Amazon is slated to occupy a proposed 7.5M SF data center campus in Virginia’s King George County — a project that gained key approvals from local regulators last week.

The county’s planning commission voted to recommend rezoning and other land use changes that would greenlight the 869-acre campus, proposed in July by Birchwood Power Partners on the site of its former power plant. The commission also revealed that Amazon will be the end user of the campus as the tech giant continues to aggressively expand its Virginia footprint well beyond the data center industry’s traditional boundaries.

According to planning documents filed with county officials and first reported by the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star, initial build-out on the Amazon campus would include up to eight data centers totaling 4M SF, with multiple on-site substations. While construction would aim to begin within 18 months of final zoning approval, the project’s first phase would be developed gradually over a 15-year period. Subsequent phases could see an additional 3.5M SF of data centers spread across nine buildings on neighboring parcels.

Birchwood, a subsidiary of Japanese energy company J-Power, has been looking to redevelop the site of its King George power plant since the coal-powered facility was decommissioned in 2021. The company’s previous plans for the site included a solar farm and a mixed industrial campus that would have included data centers. The proposed campus for Amazon, first submitted in July, is set to go before the county’s board of supervisors later this year for final approval.

While Virginia has the world’s largest concentration of data centers by a significant margin, King George County — nearly a two-hour drive from the data center hub of Ashburn in Loudoun County — has seen no major data center development until now. But it is one of a number of Virginia counties outside the industry’s traditional footprint that have seen developers propose massive data centers over the past 24 months.

Continued demand for data centers from tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft and shortages of land and power in Loudoun County have driven digital infrastructure developers to look at new markets across the state. Spotsylvania, Caroline and Stafford counties, which neighbor King George, are also weighing major data center projects, as are counties like Culpeper, Frederick and Tazewell that were previously well off the data center industry’s radar.

Much of the industry’s geographic expansion across Virginia has been led by Amazon, which plans to spend $35B on new data centers in the commonwealth by 2040. Just this year, the company has filed four other applications for data centers in Spotsylvania and Caroline counties totaling more than 10M SF, according to Data Center Dynamics.