Amazon plans Spotsylvania data centers

A game changer. That’s how Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors Chair David Ross describes the annual tax revenue the county could see from data centers, including a slate of proposed Amazon.com facilities that could generate $120 million per year.

“You could get rid of personal property tax on cars,” Ross says. “You could put more money towards the schools; you could relieve some of the tax burden on the citizens.”

In July, the Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors voted to amend the county’s comprehensive plan to make data centers a targeted industry and allow them to be developed in almost every land use category, provided the centers meet parameters such as being near existing transmission lines and within 1 mile of the county’s designated “primary development boundary,” a 72.9-square-mile area stretching south and west of Fredericksburg. 

“We are seeing major data center companies wanting to move to our area,” Ross says. “If they are coming, we want to get prepared.”

Data centers have always been permitted in the county, but none have materialized so far, says Spotsylvania Director of Community Engagement Michelle McGinnis. 

Other Northern Virginia counties have courted data centers for decades. Data centers are projected to generate $570 million in local property taxes next year in Loudoun County, home to Data Center Alley, the world’s largest concentration of data centers. However, data centers also are subject to criticisms for being loud, unsightly and large consumers of electricity. Prince William Board Chair Ann Wheeler lost her primary bid in June over backlash to the controversial proposed Digital Gateway campus, which she supported.

Between 2011 and 2021, Amazon invested $52 billion building data centers in Virginia, and the e-commerce giant plans to spend $35 billion more on data centers in the commonwealth by 2040. 

Since Spotsylvania passed its amendments, Amazon subsidiary Amazon Web Services has filed four rezoning requests, three of which would include data centers within the county, McGinnis says. The fourth would provide infrastructure for a data center campus in neighboring Caroline County. Charlie Payne, an attorney representing Amazon, says the projects, all east of Interstate 95, would total 6.7 million square feet of data center development and could generate $107.2 million to $120.6 million annually in local tax revenue.

Spotsylvania is “not as dense as Northern Virginia,” Payne says. “We have the infrastructure that data centers are looking for, both public utilities and also electric infrastructure.”