The Prince William County Board of Supervisors will vote tomorrow on a plan to convert rural land into as much as 27 million square feet of data centers, according to The Washington Post. The “Digital Gateway” proposal asks the county to amend the planning guidelines to allow data center development on 2,133 acres along Pageland Lane in Gainesville, according to Prince William Times. The land that is within the county’s “rural crescent”—an 80,000-acre portion of the of the Occoquan watershed, according to the Post, and close to Manassas National Battlefield Park, where two major Civil War battles were fought.

The proposal would require the sale of more than 200 homes and small farms—most of which are under contract with either QTS Realty Trust or Compass Datacenters, according to the Post. Blackstone acquired QTS Realty Trust last year for approximately $10 billion.

Prince William County—which currently has 35 data centers, covering six million square feet, with another 5.4 million square feet under development—estimates that the Digital Gateway plan would generate an additional $400 million in annual tax revenue, according to the Post. Neighboring Loudoun County is expected to bring in more than $576 million in tax revenue from the data center industry in FY2023. This amounts to 29 percent of its total projected tax revenue, according to WUSA9. Prince William is the next-largest data center hub in Northern Virginia, according to the Post, and receives about $79 million per year.

Last Updated on October 31, 2022 by Ramin Seddiq