Vantage Plans Big Loudoun County Data Center Campus After $180M Land Buy
Vantage Data Centers plans to build a new 134-acre campus in Loudoun County.
The developer has submitted an application with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build what it calls a “large scale data center campus” in Ashburn, Data Center Dynamics first reported. The proposed campus would include four buildings and an electrical substation on a Belmont Ridge Road property that Vantage purchased last year for $180M.
Although neither the development timeline nor the capacities of the planned data centers were included in Vantage's filing, the project adds to the company’s already-growing footprint in Loudoun County. Vantage operates a 42-acre campus in Sterling that houses two data centers with a third under construction and room for a fourth.
In October, the company purchased 10 acres in Sterling from Boston Properties for $27M to accommodate future expansion. Vantage is also spending $380M to build out an 800K SF data center campus at another location in Sterling, according to the Washington Business Journal.
Denver-based Vantage specializes in building and leasing entire data centers — or entire campuses — to hyperscale tenants: cloud or social media giants like Amazon Web Services, Google or Meta that are driving much of the growing demand for these facilities. The firm is on a bit of a building spree, adding 13 new data centers globally in 2022 alone.
But Vantage’s push in Loudoun County comes at a tumultuous time for data center development in the world’s digital infrastructure capital. While Northern Virginia still has more data centers than anywhere else in the world and demand from developers remains robust, the region is also facing unexpected infrastructure problems and growing political uncertainty that, more than ever before, have developers looking elsewhere.
In July, utility Dominion Energy announced it wouldn't be able to deliver power as expected to a handful of data center developments in Ashburn’s Data Center Alley. The result of insufficient transmission infrastructure, these power shortages are unlikely to be resolved until 2026.
At the same time, the famously data center-friendly political environment across Northern Virginia has become increasingly difficult in recent months. Loudoun County officials approved land use changes in September that would effectively bar new data center development in significant swaths of the county. This comes as organized opposition to new data center projects is on the rise in neighboring counties like Prince William, Fairfax and Fauquier.
Virginia state officials have advanced a strengthened data center incentive program as a means to boost the state’s competitiveness — an effort that has already yielded a $35B development commitment from Amazon. Still, a January report from Cushman & Wakefield confirmed that, for the first time, Northern Virginia is no longer alone at the front of the pack when it comes to opportunity for data center developers.
