Data Center Mega-Campus Gets Green Light in Rural VA

In a major defeat for a growing NIMBY movement to restrict the expansion of Northern Virginia’s data center hub into rural areas, Prince William County has approved a 2,139-acre, 28M SF data center cluster that will sit in proximity to the Civil War battlefield at Manassas.

Anti-data center activists had specifically drawn their battle lines around the historic site, also known as the Battle of Bull Run.

But this week the county’s Board of Supervisors gave the green light—in a 5-2 vote during a 14-hour session—to a development that will be known as the Prince William Digital Gateway, a massive data center cluster that already has two anchor occupants: QTS and Compass Data Centers, which each will build hyperscale data center campuses encompassing 18M SF and 1,000 MW of capacity on 1,636 acres of the new Gateway zone.

Prince William’s board adjusted the county’s land use master plan to allow for the rezoning of 2,139 acres of farmland, homes and protected forest known as the Rural Crescent, which stretches from the Manassas battlefield in the south to Route 234 in the north.

With Loudoun County—the epicenter of NoVa’s data center hub, the largest data processing cluster in North America, also known as Data Center Alley—temporarily pausing development of new data centers, surrounding areas have seized the opportunity to develop new data processing capacity that can be connected to Loudoun’s cluster with fiber lines.

Last month, Loudoun County’s Board of Supervisors amended the county’s comprehensive plan—to be codified in zoning changes to come—removing specified parts of the county from the fast-track, by-right pre-approval that assured developers purchasing sites in the hub they could build data centers on them without having to submit to zoning or planning board hearings.

Under the update, which also stipulates new design and environmental standards for data processing facilities, data center developers will no longer be allowed by-right in “place types” (neighborhoods) designated as either suburban mixed-use, suburban neighborhood, suburban compact or urban transit center (UTC) zones.

The suburban mixed-use designation covers more than 887 acres of undeveloped land in the western part of the county; the urban transit center restriction will include areas along Route 7 in Loudoun that already have data centers operating in them.

In August, Dominion Energy—the regional utility that powers the data center hub—informed data center providers that it won’t be able to expand its transmission capacity in Loudoun County fast enough to support deliveries of some new data center facilities.

Dominion has told customers in Eastern Loudoun County near Ashburn, VA—the epicenter of Data Center Alley—that it will take until 2026 to install two new 500 kV transmission lines needed to power new data centers in the area.

Across the border in Maryland, Quantum Loophole, which began construction in June for a massive, 2,100-acre “Gigawatt-scale” hyperscale data center campus in Frederick, MD, already has lined up its first four tenants for the first phase of the project, deals which will encompass 240 MW of capacity.

Quantum also announced last month that construction is underway on its QLoop network, a 40-mile hyperscale fiber ring that will connect the Frederick campus to the internet ecosystem in the heart of NoVa’s data center cluster in Ashburn, VA.

In August, the first of two under-the-Potomac River borings for the fiber optic cables was completed. The 3,500-foot boring drilled through bedrock 90 feet below the river.

Quantum announced in May that data center provider Aligned would build out a facility on the campus site in Frederick, to be branded as Quantum Frederick.

The campus will rise on the site—purchased by a joint venture of Quantum and TPG Real Estate Partners in 2021—of a former Alcoa aluminum smelting plant. Quantum has several development-ready parcels to offer that are fully entitled for data center development—a major selling point as NIMBY sentiment against new data centers grew in rural areas of Virginia.

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