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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[...]
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 […]
Federal Contractors | Technology 2023: MAX PETERSON
Peterson, who joined AWS in 2012 and started his current role in 2021, has more than 30 years of public sector experience, with stints at Dell and CDW-G. Now he’s guiding the $80.1 billion Amazon.com cloud subsidiary through a variety of high-tech federal projects. So far, AWS landed a spot (along with Google, Microsoft and […]
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 […]
AWS reports it invested $51.9B in Va. from 2011-21
Amazon Web Services Inc. invested more than $51.9 billion in Virginia between 2011 and 2021, according to an economic impact statement released by the company Wednesday. That investment total includes capital and operational expenditures in Virginia, including Loudoun, Fairfax and Prince William counties, AWS said. During that same period, the company has contributed an estimated […]
On cloud nine
In 2007 — the same year that Apple unveiled the iPhone and Netflix introduced the idea of “streaming” movies — Buddy Rizer started aggressively targeting an industry that many of the people he worked for in Loudoun County didn’t yet fully comprehend. “It was not an easy story to tell at first,” Rizer recalls of […]
Data centers’ job impact is spread out
The Lego Group’s July 2022 announcement that it would build a $1 billion Chesterfield County manufacturing plant came with the promise of 1,760 new jobs. Meanwhile, Amazon.com Inc.’s 20-year, $35 billion investment to expand its data center footprint across Virginia is projected to generate only 1,000 direct jobs. The data center industry‘s jobs-to-investment ratio is […]
Data center park headed for Surry County
A Middleburg developer plans to build at least 30 data centers on a 641-acre plot next to the Surry Nuclear Power Station in Surry County, with the possibility of a hydrogen and nuclear-powered green energy production facility in the future, the county announced Wednesday. John Andrews, CEO of Middleburg-based Green Energy Partners LLC of Virginia, […]
Defense and defensibility
When it comes to tech and government contractors, Northern Virginia’s national profile continued to rise in 2022. Arlington County, where Amazon.com Inc.’s multibillion-dollar HQ2 is continuing to take shape in National Landing, made headlines around the globe in spring 2022. Fortune 500 companies Boeing Co. and Raytheon Technologies Corp. announced within weeks of each other […[...]
