Chesterfield’s new tech park already generating buzz

Chesterfield County Economic Director Garrett Hart received an inquiry about Upper Magnolia Green a week after the county announced in 2020 that it had purchased the property with the intent to develop a portion of it as a technology park.

Intel Corp. hadn’t been able to find a site in Virginia for a $20 billion semiconductor facility that would generate 5,000 jobs, Stephen Moret, then president and CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, told Hart. Could Hart submit Upper Magnolia Green?

“I agreed, and we sent Stephen and VEDP all the information we had on the site at that time,” Hart says.

Intel requested additional information and visited Chesterfield’s proposed 1,728-acre technology park twice before settling on a site in Ohio.

“We were one of the top three selections for Intel,” Hart says, “so that tells us … [it] was a good site for a fab plant.”

The county’s other large tech park, Meadowville, in eastern Chesterfield, was running out of space long before Lego Group announced plans last year to build a $1 billion manufacturing plant there, Hart says. To remain in contention for future megaprojects, Chesterfield’s economic development authority began negotiating to acquire Upper Magnolia Green in western Chesterfield in 2018.

Chesterfield is using a $25 million Virginia Business Ready Sites Program grant to design road and utilities infrastructure at Upper Magnolia Green and to perform other preliminary engineering work to demonstrate it could be site-ready within
18 to 36 months, Hart says.

Upper Magnolia Green is being built to attract megaprojects. That could be a chip manufacturer that would invest up to $25 billion and create thousands of jobs, Hart says, or a pharmaceutical manufacturer constructing a $10 billion plant.

“We’re building towards those determinations, because we have been working with companies like that on projects like that,” Hart says, though he declined to offer more detail.

Hart says he’s already receiving calls from site consultants about Upper Magnolia Green. The Greater Richmond Partnership is also promoting the site through newsletters to consultants and interested parties, says Michael Ivey, the regional economic development organization’s vice president of marketing and communications.

A property of Upper Magnolia Green’s size near a major metropolitan area is “hard to come by,” Ivey says. “We don’t have to scream from the rooftops that Upper Magnolia Green is available.”  

Virginia Business Associate Editor Courtney Mabeus-Brown contributed to this story.