Google investing $1B in Va. data center campuses
Google is investing $1 billion in expanding its Virginia data center campuses this year and is launching a $75 million Google.org AI Opportunity Fund, one of Google’s top executives and Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Friday at Google’s Reston office. “Today is a great day. We’ve got a $1 billion investment in the commonwealth that we’re […]
Which way the Venn blows
It feels like one of those logic puzzles high school students grapple with on the SAT: If Delegate Sally passes a law to require utilities in her state to generate all their electricity from renewable, carbon-free energy sources like wind and solar by 2045, what is the latest year CEO Tom’s power plant can stop […]
Digital divide
In a relatively short time, Josh Thomas has seen the Prince William County district he represents in the Virginia House of Delegates transform from farmland and residential neighborhoods to massive buildings filled with the digital infrastructure that stores, processes and distributes huge amounts of information across the global internet, from cloud computing for businesses to […]
Modine will invest $18.1M in Rockbridge County expansion
Modine Manufacturing, a manufacturer of cooling equipment for data centers, will invest $18.1 million to expand its Rockbridge County operation, creating an estimated 211 jobs, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Tuesday. Wisconsin-based Modine, which builds thermal management systems and components, saw $2.3 billion in net sales in fiscal year 2023, a 12% increase over the previous […]
JLL: NoVa is still nation’s top data center market
Northern Virginia remains the country’s largest data center market, according to a report released Monday by real estate company JLL. The 581 megawatts of capacity leased by energized — or built-out — data centers in Northern Virginia for 2023 represented a new record, according to the JLL report. Data centers leased 184 MW in capacity […]
Southwest Va. Big Deal: Land ho!
The largest business deal announced during the past year in Southwest Virginia is an agreement between Dallas-based Fortune 100 natural gas and propane pipeline transport company Energy Transfer, Virginia’s nonprofit Energy DELTA Lab and Wise County to develop energy infrastructure in the region. Under the agreement, the partners will work with energy companies and electric […]
Old Dominion, new data
As available land for data centers in Loudoun County — home to Data Center Alley, the world’s largest concentration of data centers — has become scarcer and more expensive, the industry has expanded into other Northern Virginia localities and beyond. In Virginia, Prince William County has become the other heat map for the industry — […]
Northern Va. Year-in-Review: Back to the cookie jar
Data centers continued to dominate, define and, in some cases, shape the arc of Northern Virginia’s 2023 economic story. Amazon Web Services cleared its hurdle in Stafford County, and although Prince William County’s controversial Digital Gateway project faced major public backlash, supervisors ultimately voted to approve the 1,200-acre project’s rezoning applications in December 2023. (See [...]
Data mining
Elena Schlossberg has spent the past three-and-a-half years fighting against what some say is soon to become the world’s largest data center complex. The Haymarket resident estimates she’s participated in at least 100 Zoom calls, town halls and Prince William County meetings to protest the project, while wearing a series of T-shirts voicing her opposition […]
$14.9M manufacturing facility coming to Russell County
Tate, a data center supplier, will invest $14.9 million to establish a new manufacturing facility in Russell County, creating 170 jobs, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Thursday. The new plant will focus primarily on data center component manufacturing and containment products to serve clients in Virginia and other data center sites. “I’m proud that the commonwealth […]
RVA757 Connects releases plan for global internet hub
RVA757 Connects, a nonprofit focused on regional cooperation for economic development in Richmond and Hampton Roads, released on Thursday its 10-point strategic plan for transforming the “megaregion” into the next global internet hub. Virginia is already home to the world’s largest internet hub in Loudoun County’s Ashburn area, which has the world’s greatest concentration of […]
Data centers added $54.2B to Va. GDP over five years
The data center industry contributed $54.2 billion to Virginia’s gross domestic product from 2017 to 2021, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers study released Tuesday. That calculation includes indirect impacts from other businesses as part of the data center industry supply chain and induced impacts resulting from household spending of income earned from the industry or its […]