Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) is planning to build a data center in Ashburn, Virginia, whose anchor tenant will be Amazon, Washington Business Journal reported, citing anonymous sources.

COPT, a real estate investment trust, will build the data center on a 34-acre piece of land it bought from St. John Properties in December for US$14m, the report says, citing local land records. The company can build up to 608,000 sq ft of new development on the site.

Representatives from COPT did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

Ashburn, being on the East Coast and in close proximity to Washington, D.C., is one of the most active data center markets in the US. Nearly all major US providers have data centers there, including Latisys, DuPont Fabros, RagingWire, Digital Realty Trust, Phoenix NAP, Equinix, NTT America and Sabey, among others.

Amazon has always been tightlipped about its data center locations, but its public cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services) has a Northern Virginia availability zone. This means (if the report is true) that Amazon is expanding its data center capacity in the region.

Its other US data center locations are in Northern California and Oregon. It also has data centers in South America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

In November, Amazon launched two data centers for its cloud services in Australia, establishing the primary of the two inside an Equinix facility.