Peterson Cos., Denver firm to develop massive data center campus. But not in Loudoun.
A data center planned for Manassas, to be developed by Peterson Cos. and Denver’s Stack Infrastructure.
WASHINGTON BUSINESS JOURNAL – The Peterson Cos. is partnering with a Denver-based data center developer to construct a massive data center campus in Prince William County, the duo jointly announced Wednesday.
Fairfax-based Peterson and Stack Infrastructure will tackle the 125-acre project together, ultimately delivering 250 megawatts of capacity in 4 million square feet of build-to-suit facilities. The first phase, the two said, will cover 25 acres and 700,000 square feet of data centers, and could begin to come online as soon as late 2020.
Four pad sites are already cleared and graded, said Taylor Chess, Peterson’s president of development.
“Northern Virginia continues to be the biggest, most important data center market in the world, and we are excited to partner with Peterson on this opportunity”, Brian Cox, Stack CEO, said in a statement. “Prince William County offers robust power infrastructure and low latency connectivity within one of the densest concentrations of fiber networks in the world.”
Neighboring Loudoun County is widely considered the data center capital of the planet, but Prince William’s inventory of the massive server shells is growing, too. The county announced in August that it had surpassed 5 million square feet of data center space, from 41 projects involving $9 billion in capital investment.
As the Washington Business Journal reported in February 2019, Peterson assembled this 125-acre tract largely through a pair of acquisitions. It paid $12 million for 87 acres at 9604 Hornbaker Road in Manassas, and then $3 million for an adjacent 35.6 acres within the county-owned Innovation @ Prince William business park, 9750 Hornbaker Road. Innovation @ Prince William is located between Route 28, the Route 234 bypass and University Boulevard.
At the time, Chess suggested the site would be developed as a “technology focused” campus, likely data centers, despite the fact that the land lacked the infrastructure for that use. It is partly why Peterson got such a good deal on the county’s land — the developer will have to invest millions to ready the property for construction.
Stack has developed in Northern Virginia before, specifically its 180,000-square-foot, 18MW nva01 data center in Sterling. It also has data centers in Atlanta, greater Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Silicon Valley, Portland, Oregon, and New Albany, Ohio.