The Virginia town of Culpeper, located in Culpeper County, sits around 55 miles south of Data Center Alley in Ashburn. It is a largely rural county of 55,000 souls, around half of which live in Culpeper, the only notable town.

Like many Virginia counties south of Loudoun’s data center heartland, it is seeing a rapid data center build-out totaling gigawatts of capacity. Yet unlike many of the rural counties vying for the attention of data center developers, it is one of the few with an existing data center footprint.

From the 1960s until the late 1990s, Culpeper was home to a high-security storage facility operated by the Federal Reserve Board. The bunker housed enough US currency to replenish the cash supply east of the Mississippi River in the wake of a nuclear attack on DC. The facility also housed the Culpeper Switch, the central switching station of the Federal Reserve's Fedwire electronic funds transfer system – the Switch ceased operations in 1992.

Rather than be turned into a traditional data center, the site was acquired by HP founder David Packard’s foundation and transformed into the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, hosting the Library of Congress' audiovisual archive – all 6.3 million pieces of the library's movie, television, and sound collection.

But the presence of the Culpeper Switch attracted a Swift data center to the area in the 1980s that continues to operate today. Terremark then acquired a 30-acre site nearby at 18155 Technology Drive around 2007, announcing plans to develop the NAP of the Capital Region. The $250 million campus was set to total five, 50,000 sq ft (4,645 sqm) buildings at full build-out; work on a second building began in 2009, a third building was added in 2010 and a fourth in 2015. The site reportedly totals around 60MW.

Built by Terremark in 2008 to target government customers, the company billed the site as one the most secure in the world, and Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) was the site’s anchor tenant. Terremark was acquired by Verizon in 2011; Verizon then sold its data center business – including the Culpeper campus – to Equinix in 2016.

But after that, nothing. The area saw little in the way of data center development for years. With the advent of AI and capacity crunches further north, that has quickly changed. The county is now expecting millions of square feet of new development, totaling gigawatts of capacity, all due to be built out within the next decade.

“I think Culpeper is looking like a promising market,” DC Byte analyst Lilli Flynn tells DCD. “While a very small market now, Culpeper is proving a fairly friendly area for data centers. The Culpeper Tech Zone was created to avoid a lot of the backlash much of Virginia has seen by localizing builds to a specified area, and is utilizing existing infrastructure to incentivize operators to build there. Equinix’s established presence in the area is also a draw.”

Developers flock to Culpeper

Amazon, as has been the case across the Old Dominion, has led the way. The cloud giant was granted permission in April 2022 to rezone 243 acres of land along Route 3 in Stevensburg to develop a two-building data center campus totaling 430,000 square feet (40,000 sqm).

Since then, a bevy of other companies have followed suit into the county, which is served by both Dominion and Rappahannock Electric. Construction on each of the projects is anticipated to begin in the next two to three years and is projected to be completed in the 2030s.

“We've been interested in data centers for quite some time, Bryan Rothamel, director of Culpeper County Economic Development (CCED), tells DCD. “We've had the Swift data center, as well as Equinix opening up, originally known as Terremark, opening up in 2008. We hadn't gotten much traction. And then we had an AWS facility approved in 2022.”

“I'm sure everyone, at some level, had an envious look to the success that Loudoun was able to produce,” he adds. “But for us, we had been described as a pathway community that was coming to us. Loudoun and Prince William did what they needed to do to allow the data center industry to grow further out.”

“We were prepared for when it did, and it's now since arrived.”

2022 also saw CloudHQ acquire around 100 acres in Culpeper, with plans to develop a build-to-suit campus spanning up to 2.1 million sq ft and 60MW.

2023 saw DataBank announce plans for its own 85-acre campus expected to comprise three two-story buildings spanning 1.4 million sq ft (130,065 sqm) and set to offer 192MW. The first building, IAD5, will be located at 14601 Germanna Highway; it will offer 40MW across 180,000 sq ft (16,720 sqm).

