoning sets buffer width, tree counts, and minimum plant height. The drawing's job is to meet those numbers and pass review. The numbers rest on assumptions about how screening works, but once they become code, they are simply checked. No one asks whether a buffer of a few dozen feet means anything against a building this large, with machinery across its roof. The difference between the two edges on Prentice Drive mostly comes down to which provision applies to which parcel.

And the task stops at the property line. Inside it, the site is divided among disciplines. The hydrology engineer sizes the detention pond to the required volume. It is fenced, with turf edges. Where the water goes next, and what this ground once did in its watershed, fall outside that scope. The acoustic consultant meets a decibel limit at the property line, mostly through enclosures and equipment placement. Berms and tree rows are assumed to help, though no one designs them for sound, and the noise on the nearest porch is in no one's contract. Civil engineering sets the fire lanes, parking, paving, and utility routes, and those dimensions are fixed.

Each of these is handled and compliant. What remains belongs to no one: the ground past the setback, outside the fire lane, between the easements. It appears in no scope of work. It does not need to be designed, only filled, and lawn and gravel are the cheapest, fastest, and safest way to fill it. That is where the landscape on Prentice Drive comes from.

The same logic plays out at the scale of the district. Ashburn now holds more than a hundred data centers, along with the substations, transmission lines, fiber routes, water intakes, and roads that serve them, packed into a few square miles. Each of these facilities has an owner. The space between them does not. The strips between buildings, the land under power lines, the bands between road and property edge, the scraps left between parcels: each exists for a technical reason, but none was designed. None connects to the others, to the nearby neighborhoods, to the trail, or to any public space. No document describes the whole, and no one is responsible for it.

Data center near residential community in Ashburn, Virginia / istockphoto.com, Gerville

This is how project approval works in Virginia and almost everywhere else. Each project is permitted on its own by showing that it meets buffer, detention, setback, and fire requirements. Nothing in the process looks at how parcels relate to one another. Ashburn was never designed as a district. It accumulated out of dozens of drawings, each one correct. The same is happening on the edge of Dublin, in Johor, and in the new computing hubs of western China, where the codes differ but the leftover ground looks much the same. And there will be more, as data centers become a basic part of the region, much as warehouses did before them.

AI Infrastructure Network in the United States / Minghao Zhao

Landscape architecture can improve the relationship between parcels and the districts and regions they draw on. Data centers are secure facilities, so nothing public can happen inside the fence. But almost everything described above lies outside it.

In Ashburn, the setback strips along each road could be read as one continuous edge and built as a shared path that joins the W&OD Trail instead of running beside it behind a berm. Transmission corridors, which cannot hold buildings anyway, could become linear meadows. Detention ponds on neighboring parcels could be sized and placed together as one wetland instead of a row of fenced basins. The leftover fragments could become small public grounds where the district meets its neighborhoods. At a larger scale, the power lines and water systems that tie each cluster to distant grids and watersheds could be planned as landscape before they are built, instead of screened after. None of this needs access to the buildings. Most of it is landscape that already exists and is already being mowed.

None of this fits inside a single project, and no other discipline is set up to answer it. Civil engineering serves one site's technical needs. Architecture serves the building. Acoustics and hydrology each answer for one metric at one property line. Judging what should exist between many parcels is the combined work of landscape planning and site design. Landscape architecture comes last in the sequence, yet it is the only profession equipped for the largest scale involved.

That scale is unlikely to be handed to the profession soon. Even so, there is real room to work within the current division of labor. The leftover landscape is small, irregular, and underfunded, and its shape is set by others. That will not change. But turf and a native plant community can cover the same area at similar cost, and they perform very differently in infiltration, surface temperature, and habitat. Once a pond's volume is met, its position and edge are still open. Grading at the site's edge still decides where water goes, without touching any engineering requirement.

Some choices also reach past the property line: whether leftover landscape opens to the road or hides behind a fence; whether a footpath ends at the edge or lines up with the one next door; and whether a boundary repeats the standard treatment or follows the local landform. Each fits in one drawing set, and each takes effect beyond the site. One site doing this changes little. Most sites in a district doing it changes the district. Ashburn today is the sum of many small, independent decisions, and that kind of accumulation can run in either direction.

The ground on Prentice Drive is still there, and more buildings are rising around it. The lawn is mown every week. Grass is creeping into the gravel, which will need to be relaid in a few years. The building beside it will run for twenty years or more.

Filling that ground took one decision. Making it into something else takes one too, and that decision belongs to landscape architects.

Zhimin Ma is a landscape designer with SWA Group in Los Angeles and has a master's of landscape architecture degree from the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Minghao Zhao, ASLA, is a landscape designer with SWA Group in Los Angeles and has a master's of landscape architecture degree from the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.