It was 2001 when I realized the city of Buffalo, where I was living and doing radio at the time, was never going to come back from being a ghost town. That’s because there was this little art house startup tech firm called Microsoft that wanted to build a data center out of the abandoned Diamond Reo truck manufacturing facility downtown. But the city rejected it because it had grander plans for the space.
The company loved the factory’s giant floors, but the city of Buffalo said, “No, no, we’re going to make a museum for trucking history there someday.”
I’m sure there was concern, as there is in Virginia today, that this startup tech firm might not succeed (tongue in cheek … remember, it was, after all, Microsoft, and even back in 2001, it had revenues of over $25 billion).
Since then, data centers have become quite a thing. In fact, Northern Virginia is…
