Peterson Plans 5.5M SF Data Campus in Stafford County, VA
The $1.5B, 524-acre project will include more than two dozen buildings.
Peterson Co. affiliate Stafford Technology LC has filed plans to build a $1.5B data center campus on an undeveloped 524-acre site in the woods next to Stafford Regional Airport in Virginia.
What will be called the Stafford Technology Campus envisions a 5.5M data center complex that will be built in five stages and encompass more than 25 buildings, including data-processing facilities and electrical substations to power them.
The move represents a growing strategic thrust for Fairfax, VA-based Peterson, which has a diverse portfolio of retail, residential and office properties, including the National Harbor mixed-use complex, but very few data center assets.
In 2020, Peterson announced a partnership with Stack Infrastructure on a 125-acre data center campus in Prince William County encompassing 4M SF of data-processing space.
The proposed data center mega-campus would require rezoning of the undeveloped tract, which currently has an agricultural/rural designation, as a Targeted Development Area.
Approval of the Stafford project, which is adjacent to US Highway 1, known in Virginia as the Jefferson Davis Highway, would be a major benchmark in the incursion of the largest data center hub in North America—the Northern Virginia cluster centered in Loudoun, Fairfax and Fauquier counties—into rural areas of VA, including Stafford County.
Proposed rural data center projects encountered stiff resistance from NIMBY opponents in H1 2022, but the tide appears to be turning in favor of data center development.
The NIMBY movement’s war against data center expansion in Northern Virginia suffered a huge setback in November when Prince William County approved a massive new data center cluster that will sit in proximity to the Civil War battlefield of Manassas, a.k.a. the Battle of Bull Run.
The Prince William County Board of Supervisors gave the green light—in a 5-2 vote during a 14-hour session—to a 2,139-acre 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.