Rep.-elect Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., talks to reporters after attending new Congress member orientation, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The 119th Congress members-elect are in Washington for a 10-day new member orientation. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) **FILE**
Rep.-elect Suhas Subramanyam, D-Va., talks to reporters after attending new Congress member orientation, Tuesday, Nov. 12, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. The 119th Congress members-elect are in Washington for a 10-day new member orientation. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana) **FILE**
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam is warning that the collection of data centers is making Northern Virginia a larger target for America’s enemies than the concentration of the federal government in Washington.
The Northern Virginia Democrat said his district, which includes all of Loudoun and Rappahannock counties, is home to more data centers than any other district and almost any country in the world.
Mr. Subramanyam said the hub of data centers in his district is a “security risk” and called it a “huge problem” during a House Oversight and Government Reform hearing on Tuesday.
He estimated 10 data centers use more power than all of Washington and he said his district housed more than 200 such centers.
“You just look at the Ukraine war. When Russia failed to hack Ukraine’s telecom networks, what did they target? They targeted the data centers,” Mr. Subramanyam said. “And so Northern Virginia is becoming more of a target than Washington, D.C., itself.”
Big Tech’s data centers proved critical to Ukraine’s survival, and cloud computing helped enable Ukraine’s efforts to strike back against Russia.
The Ukrainian government transferred existing servers to the cloud in 2022, which, Microsoft said in 2023, meant Ukraine effectively “evacuated critical government data to information processing centers across Europe.”
Microsoft said in a 2023 statement that it “played a role in maintaining the country’s digital stability,” particularly via expediting Ukraine’s data transfer. Microsoft also partnered with the U.S. National Security Agency to stop Russia dead in its tracks before devastating cyberattacks could dismantle Ukraine and spread to America.
Ukraine has also credited Amazon with helping its cloud migration, securing its data away from the havoc of Russian missiles. Soon after Russia’s invasion, Amazon provided Ukraine with three Snowball devices, according to Nextgov/FCW, which enable data transport into and out of the cloud.
The cloud has also proved critical for Ukraine’s work to strike back at Russia.
The U.S. provided Ukraine with coordinates of Russian targets for destruction via a “secure cloud,” according to a “secret history of the war in Ukraine” published by the New York Times last week.
American security officials are aware of the threats to data centers and have worked to bolster defenses in Northern Virginia.
In 2019, the FBI’s Washington Field Office helped establish a Data Center Physical Security Working Group to better prevent sabotage through partnerships with the private sector.
“It is a two-way, real-time information sharing platform for physical security practitioners who work for data center companies in the Ashburn, Virginia area — also known as Data Center Alley — as well as in the surrounding northern Virginia area where data centers are spreading,” the working group’s website said. “The entities in Data Center Alley have [organized] to help protect the region’s data centers from threats, both foreign and domestic, as well as insider threats.”
The group said it shared info and worked with federal, state, and local law enforcement to protect the data centers and the information they stored.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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