Google Investing $1B To Improve Northern Virginia Data Centers
Tech giant Google plans to spend $1B on improvements to three data centers in Virginia's Loudoun and Prince William counties.
Google plans to make capital improvements to its data centers in Loudoun County’s Arcola and Leesburg, as well as a facility in Gainesville, Prince William County, the Washington Business Journal reports.
While the company said the funding will go toward “technical infrastructure,” it remains unclear whether the billion dollars in spending will entail any expansion of these facilities or go toward upgrading the infrastructure inside them.
The spending, announced Friday during an event with Gov. Glenn Youngkin at Google’s Reston Station office, brings the company’s total investment in the commonwealth to $4.2B.
The three data centers slated for improvements encompass the bulk of Google’s digital infrastructure footprint in Virginia. The company operates a 400K SF data center in Arcola, with plans to develop a second facility closer to Dulles International Airport, according to Baxtel. In Leesburg, Google opened its 200K SF facility on 58 acres in 2022.
In Prince William County, Google is making an additional investment in its recently opened facility on Rollins Ford Road near Gainesville, which occupies at least part of a 270-acre campus initially developed by Chuck Kuhn’s JK Land Holdings and third-party data center developer Yondr Group. Google is also building a second Prince William County campus on 181 acres at a former military site in Bristow.
The announcement of Google’s new data center spending in Virginia came hours after parent company Alphabet indicated on its quarterly earnings call that it would ramp up spending on data centers and other information technology infrastructure worldwide. Google increased capital expenditure by 9% to $12B last quarter, driven overwhelmingly by servers and data centers, and CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts the digital infrastructure spending will remain at or above current levels for the rest of the year.
“We have committed to making the investments required to keep us at the leading edge in technical infrastructure,” Pichai said Thursday. “You can see that from the increases in our capital expenditures. This will fuel growth in the cloud and help us push the frontiers of AI models and enable innovation.”
In addition to the billion dollars in improvements to Virginia data centers, Google announced Friday that it will devote $75M to fund a pair of artificial intelligence-focused workforce development programs in the state. The funding will go to a grant program for organizations providing AI workforce training, as well as the development of a Google AI Essentials training course that will be available for free to Virginia residents through certain nonprofits.