US real estate development firm Peterson Companies is developing a large nine-building campus on a 150-acre site along Route 799 (McDevitt Drive) and Route 699 (East Chandler Street). The Culpeper Technology Campus will support more than 2 million sq ft (185,805 sqm) of data centers; Peterson has said power will be available to the site by 2025 via two approved 300MW Dominion substations.

The nearby Copper Ridge development is another 116-acre data center campus in development. The site could see up to eight two-story data center buildings developed totaling 2.36 million sq ft (219,250 sqm), as well as an on-site substation. It isn’t clear which company is behind the development at this stage, but the land is owned by CR1/Culpeper LLC and CR2/Culpeper LLC.

In late 2023, Cielo Digital Infrastructure was granted permission to develop a 1.4 million sq ft (130,065 sqm) data center campus on a 121-acre parcel along Nalles Mill Road. The site will reportedly span three buildings: two 96MW data centers and one 48MW data center.

EdgeCore has since acquired the development and announced a 216MW campus in the county, with the potential to support up to 432MW. Initial power delivery is expected in early 2028 through Rappahannock Electric Cooperative.

In July 2024, US investment firm Red Ace Capital Management was granted permission for two four-story data centers totaling 1.16m sq ft (148,645 sqm) in July 2024. The facilities, known as the Keyser Road Data Center, are due to be completed around 2028.

Many of these companies share common traits; most of them are established data center developers and/operators, and most have existing facilities further north around the traditional NoVA ecosystem. Many are continuing to develop new facilities in NoVa, and some, like Peterson, are also expanding in other counties across Virginia.

A change of pace

Rothamel tells DCD the county is looking for some construction to start in the next year or two, and then probably a 24-36-month build-out of the first building, with development continuing over the next decade.

“We need power upgrades. We're talking about that there'll be more power to one of these campuses then we probably currently see in our development area, and we're adding five of them. So it's going to be a significant power upgrade and we know that's going to take some time.”

Ahead of that build out, he says the county is now preparing for what the arrival of so many data centers could mean for the county.

“We are still a community that's very rural. It's good that we have that roadway ahead of us. We're trying to get prepared so that when that timeline starts in the next year or two, the community is ready. The next five years will fundamentally change things for us. I'm really excited about the opportunities.

“We’re asking if any vendors can meet with our Small Business Advisors now so we know what needs to be done in preparation and what they're looking for when they come to a community,” he says. “We don't want them to show up and then we go 'Oh, we didn't know that.'”

He says the county settled on keeping campus-style developments to prevent too much sprawl, but Culpeper has had to figure out things like security, transportation, and even fire & rescue.

“We don't have many buildings higher than 45 feet in Culpeper, if any. We have silos that are that big,” he says. “We have a 100 percent volunteer fire staff. How do we handle it if a building catches on fire? How do you put out a building 75 feet high and 200,000 square feet? We don't have those.”

Rothamel says Amazon was one of the “first ones to come up and they said we will help support the county on that." They have connected Culepeper with Loudoun's staff and provided information and assistance to the county to help prepare – the help was described as “extremely beneficial.”

“AWS was able to say we think this would be a good solution, like peer-to-peer and we can help arrange it,” he says. “The training, the AWS solution that they came up with was very, very thoughtful to go through.”

DCD understands that Amazon has developed programs with local law enforcement on how to treat its facilities; what happens around them, providing familiarity with points of entry, potential vulnerable areas, and how best to respond to a potential emergency. The idea is to ensure first responders on site are not delayed in any event, and the company has conducted training with the likes of local fire departments and county fire marshals to this end.

Bringing the community on-side

Rothamel says the change is exciting for a community of Culpeper’s size; “It's more trades, more opportunities for our people that are going through our Technical Education Centre, more restaurants that will be utilized throughout the work week, more small businesses.”

“We will be able to see more small businesses grow, more opportunity for employment, different opportunities for employment that we currently have.

“You have one chance to bring in a new industry or to greatly expand a new industry. You have one chance to make a good first impression. You have one chance to do it right from the start.

