Northern Virginia–based data center firm Oasis Digital Properties has gained approval to build a large new data center campus near Fredericksburg.
The King George County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved Oasis’s plan for Dahlgren West. This data center campus will span 485 acres in the county, on the north side of James Madison Parkway. The plan includes 10 buildings with a total of about 6.8 million square feet.
Oasis projects that the project will create 1,500 construction jobs and 50 to 60 full-time jobs per building. It says that the annual fiscal benefit for real estate and personal property taxes generated by the campus will be between $100 million and $120 million.
While Oasis is based in Falls Church, the developer told the Washington Business Journal that the project’s site being outside of Northern Virginia was part of the appeal.
“It’s a tangible example of data centers being lured outside of Northern Virginia because of the shifting political winds and the shrinking appetite for additional data centers in Northern Virginia,” co-founder Ross Litkenhous told WBJ.
The prevalence and spread of data centers in Northern Virginia has been a topic of political debate in the region, particularly in data center–heavy Loudoun and Prince William counties. While some tout the economic benefits, others have raised concerns over their proximity to residential neighborhoods and historical spaces, and their heavy usage of resources like water and energy.
Just this month, a judge in Prince William County ruled to void the rezoning decision on the Prince William Gateway project, a huge campus that would have become the largest data center corridor in the world.
Feature image courtesy King George County Board of Supervisors
