Today in DTN – AI and addressing chronic pain.

Virginia No Longer No. 1

Commercial real estate investment group CBRE reports that Northern Virginia is no longer the No. 1 destination for new data center construction. That honor now goes to Atlanta, which saw “under construction capacity surge by 52.3 percent.” Virginia continues to have the highest inventory of data centers at 4,496.5 MW. The vacancy rate in Virginia is at 0.2 percent.

While data center growth grew by 16.5% to 2,420.2 MW in the first half of 2026, that was a slower rate than in previous reports. In Georgia, Atlanta’s under-construction capacity surged by 52.3% year-over-year to 2,882 MW.

AI to Help Rural Regions Better Identify, Manage Chronic Pain

Chronic pain affects more than one-third of adults over age 65. Addressing that problem, especially in rural communities presents a number of challenges.

“I became interested in chronic pain because it’s incredibly common, but also incredibly complicated,” said Huaiyang Zhong, assistant professor at Virginia Tech. “Pain is not just a single diagnosis, and it’s not a number on a scale like a lot of medical diagnoses. Pain itself can affect mobility, mental health, sleep, cognitive functions, and overall quality of life. It’s a multidimensional thing.”

Zhong and his team will leverage artificial intelligence tools to help clinicians improve pain assessments, identify risks, and support better decision making to reduce pain and pain-related complications for older patients in rural communities.

“Machine learning can tell us which patients are at elevated risk,” Zhong said, “but as researchers, we ask the next questions: What should we do with that information? How should limited healthcare resources be allocated? How does this information feed into clinical workflows? How does using this actually improve clinical outcomes?”