“It's a relationship business and we've tried to keep an open communication. I've had projects where we were talking weekly, for years up to the point where the project gets announced, and now we just call to catch up.”

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, however. Amazon has faced opposition and legal challenges to its Culpeper development, but has managed to push its development through the permitting process. The project was narrowly approved by the county board of supervisors despite the planning commission recommending denial of the project.

“We learned a lot through that first process [with AWS]; that's when we started kind of narrowing our focus to bring them outside of the town of Culpeper and into the Culpeper Tech Zone,” says Rothamel. “We told them where in-bounds was, and we're out of bounds was.”

Part of keeping the community on-side for the other developments has been maintaining those projects within the Culpeper Technology Zone – a dedicated hub for all the data center developers minus Amazon – to act as a single industrial hub and prevent the kind of sprawl seen further north.

The county had previously established five different incentivized technology zones dedicated to these companies. But, as county supervisors learned more about the power and fiber resources needed to support data centers, they realized that by consolidating the five zones into a single 950-acre stretch of land near the Germanna and James Madison Highways.

Officials previously voted to remove data center zoning from one of the county’s designated technology areas, after a local landowner proposed an 88-acre campus. The application sought to develop more than 800,000 sq ft of data centers across three buildings, but the proposal faced opposition from local residents due to concerns over noise, construction traffic, the site’s adjacency to the new state park, and the potential requirement for a new transmission line.

“So many communities struggle with that process; they're not quite sure where they want it to go, and don’t know where they don't until it comes up.”

Despite efforts by officials to keep these developments contained, not everyone is happy, of course. Julie Bolthouse, director of land use with Virginia opposition group, the Piedmont Environmental Council, is worried about the impact so much new data center capacity could have on the area.

“Yes, they have been doing a good job of siting them within that core area, but that being said, they're now up to gigawatts... We’re pretty sure you're full. Now you've got to cut off the faucet.”

As is common with such developments, Bolthouse cites concerns around how the new and upgraded power lines needed to serve so much capacity will impact the area, along with how so many data centers will impact the water table of the county, saying there has been little clarity from the companies, utilities, and officials on these issues. Air quality, and how the arrival of what likely will be hundreds of generators will impact that quality during any major power outages, is also a worry.

Like with most data centers, aesthetics are a concern. Shenandoah National Park is located close to Culpeper, and without careful view shed analysis and enforcement from local officials, the landscape could soon be full of concrete boxes. Bolthouse tells DCD she also fears lower air quality because of generators could also impact views in the long term.

The new Ashburn? Probably not

Michael Shaw, vice president of land acquisition at EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure, in August 2024 wrote in a piece for DCK: “Some have likened the Culpeper of today to pre-2008 Ashburn due to the availability of land, power, and fiber.”

While EdgeCore may be keen to promote its new investment, it's unlikely Culpeper will become the next data center alley and see the same kind of build-out at Ashburn in the long run.

While the county is seeing a major data center build-out, Culpeper seems to have taken a firm stance against the wild and largely uncontrolled build-out that has marked Loudoun’s history.

“We know that we have probably a glass ceiling of what we're interested in seeing development-wise,” says Rothamel. “We envision us as a piece of the puzzle. This is a massive change for a community of our size. We can't and we're not interested in competing with our neighbors to the north.

“The industry right now is in such a growth mode. I never felt like it was a competition between the localities. It's really who who needed to be where and who could go somewhere else.”

Rothamel says the county has had inquiries from developers interested in building 500-acre, multi-gigawatt campuses in Culpeper, but has told them it would be better to look elsewhere.

“We know we're not the best fit for everyone. We try our best, but we know who we are and we're honest about that with the companies,” he says. “We tell them we don't think we're a great fit, and they appreciate the honesty.

“We're interested in making development choices that make sense for Culpeper, help us bring services and a way of life for our residents that we're interested in, as well as attracting businesses that can fit into our economy, and our economy can make sense for.”

For now, he says the county is “really happy” with how things have gone, and now the focus is on the future and “making this landing as smooth as possible.

“The next little bit is going to be very exciting.”