Amazon Data Center Expansion Targets Suburban NoVa Offices

In 2022, NIMBY activists fought a pitched battle with data center owners and operators to keep the Northern Virginia data center hub—the largest in North America—from expanding into rural parts of the state.

The developers won, and several hyperscale data center projects have moved forward in Prince William County.

This week, the largest data center customer in the US opened what may be a new frontier in the expansion of the data center cluster in NoVa: 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 Sterling, Amazon will take down three office buildings at the Loudoun Commerce Center on Nokes Boulevard, on a site the tech giant purchased from Virginia-based Clark-Hooke Corp. for $31M last summer.

Amazon also will demolish three offices at the Loudoun Tech Center on Ridgetop Circle, a site acquired in January 2022 from St. John Properties; a third location—which will also see three office buildings topple under Amazon’s plan—at Manekin Plaza was purchased from in investment fund for $21M in 2021.

According to plans filed with Loudoun County, Amazon will build a two-story, 312K SF data center at the Nokes site and a three-story, 313K SF data center at Manekin Plaza. A pair of server farms encompassing more than 300K SF are planned for the Tech Center property.

Amazon also is razing a two-building site in Fairfax County for redevelopment into a data center, the report said.

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.

The Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP), the Commonwealth’s state economic development agency, and the General Assembly’s Major Employment and Investment (MEI) Project Approval Commission put out the welcome mat for the mega-development with a new incentive designed to secure the $35B commitment.

Under a new program VEDP is calling the Mega Data Center Incentive Program, Amazon will receive a 15-year extension of Data Center Sales and Use tax exemptions on qualify equipment and enabling software, and an MEI performance grant of $140M for site and infrastructure improvements, workforce development and other project-related costs.

In November, a growing NIMBY movement aiming to restrict the expansion of Northern Virginia’s data center hub into rural areas, 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.

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.

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.