Data center developers turn their eyes to Stafford; 4 server farms proposed

Data center developers are turning their attention to Stafford County.

According to sources familiar with the project, an unnamed single firm aims to build four server farms in multiple corners of the county, including the Falmouth, Griffis-Widewater, and rural George Washington magisterial districts.

Now commonplace in localities to the north, like Loudoun and Prince William counties, data centers are typically large warehouse-style buildings, with hundreds of thousands of square feet, built between 60 and 100 feet tall. They’re full of servers that power the internet and draw large amounts of electricity to power the servers and water to cool them.

While data centers provide few jobs, they are a massive cash cow for localities that rake in computer, peripheral, or machine taxes based on the number of servers inside the buildings. With the changing nature of the internet, data centers frequently upgrade their equipment, leading to even more tax money for localities.

Stafford County is also considering creating a data center overlay district — a defined area within the county borders where developers could build data centers by right, without seeking a land rezoning from the Board of Supervisors, which would come with public input from residents.

Sources say it’s too early to know where the data center district lines would be drawn. We’ll post more here to PLN once we learn more.

Neighboring Prince William County also identified an area in which data centers should go in that county. However, projects to be located inside the area must come before the Board of County Supervisors for approval, and the boundary line is only a suggestion — not the rule.

Last year, Prince William County residents saw the result of a years-long fight against its Board of County Supervisors to stop the Prince William Digital Gateway project, a rezoning of more than 800 acres of semi-rural land next to Manassas National Battlefield Park — outside the county’s data center overlay district.

Ultimately, supervisors approved the project — which is about 15 times larger than Potomac Mills mall in Woodbridge and larger than 100 Walmart supercenters — after a record-breaking 14-hour meeting that lasted into the late morning hours of November 2, 2022.

Residents opposed the data centers not only because they would be built near the hallowed ground at one of the first battles of the Civil War, a popular national tourism destination, but also near homes.

Residents said they feared a loud hum omitted by the rooftop cooling units would ruin their quality of life. Plus, conservationists warned that clear-cutting the land to build the server farms would lead to more stormwater runoff and sediment flowing into the region’s drinking water reservoir.

Data center developers continue to choose Prince William County because of its cheaper land and lower tax rates than neighboring Loudoun County and access to high-speed fiber data lines, a requirement for the centers and something that Stafford also has.

Falmouth District Supervisor Meg Bohmke said she’s now paying attention to data center developers’ interest in the county. She toured a multi-level data center in Prince William County, just outside Manassas, with more than 500,000 square feet of server storage.

“I’m meeting with as many people as possible because there are definite positives to data centers,” said Bohmke. “The key is, where are they going to be located, what will the buffer between them and people’s homes be, and what will they look like when they’re built? We don’t want a bunch of boxy warehouses all over.”

The data center projects across the region come as Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Amazon would invest $35 billion to build new data centers across the state — the most significant private investment in Virginia’s history.

Since the 1990s, Loudoun County has led the world in data centers, as the county is home to the most server farms on the globe. However, Prince William will replace it at the top of the list when the Prince William Digital Gateway is complete.