Amazon has acquired 20 acres of city-owned land in Manassas, Virginia, with plans to add to its growing data center portfolio in the booming Prince William County market.
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Amazon Web Services purchased the parcel for $27.7M, or more than $1.3M per acre, InsideNoVA reports. The Manassas City Council unanimously approved the sale of the undeveloped property on Wakeman Drive next to the Manassas Regional Airport.
The deal comes after the city received an unsolicited offer for the land from AWS in November. Local officials indicated that the city had no planned uses for the property, and there was broad agreement that the transaction was in the best interest of the city, according to InsideNoVa.
Neither AWS nor Manassas officials have provided any details regarding the facilities that may be developed on the site.
AWS’ latest land acquisition in Manassas sits in a swath of Prince William County that is already home to several data center projects, some of them already owned or leased by Amazon. A Digital Realty campus with a trio of data centers on the other side of the Prince William Parkway is reportedly leased to AWS. Digital Realty is also developing a nearby industrial site as a standalone data center.
Farther north, AWS is developing a pair of properties with multiple data centers. The company filed plans for a 2.2M SF campus on 117 acres in Gainesville in late 2022. In February, AWS proposed another Prince William County project, this time three data centers and a substation at the intersection of Route 29 and Wellington Road.
The projects are part of an aggressive expansion of Amazon’s data center footprint in Virginia that extends well beyond the borders of Prince William County. In January, the tech giant pledged $35B in data center development across the commonwealth and has since advanced several major data center projects at a handful of sites across the state.
But Amazon’s acquisition in Manassas last week capped a banner month for data center development in the county, which is rapidly becoming one of the nation's largest digital infrastructure markets. On Wednesday, county lawmakers approved the controversial 2,139-acre Prince William Digital Gateway, greenlighting what is expected to be the world’s largest data center corridor.
Developer Stack Infrastructure also acquired land in Prince William County earlier this month. The firm plans to expand its existing campus in Bristow, adding three data centers to the seven it has already built on the site.
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