A new data center campus is being proposed in Virginia’s Fauquier County.
Fauquier Times reports that local developer Gigaland is proposing six data centers on about 200 acres outside Remington on the south side Lucky Hill Road.
The company, which paid $4 million to buy 200 acres of land in Remington last October, has reportedly been making its pitch to local residents about the potential benefits of their proposed development.
The residential-zoned land is near a substation and the Marsh Run Powerplant and across the road from a planned data center complex of similar size — the Remington Technology Park — which has been approved, but is not yet built.
The campus would total 1.6 million to 3.2 million sq ft (148,645 - 297,290 sqm), depending on the number of stories in each building.
Gigaland said it expects to submit its first rezoning application to the county by the fall. No end customer is named.
Little information about Gigaland is available online. On its website, the company says it specializes in “transforming raw land in Northern Virginia into the most valuable land in the market.”
The company was founded by Art Lickunas and Roland Talasas. The former is a partner at Virginia real estate firm Keller Williams Realty Dulles, while the latter is CEO of window provider Intus Windows. This is seemingly the company’s first data center project.
“We're really trying to be transparent in our approach — talking to the county, to the people, to the communities, to supervisors [and] interested parties, including environmental groups, activists, journalists,” Talalas said at a local meeting held last month.
If the data center plan doesn’t happen, Lickunas and Talalas said, they will still develop the land. Other projects could be residential or industrial.
“If the county doesn't want us, no one is gonna try to force it through,” Talalas said.
Fauquier isn’t traditionally a major data center hub within Virginia, but a number of developments have been proposed in recent years.
Point One applied for permission to build a large data center campus at the Remington Technology Park back in 2018. The company aimed to develop six buildings totaling up to 1.8 million sq ft. The campus is still listed on the company’s site and described as a 300MW shovel-ready site totaling 234 acres.
Beyond Remington, AWS has a data center on the DoD’s nearby Warrenton Training Center campus, built in 2016. Amazon is also seeking to build a data center in the Fauqiuer town of Warrenton; though it has been granted a permit by the county, it has faced ongoing opposition from local residents.
Headwaters Site Development is planning to develop up to 1.4 million square feet (130,050 sqm) of data centers on a 66-acre site in Catlett.
OVHcloud has a facility in Fauquier, located at 6872 Watson Ct, that launched in 2017.
In the wake of multiple proposals, the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors last year adopted a new set of guidelines designed to curb data center developments and protect the area’s rural nature. Fauquier Times notes the Gigaland campus could be the first project to test the new guidelines.
