Microsoft Files MNZ07 Data Center Permit for Prince William Site

Microsoft has filed a Clean Water Act permit application with the Army Corps of Engineers to build its MNZ07 data center campus on 123 acres in Prince William County, Virginia, the first hard test of whether by-right zoning is enough to move a Northern Virginia project when the county has spent this year rejecting them.

Why it matters

Prince William’s Board of Supervisors unanimously rejected a 1,940-acre data center rezoning in July, and watched the $100 billion Digital Gateway campus collapse for good in the same county this summer. Both of those projects needed the county’s permission. MNZ07 does not. The 123-acre site at 13490 University Boulevard in Gainesville sits inside the county’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, so the two one-story buildings and substation Microsoft wants to build are by-right. That closes off the local political fight that killed the last two projects. It does not close off the federal one: the Joint Permit Application now sits with the Army Corps of Engineers’ Norfolk District and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, because the site crosses wetlands and a stream channel. For site selectors, the lesson is that entitlement risk and wetlands risk are now separate line items, and a parcel can clear one while still being stuck on the other for months.

The numbers

Microsoft paid $465.5 million in 2024 for the roughly 124-acre parcel, a former Atlantic Research Corporation rocket and missile testing site decommissioned in 2005. The Joint Permit Application seeks to permanently impact 955 linear feet of intermittent stream channel and a combined 1.95 acres of wetlands, split between 1.82 acres of palustrine emergent wetlands and 0.13 acres of palustrine forested wetlands. The public comment period on the filing ran through August 7. Microsoft says the campus is needed for growing cloud demand in the region.

What’s next

The Army Corps individual permit process, not the county, is now the long pole on MNZ07’s schedule; these reviews commonly run months past a comment period’s close before a decision issues. Developers holding by-right data center land elsewhere in Data Center Alley should expect the same sequence: zoning clears fast, wetlands review does not. Track the rest of the pipeline at the national data centers hub, including Microsoft’s own 38-gigawatt build-out target.