Microsoft Expanding In Northern Virginia With $400M Data Center
Microsoft plans to build a new 500K SF data center in Loudoun County, further expanding its Northern Virginia footprint.
The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant has filed plans with Loudoun County officials to develop a $400M facility on 67 acres in Stone Ridge, the Washington Business Journal reports.
Identified in county documents as IAD11, the project site is located in the county's Arcola Business Park, squeezed between a pair of Amazon-owned parcels that are also slated for data center build-outs, according to Data Center Dynamics.
While several data center projects in Loudoun County and elsewhere in Northern Virginia have been delayed or withdrawn in recent months due to opposition from some community groups, Microsoft’s Stone Ridge project is unlikely to face any such holdups. The county approved Microsoft’s site plan for expedited development when the company purchased the property in 2020, meaning construction can proceed once the permitting process is complete without any change to land use policy or zoning. Microsoft has partnered with Turner Construction, engineering firm Dewberry and architect Gensler on the project.
Microsoft paid $93.7M for the property in August 2020, acquiring the site from a joint venture involving Baltimore-based St. John Properties and JK Land Holdings. The latter, an offshoot of logistics firm JK Moving Services, recently announced its own plans for a 112-acre data center development in Leesburg, one of several logistics-focused developers that have dipped their toes into the data center market in recent months.
The planned Stone Ridge data center would add to Microsoft’s already-sizable digital infrastructure footprint across Northern Virginia. In Loudoun County, the company operates facilities or campuses in Ashburn, Leesburg and Sterling, along with facilities in Manassas City and elsewhere in Prince William County. In October, Microsoft filed plans to build another campus in Virginia’s Mecklenburg County.
Like its hyperscale competitors, Microsoft has continued to aggressively build out its data center infrastructure even as it cuts back in other areas of its business. In November alone, Microsoft announced plans to build a pair of data centers in San Jose, California, and said it would spend more than $1B on the development of four facilities in Catawba County, North Carolina.
