Imagine you come to America as an immigrant in the 18th or 19th century and you’re given a plot of land to farm.
But first you have to clear and weed it, plough it and fertilise the soil before it's ready for crops to be grown.
“We think about it the same way for data centres,” Snowhorn tells Capacity. “We're really cultivating the ground before a farmer, or a data centre builder in this case, comes in to use it. And we’re doing it at scale in a way no one has before”.
Quantum Loophole is a data centre master planning company set up by Snowhorn and with investment from TPG
Real Estate. It provides the four elements that data centre developers need to build their facilities: namely land, water, power and fibre.
But Why?
“If you think about it from the perspective of Ashburn, Virginia, go to Google Earth and go back in a time machine to look at what the area used to look like when the first data centres were built there. It was all farmland. There were no housing developments around them,” Snowhorn says.
That’s no longer the case. Ashburn is a data centre metropolis that Snowhorn refers to as the centre of the internet for North America. Quantum Loophole’s Frederick Campus is located just 20 miles away, over the border in Frederick County, Maryland.
But it will look very different to the way Ashburn looks now.
With the success of the region as a data centre hub, it soon became crowded and outgrew its initial boundaries, at the same time as homes and local communities were established to support the growing workforce.
“As the industry outgrew the bounds of where it was being built today, you started seeing data centres popping up in what I would call inappropriate locations,” Snowhorn says.
The modern demand for data centre capacity close to dense urban areas has led to them being built close to local communities who understandably don’t want industrial buildings on their front doorstep.
“It's the unmitigated growth and the way it hasn't been master planned that is a problem,” Snowhorn says.
Data centres are not all bad. As readers of Capacity will know, they are the lifeblood of the internet, and facilitate all of the digital experiences we take for granted day to day.
They can also offer great benefits to local communities in terms of taxes raised from their operations being used to fund public services, but yet conflict with communities remains.
“That's why we exist, because we're doing it the right way and differently,” Snowhorn says.
Community outreach and green space
Quantum Loophole’s business model is not to build data centres itself. Instead, it has purchased a 2,000 acre plot of land, and is developing it with all the infrastructure needed for co-location providers and hyperscalers to build their own facilities.
That 2,000 acres makes it the largest landowner in Frederick County, with the largest piece of industrial property in all of Maryland, a responsibility that Snowhorn does not shoulder lightly.
“The scale of what we are doing in Maryland means we have a moral responsibility to the community, making sure that we pay attention to their needs as well as our own and our clients”.
When fully operational, Quantum Loophole will have 2-2.5 gigawatts of power to support data centre capacity on the site.
1,500 acres of the land they bought was already zoned for industrial activity, but rather than squeeze as many data centres in as possible, Snowhorn’s team has plans to donate 500 acres to green spaces.
“I challenge you to find any other data centre developer that would do that,” he says.
The company has formed strong local bonds with IT groups and county council members all the way down to neighbourhood committees.
One initiative it has in place is a partnership with a local homeless mission, whereby Quantum Loophole will open up fundraising opportunities for its customers to directly contribute to local causes.
“The master planning effort is not just the infrastructure itself, but it's driving these connections with communities in a way where we can show how data centres can be done better through master planning,” Snowhorn says.
“So we're really driving these relationships, taking into account the robust opposition to data centres”.
But the infrastructure itself can help too. In addition to Frederick Campus, Quantum Loophole is building the QLoop, a 41 mile fibre ring that connects the campus with the Ashburn internet ecosystem.
That fibre is industrial grade, with 34 two-inch ducts, holding over 235,000 strands.
It will serve the tenants of the data centres that will be built, but it’s also open to local ISP’s to rent and deliver fibre broadband into rural areas that Snowhorn is confident will greatly benefit from better connectivity.
Building their own fibre
Building that fibre themselves is also unique, and part of the master planning process, Snowhorn says.
“I've built millions of square feet of data centres in my career and as I’ve always been responsible for telecoms. I had to
work hard to make sure telecom carriers built enough capacity, fast enough. These multi-billion-dollar businesses rely on this connectivity being built.”
For the scale of what Quantum Loophole wanted to do, Snowhorn realised he needed to build the QLoop himself.
“There will always be a relationship between outside plant fibre providers, ISP's and data centre campuses, but we realised that getting to the scale of what we needed and to enable our campus, we needed to do it ourselves.”
This will be Quantum Loophole’s plan going forward as well.
“We'll do it again when we look at other markets,” Snowhorn says. We're looking out in the Illinois area, California, Texas and looking for giant campuses”.
Planning fibre and data centre capacity hand-in-hand could emerge to be the trend going forward to meet the next wave of capacity coming from hyperscalers and the compute power that could be required for widespread generative AI.
Others are doing things at scale but with a twist
While what Quantum Loophole is doing is unique so far, Snowhorn wouldn’t be surprised if companies with the same model as his popped up soon.
QTS and Compass Data Centres are planning a similar sized development in Prince William County in Virginia, and recently had rezoning approved.
“They're building millions of square feet of data centres to lease to hyperscalers and other folks, so it’s a different kind of business to ours,” Snowhorn explains.
But the same tenets of community outreach has not been missed. In the rezoning hearing, the two companies were keen to address the project's potential impact on local water utilities, as well as noise pollution, increased traffic and disruption to nearby places of natural and cultural significance.
It's a start. But if data centres are to address their PR issue head on, better planning is surely required.
