With the largest data center hub in North America consuming most of the available space in Loudoun County, VA—where some data center development has been paused to give Dominion Energy the time to install upgraded power transmission lines—data centers projects continue to migrate into rural areas of Prince William County.
Virginia-based JK Moving Services has filed plans for an 82-acre data center campus encompassing 1.8M SF of data processing space that will be located on the site of the Hillwood Camping Park, a residential RV community in Gainesville, VA.
The encroachment of data centers into rural areas of Prince William County touched off a pitched battle with NIMBY activists last year. In November, the local NIMBY movement suffered a major defeat when Prince William County approved a 2,139-acre, 28M SF data center cluster that will sit in proximity to the Civil War battlefield at Manassas.
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Anti-data center activists had specifically drawn their battle lines around the historic site, also known as the Battle of Bull Run. Instead, 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.
The Gainesville site of JV Moving Services' project sits about two miles west of the Manassas battlefield site, behind a McDonald's restaurant on US 29. According to a report in the Prince William Times, the RV campground has for several years provided a lower-cost housing option for long-stay visitors and workers.
According to the Hillwood campgrounds website, the park has space for 140 RV campers.
The company has filed a rezoning application that would add the RV campground to Prince William County's Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, which also includes the Digital Gateway project. Developers building server farms in the zone are fast-tracked, avoiding a cumbersome special-use permit process.
For Digital Gateway, Prince William's supervisors 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.
Last month, Amazon announced plans to demolish up to a dozen suburban office buildings in Loudoun and Fairfax counties and replace them will new server farms. The cloud-computing leader will replace the office campuses with five data centers encompassing nearly 1M SF, the Washington Business Journal reported.
In January, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced it is planning to invest $35B by 2040 in multiple new data campuses that will combine its expandable cloud capacity in Virginia.
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