Japanese data center provider NTT has applied for permission to build a 336-megawatt data center campus in Virginia’s Prince William County.
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Located on John Marshall Highway in Gainesville, the proposed campus would contain four two-story data centers and supporting infrastructure on approximately 104 acres, according to filings with the Army Corps of Engineers that were first reported by Data Center Dynamics.
NTT first announced plans for a Prince William County campus in June 2022, but the project’s location hadn't been disclosed.
The project, which planning documents refer to as Grove at Gainesville, would exceed 2M SF of data center space at full build-out, with the first building scheduled for completion in the first half of 2024. It would be NTT’s second campus in Northern Virginia and its largest in the U.S.
NTT acquired the property in 2022 from developer Lerner Enterprises for $257.4M, according to Commercial Observer. Lerner and another developer had planned to develop data centers on the site themselves prior to selling the parcel, gaining rezoning approval from Prince William County in late 2021. NTT’s project requires additional permission from the Army Corps of Engineers due to its impact on wetlands that fall in the Army’s jurisdiction.
Amazon Web Services is likely NTT’s intended tenant at the site, Data Center Dynamics reported, citing the application’s references to a nearby Amazon-owned property as an alternative location for the project. Indeed, the cloud computing giant is in the midst of a $35B expansion of its data center infrastructure across Virginia.
The details of NTT’s proposed campus are emerging as data center developers are facing an increasingly challenging political environment in Prince William County. Last week, opponents of large data center projects scored an unexpected victory in a local election — results that could cause headaches in a county with more than 24M SF of data centers in the development pipeline.
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