Developers are proposing another large-scale data center development in Prince William County, Virginia.
First reported by InsideNoVa, developers last month submitted plans to rezone a site located at 14854 Dumfries Road in Independent Hill - to the west of Dale City and to the east of the Northern Virginia county -- to allow for a 1 million sq ft data center development.
As part of the proposed project, named the Potomac Technology Park, Plaza Realty Management Inc. are requesting permission to rezone 1.7 acres from A-1 - Agriculture, to O(M) - Office Mid-Rise District, in order to develop the property with office or data center uses.
The company is also filing for a special use permit to allow a data center and a substation outside of the county’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District.
According to the filings, Plaza Realty owns the land and plans to develop up to 1.16 million sq ft of data center space on the site. The company said the facility could come online by 2025. The site is close to Prince William Forest Park, a large area of protected forestland.
“Dumfries Road (Route 234) is currently a 4-lane divided highway and comprehensively planned to add additional lanes. As a result, the area is a commercial corridor connecting Route 1 and Interstate 95 to the commercial areas of mid-County and Independent Hill. On the other side of Route 234 is the County bus facility, a junkyard, and the County Landfill and, therefore, the proposed data center and/or office uses are a compatible use with the surrounding areas,” it said in the filing.
Prince William County is seeing a large number of new developments being proposed, much to the ire of locals. The study into whether PWC should expand its data center overlay district is still ongoing.
The proposed PW Digital Gateway could see thousands of acres of land rezoned and developed into a huge data center campus. The project, which could support more than 27.6 million square feet of data centers has caused controversy with local who doesn’t want PWC to reach the same level of data center density as neighboring Loudoun County.
