New $17B Project Continues Data Center Surge In Small Virginia County
Data center developer EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure is planning a 1.1-gigawatt campus in Louisa County, Virginia, a rural county near Richmond that has quickly gone from a data center hinterland to a digital development hotbed.
EdgeCore plans to invest close to $17B to build nearly 4M SF of data centers across 697 acres in the Shannon Hill Regional Business Park, it announced Wednesday. The facilities would ultimately be leased to cloud providers, artificial intelligence firms and other Big Tech hyperscalers.
"The investment in this land enables EdgeCore to expand our growth in Central Virginia, providing our hyperscale and AI focused customers with scalable, cost-efficient data center solutions, while simultaneously benefitting the residents of Louisa County with decades of tax revenue, job creation and ancillary investments,” EdgeCore CEO Lee Kestler said in a statement.
For EdgeCore, a hyperscale-focused developer backed by investment firm Partners Group, the proposed campus in Louisa County represents its third development effort underway in Virginia. The Denver-based firm is in the process of building a 114-megawatt campus in Ashburn as well as a 120-acre campus in Culpeper County that could eventually support as much as 432 megawatts.
Beyond Virginia, EdgeCore has developed facilities in Silicon Valley, the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, and has a campus in Reno, Nevada, under construction that is expected to be completed next year.
The company acquired its newest site, located around 40 miles northwest of Richmond, for $42M from the government of Louisa County. The county purchased the land in 2018 for just $2.6M, subsequently rezoning it the following year for technology-based uses.
Leveraging state economic development grants and debt assurances worth a combined $30.6M, Louisa County also launched efforts to make the site development-ready and invested nearly $30M in utilities to serve the campus. Power for the site will be provided by Virginia utility Rappahannock Electric Cooperative.
“This announcement marks a realization of the park’s full benefits,” Dustin Madison, chairman of the Louisa County Industrial Development Authority, said in a statement, adding that the project will generate “significant and ongoing revenues which will benefit our citizens.”
Such proactive efforts by Louisa officials to court the data center industry have turned a county without a single data center, and a population of roughly 40,000, into an industry hotbed with more than $28B worth of data center development planned or in the works.
EdgeCore's Kestler, in written responses to Bisnow's questions, said Louisa has drawn such strong interest because the data center hub of Virginia's Loudoun County has become “increasingly constrained.” Louisa has the same tax incentives, infrastructure support and skilled labor pool as Loudoun, he said, but it has “lower costs and improved power timelines.”
“This site provides ideal conditions for hyperscale and AI-centric campus developments, especially as land scarcity intensifies in other Northern Virginia corridors,” Kestler said in an emailed statement. “Louisa County leadership has been extremely forward-thinking, with a clear understanding of the economic potential of digital infrastructure.”
The county’s data center boom kicked off in 2023, when Amazon announced it was investing $11B to build a pair of campuses in the county’s Technology Overlay District.
Those campuses are now in development. One will total 1.7M SF of data center space on 173 acres, while the larger of the two projects is expected to house 10 data centers on a 374-acre site.
Earlier this month, Amazon proposed a third Louisa campus with more than 7.2M SF of data center space. The tech giant plans to build four initial data centers at the site, with three further phases of construction expected at the 1,370-acre property. While the power capacity of the project wasn't provided in the company’s proposal, the number of substations planned for the campus suggests it could ultimately house close to a gigawatt of capacity or more.
Louisa County’s data center development surge comes amid a wave of large-scale data center projects flooding into Richmond and its other surrounding counties. Amazon has pitched a 1,143-acre campus in Caroline County, while data center developer Tract has proposed a 1,211-acre project in Hanover County. In early June, officials in Chesterfield County approved rezoning for a pair of campuses totaling more than 1,300 acres.
Still, it has not all been smooth sailing for developers in the Greater Richmond market. Last week, officials in Chesterfield County recommended the denial of a second data center project planned by Tract, a 740-acre campus that would include up to 2M SF of data center space across as many as 11 buildings.
