Restrictions Placed on New Data Centers in Virginia

Loudoun County, the Virginia region that is home to the largest data center cluster in the world—known as Data Center Ally, 200 data centers encompassing 26M SF—has taken its first step to prohibit the growth of new server farms in certain parts of the county.

The county’s board of supervisors has 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.

The county board said its restrictions on new facilities in the urban transit center zone would not prohibit existing data centers from continuing to operate in the UTC. Advocates for the data center industry said the board still must clarify whether existing facilities will be prohibited from expanding in the UTC.

“We view it as vital that data centers on these sites have the option to respond to market conditions and expand beyond the current by-right FAR (floor-to-area ratio) limits of their underlying zoning or their existing configuration,” Josh Levi, president of the Data Center Coalition, said in a letter to the board of supervisors last month.

“Older style buildings might one day seek to expand to include additional stories with a much more office-styled data center appearance,” Levi added.

The Loudoun board’s action is a response to growing NIMBY backlash to new data center projects that have been proposed in rural areas of the NoVa hub, including near some historic preservation sites of Civil War battlefields.

The increasingly vocal opposition isn’t the only hurdle to new data center development in Loudoun: 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.

The announcement from Dominion stunned developers who said they had been assured by the energy giant that it would be able to provide electricity to support their projects.

There is an estimated 8M SF of new facilities in Loudoun County’s data center pipeline. Expansion plans in the NoVa cluster include 10 projects encompassing an estimated 1.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, which would almost double the cluster’s current capacity of 1.9 GW.

According to Dominion, the electricity capacity problem is limited to Eastern Loudoun County and will not affect data center operations in other parts of Northern Virginia.

Single data center projects now are being specified with capacities of 60 megawatts or more, double the 30 MW that previously was the industry standard. As a result, projected data center “loads” on the power system in Loudoun are expected to double in coming years.