Is AWS Planning A Loudoun County Datacenter?

There are whispers. Whispers that Amazon Web Services is thinking about setting up a new datacenter in the Loudoun County area. But it needs to get permission to rezone the land first.

As reported, a company representing the cloud giant submitted a plan to build a 600,000 square foot datacenter campus at the heart of the Loudoun County. This is a 44-acre site near the Dulles International Airport, some 25 miles south of Washington DC.

This will require rezoning of three parcels of land that belong to Chantilly Crushed Stone.

The proposed campus is said to comprise three separate datacenter halls, though the report does not clarify whether all three would be built simultaneously.

Obviously, this is not the first rodeo for Amazon in this area.

According to the 2018 report by real estate firm Transwestern, AWS footprint in the Northern Virginia and wider Washington DC area rose from just 200,000 square feet in the late nineties to almost 6.6 million square feet last year.

And not just that, the company is also evaluating Northern Virginia as the potential location for its second US headquarters. If the company follows through with this, this headquarters would span 8 million square feet, on a site located 7 miles from the proposed datacenter campus.

Early days for both projects, however, with the Loudon County Board of Supervisors due to make a decision on the project anytime now.