A Google-linked data center campus planned on the site of a former missile factory in Prince William County, Virginia, has received a key approval from federal officials.
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The Army Corps of Engineers approved plans for a 181-acre data center campus in the town of Bristow, Virginia, in western Prince William County, Inside NoVa reports.
The proposed campus at 6201 Wellington Road will include four data center buildings, along with an administrative facility and an electrical substation.
The firm behind the proposal, Delaware-based Sharpless Enterprises, is reportedly a shell company linked with Google, one of the world’s largest users and developers of data centers.
Until 2005, the property slated to house data centers was home to a manufacturing facility for the Atlantic Research Corp., which produced and tested missiles and rockets on the site under contract by the Department of Defense. The site has been unused since its decommissioning 19 years ago.
Because the site is already zoned for industrial uses that include data centers, the planned campus does not require approval from lawmakers in Prince William County, where growing hostility towards the flood of data center development in the county has made project approvals and permitting increasingly uncertain.
However, it did require approval from the Army Corps of Engineers due to its potential impact on nearby wetlands and streams. Atlantic Research Corp. operated an EPA-mandated groundwater treatment system there from 1992 to 2018 to clean up hazardous waste from its former industrial activities.
The former missile plant is located in a section of Prince William County that has become a hotbed for data center development, particularly for the world’s largest tech companies. It sits directly next to a 124-acre assemblage acquired by Microsoft less than a month ago for its own data center campus. The tech giant paid $465M to purchase the property from developer Chuck Kuhn’s JK Land Holdings.
Although the Bristow project sits in an already industrialized area, the property is only around two miles from the Manassas National Battlefield and the controversial PW Digital Gateway, a 2,100-acre development area set to become the world’s largest data center corridor.
While the PW Digital Gateway was approved by local officials in December, the plan sparked significant backlash, prompting protests, emerging as a central issue in local elections and helping drive a wave of data center pushback across Northern Virginia.
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