Active Infrastructure's Loudoun Data Center Bid Rejected
Siting politics, not power, just killed a campus in the country's densest data-center submarket.
Loudoun County’s Planning Commission voted 6-0 on July 23 to recommend denial of Spring Valley Technology Park, a 325-acre, 3.25 million square foot data center campus that Active Infrastructure had proposed for the east side of Evergreen Mills Road. The applicant wanted the land rezoned from Transitional Residential-10 to Industrial Park to build 10 data center buildings and three substations. One day earlier, the Board of Supervisors voted 6-1 to have staff research whether the county can legally freeze new data center applications altogether.
Why it matters
This is Data Center Alley, the single largest concentration of data center demand in the country, and a fully engineered, fully financed proposal still could not clear the entitlement gate. Commissioner Mark Miller summed up the commission’s reasoning: “It’s an excellent proposal. It’s just not here.” The site sits inside a comprehensive-plan transition zone between Loudoun’s urban east and rural west, and staff itself argued the rezoning was a fundamental departure from that policy, noting the nearest industrial-zoned parcel is 2.3 miles away.
Power availability and capital were never the constraint here. Zoning was. That reprices every speculative land position in the submarket: a parcel’s entitlement odds now matter as much as its substation queue position, and developers underwriting deals on power access alone are underwriting half the risk.
The numbers
325 acres, split between a roughly 150-acre agricultural tract and 13 smaller parcels of 10 to 17 acres carrying existing single-family homes in the Spring Valley subdivision. Public comment ran 89 percent opposed, with 166 written objections against 15 neutral and 7 in favor, and 50 speakers opposed the project against a single supporter at the hearing. The Board of Supervisors’ 6-1 vote, driven by Supervisor Juli Briskman, directs staff to report back September 15 on whether a moratorium is even possible.
It likely is not. Loudoun’s own published guidance states plainly that Virginia law requires every rezoning or special-exception application to be judged on its individual merits, and that a blanket prohibition “is not legally permissible.” The county is functionally denying projects one at a time on comprehensive-plan grounds while its lawyers rule out the shortcut its supervisors are publicly floating.
What’s next
Expect the Board of Supervisors to uphold the planning commission’s recommendation rather than overturn it, given the size of the public opposition on record. For developers still assembling land in eastern Loudoun, the transition-zone boundary is now a harder line than the zoning map suggests, and comparable acreage in less contested corridors, or in national markets with faster entitlement paths, gets more attractive by comparison. September 15 will show whether the county tightens standards instead of chasing a moratorium it cannot legally impose.