Another 2M SF Data Center Comes to Prince William County

NIMBY activists have suffered a series of recent defeats trying to stop Northern Virginia’s data center sprawl from encroaching into rural areas of Prince William County, their arguments rejected by a majority on the county’s Board of Supervisors.

But that may be about to change—because these grass-roots protestors have managed to change the composition of the county board itself.

Last year, the NIMBY crowd circled their wagons around Manassas—site of the Civil War battlefield at Bull Run—trying to stop a 2,139-acre, 28M SF data center campus from being built. In November, at the end of a contentious 14-hour board meeting, the Supervisors voted 5-2 to approve the project, known as the Prince William Digital Gateway.

The board adjusted the county’s land use master plan to permit rezoning of a large swath of farmland, homes and protected forest in Prince William County known as the Rural Crescent, which stretches from the Manassas battlefield in the south to Route 234 in the north.

The Supervisors also created a new Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, which includes the Digital Gateway project. Developers building server farms in the zone are fast-tracked, avoiding a cumbersome special-use permit process.

Digital Gateway is one of a series of mega-projects that have been fast-tracked in Prince William County as available space—and available electricity—are approaching capacity limits in neighboring Loudoun County, the epicenter of the world’s largest data center hub.

This week, Japanese data center provider NTT filed plans to build a 2M SF, 336 MW data center campus on a 104-acre site on John Marshall Highway in Gainesville, VA. Earlier this month, Virginia-based JK Moving Services filed plans for an 82-acre, 1.8M SF of data processing space on the site of the Hillwood Camping Park, a residential RV community in Gainesville.

In Bristow, Stanley Martin Homes has proposed to build 4M SF of data centers on 270 acres that will be known as the Devlin Technology Park.

But after these projects received preliminary approvals, NIMBY activists successfully mounted an unexpected grass-roots counter-offensive in Prince William County that appears to have outflanked their opponents:

In Virginia’s primary election on June 20, an insurgent who ran on a platform opposing data center expansion knocked off the chairperson of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors.

First-time candidate Deshundra Jefferson defeated incumbent County Supervisors Chair-at-Large Ann Wheeler after a campaign in which Wheeler’s support for large-scale data centers was the central issue. Jefferson, a Democrat, will face another staunch data center opponent in the November election, Brentville District Supervisor Jeanine Lawson, who easily won the Republican primary.

Opponents of data center expansion in Prince William County believe that the primary result portends a shift in the balance of power on the Board of County Supervisors—an expectation apparently shared by some data center developers.

Developer Chuck Kuhn, who bought the Hillwood Camping Park data center site, told Bisnow that he expects the election results to prompt the board to rethink where data centers are allowed to be built in Prince William County.

“I think it’s going to reshape the areas that we develop in and the areas that we do not develop,” Kuhn said, in an interview with Bisnow. “I wouldn’t say it help or hurts, but there’s going to be change in terms of the vision that the board has with respect to data center development and where it takes place.”

There currently is more than 24M SF of data center development in the Prince William County pipeline, according to Cushman & Wakefield.

The pipeline includes campuses that data center providers QTS and Compass are planning to build as part of Digital Gateway—facilities encompassing 18M SF and 1,000 MW of data processing capacity—but which still need final approval of zoning changes from the county’s Board of Supervisors—and, in November, from a new Chair-at-Large.

Stay tuned.