Amazon has reportedly acquired land in Bristow, Virginia, that has been zoned for data center use.
First reported by BizJournal, Amazon Data Services has acquired the site of the planned Devlin Technology Park in Prince William County.
Sources say the company bought the 270-acre site from Stanley Martin Homes for $700 million in a deal that closed late last month.
Devlin Tech Park, along Devlin Road south of Interstate 66 and north of Linton Hall Road, has been zoned to allow for up to 3.5 million square feet of data center space and up to three substations.
The deal equates to around $3.7 million an acre, well above what is already a very high average in Virginia for data center-zoned land. Stanley Martin reportedly paid less than $60 million for the land.
Stanley Martin declined to comment to the publication.
The real estate developer started acquiring land that would become the tech park back in 2021, and first filed to rezone the site for data centers in 2022. After much opposition from locals and at least one long-running legal battle, the Prince William board of county supervisors granted the rezoning request in November 2023.
News that Amazon might be interested in taking over the Devlin site surfaced in September.
Amazon has a major and growing presence across Virginia. Loudoun County hosted Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) first data centers when the book company launched its first cloud facilities in 2006.
Today, the company is known to own or lease data centers around Haymarket, Manassas, Ashburn, Sterling, Chantilly, Warrenton, and McNair, to name a few, spanning across Loudoun, Fairfax, Prince William, and Fauquier Counties.
The company’s exact footprint isn’t known, but totals more than 50 data centers across the region, with dozens more in development. Greenpeace estimated the company had 1.7GW of capacity back in 2019, having more than doubled that figure since 2015. Amazon's US-East Northern Virginia cloud region has been described as the largest single concentration of corporate data centers in the world.
As well as growing its existing footprint in Loudoun, Fairfax, and Prince William with new facilities, DCD has seen AWS active with plans for new projects in Fauquier, Culpeper, King George, Spotsylvania, Stafford, Louisa, Orange, and Caroline Counties.