Virginia Campground, RV Park Eyed For New 2M SF Data Center Campus
An 82-acre property in Northern Virginia's Prince William County that houses recreational vehicles and a campground may soon be replaced by a massive data center campus.
A developer has filed plans for an 82-acre data center campus on the site of the Hillwood Camping Park, a largely residential RV community in Gainesville, Virginia. The proposed project, first reported by the Prince William Times, would see nearly 1.8M SF of data center space rise on the site.
The property is under agreement to be sold to developer Chuck Kuhn, the CEO of Virginia-based JK Moving Services, who has made a heavy push into data center development over the past year. A firm affiliated with Kuhn has already filed plans with county officials seeking to rezone the property and add it to the county’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, which would limit the review and permitting process needed for the campus to move forward.
According to the company’s filing with county officials, the roughly 140 trailers at the Hillwood Camping Park would be replaced by 1.79M SF of data centers. The developers are seeking permission to build as high as 80 feet — the height of a three-story data center — and would likely have several buildings on the site.
Prince William County has become a hotbed for data center development, driven by shortages of land and power in neighboring Loudoun County, which is home to more data centers than anywhere else in the world.
The Hillwood Camping Park is across a set of railroad tracks from Village Place Technology Park, a 1.2M SF data center campus that is under construction. It is also just down the road from the Gainesville Business Park, a site purchased for $57M by Kuhn’s JK Land Holdings earlier this year and also slated to become a data center campus.
But opposition to data center development in Prince William County is on the rise, and there are signs that a campus that would remove a source of housing for lower-income residents could face challenges. While the project’s application to be included in the county’s zoning overlay district was scheduled to go before the county board of supervisors next week, the supervisor whose district includes the RV park has requested that decision be delayed, according to the Prince William Times.
