35 Data Centers Planned: What You Need to Know

The numbers alone will stop you cold: more than 35 data centers, fourteen electrical substations, and nearly 2,000 acres of land committed to a single infrastructure buildout. This isn't incremental growth — it's a wholesale reconfiguration of how one region thinks about power, land, and digital infrastructure.

Developer QTS is behind the proposal, and if you know the company's track record, you understand they don't make moves like this lightly. QTS has built and operated hyperscale facilities across North America and Europe, and a project of this scale represents one of the most ambitious data center infrastructure proposals to come across the permitting desk in recent memory. The question isn't whether this kind of development is coming; it's whether the surrounding grid, regulatory frameworks, and communities are ready for it.

The Scope of What's Actually Being Proposed

Fourteen electrical substations supporting 35-plus data centers isn't a support ratio you see in typical commercial or industrial development. It signals something specific: these facilities will draw extraordinary amounts of power, and the electrical infrastructure has to be purpose-built around them rather than grafted onto an existing grid.

A substation-to-facility ratio like this tells an expert more than any press release — it means the load profile here is being engineered from the ground up, not improvised.

The nearly 2,000 acres involved in land use planning for this project also deserve context. That's roughly 1.5 times the size of New York City's Central Park. For a development that isn't a solar farm or an agricultural project — where land consumption is more intuitive — this scale of footprint for digital infrastructure is striking. It reflects the physical reality of hyperscale computing: cooling systems, backup power generation, fiber routing corridors, security buffers, and access roads all consume land that never shows up in a terabyte count.

The substations, distributed across the site, aren't just switching infrastructure. They're the load-bearing pillars of the entire electrical design. Each one has to be sited, permitted, and interconnected with the regional transmission network — a process that, in most U.S. markets, takes two to four years even under favorable conditions.

Economic Weight

Projects of this scale don't arrive without an economic argument, and the argument here is substantial. Hyperscale data center campuses of this size typically generate thousands of construction jobs during the build phase — often 3,000 to 5,000 positions over a multi-year buildout — followed by several hundred permanent operations and maintenance roles that pay well above regional median wages.

The investment potential in the surrounding area compounds quickly. Data centers pull fiber, subcontractors, and suppliers. Municipal tax bases shift meaningfully when facilities assessed at hundreds of millions of dollars come online. Some Virginia counties — the benchmark for mature data center markets — collect enough in data center property taxes to fund significant portions of their annual budgets.

The economic case is hard to argue against, which is exactly why communities that have concerns often feel steamrolled before the conversation even starts.

Clean energy development incentives also factor into the calculus. If QTS pursues renewable energy procurement strategies — power purchase agreements with solar or wind developers, on-site generation, or participation in community renewable programs — the project could unlock additional federal incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act's clean energy provisions. That's not guaranteed, but at this scale, leaving those dollars on the table would be unusual.

The Hard Part: Getting It Built

Here's what the press release version of this story skips: the permitting and regulatory process for a project of this complexity is genuinely brutal, and that's not a criticism — it's just the reality of land use planning at scale.

Fourteen electrical substations means fourteen separate interconnection studies, each requiring coordination with the regional transmission organization. Depending on jurisdiction, environmental impact assessments could examine everything from stormwater runoff patterns to migratory bird corridors. Zoning variances, conditional use permits, and public hearings stack up. If any single substation site hits a snag — an easement dispute, a grid upgrade requirement, or a community opposition campaign — it can cascade into delays across the broader campus.

Community response to large data center proposals has grown more sophisticated over the past five years. Early projects in Northern Virginia and Central Oregon faced relatively little organized opposition. More recent proposals in Georgia, Nevada, and parts of the Midwest have encountered residents who show up to planning commission meetings armed with water consumption data, noise studies, and traffic impact analyses. They're not wrong to ask those questions.

The water issue is particularly pointed. A large data center can consume millions of gallons annually for cooling. In regions with water stress — and more regions qualify every year — that's not a footnote in an environmental review; it's a headline.

Sustainability: Built In or Bolted On?

The integration with renewable sources will define how this project is remembered in ten years. A 35-facility campus that runs on coal-heavy grid power is a liability — reputationally, financially (as carbon pricing expands), and increasingly from a tenant-acquisition standpoint. Major cloud providers and enterprise clients now audit the carbon intensity of their colocation providers. Clean energy development isn't just an ethical preference at hyperscale; it's a procurement requirement.

The real sustainability test for a project this size isn't what energy source powers it at launch — it's what's contractually committed for the next 20 years.

Purpose-built substations offer something that retrofitted grid connections don't: the ability to design interconnection points specifically for renewable integration. If the project team bakes in capacity for battery storage, configures substations to accept variable renewable inputs, and secures long-term PPAs early, the campus can function as a net-positive force on the regional grid. If those decisions get deferred to Phase 3 of a Phase 10 buildout, they rarely happen at all.

Energy efficiency in the facility designs themselves — PUE targets below 1.3, liquid cooling where density demands it, AI-driven thermal management — will determine how much generation capacity the project actually requires. A well-designed hyperscale facility uses dramatically less energy per unit of compute than one built to 2015 standards. That delta matters enormously at this scale.

What This Signals for the Broader Market

One project doesn't make a trend, but this proposal fits a pattern that's been accelerating for the past 18 months. The demand for data center capacity — driven by AI workloads, cloud migration, and the sheer growth of connected infrastructure — has outrun available supply in established markets. Northern Virginia is land-constrained. Silicon Valley is power-constrained. So developers are moving to markets where land, water, and transmission access align, often in regions that haven't historically been data center hubs.

The electrical substations in this proposal aren't just local infrastructure. They represent a claim on regional transmission capacity that will shape what else can be built in that corridor for decades. Whoever controls substation interconnection rights in a high-growth corridor holds a structural advantage that compounds over time. Other developers, utilities, and even renewable energy projects will be working around the capacity commitments made here.

Projects like this one — ambitious, controversial, and genuinely consequential — are going to keep appearing on planning commission agendas across the country. The communities, utilities, and regulators who figure out how to evaluate them quickly and fairly will attract capital. Those who let permitting processes drag on for five years while the market moves elsewhere will watch the investment flow to neighboring counties.

For investors and landowners watching this space: the build-out of data center infrastructure at this scale creates real opportunity in adjacent categories — transmission line corridors, battery storage siting, water recycling infrastructure, and fiber routing easements. The big campus is the headline. The supporting infrastructure around it is often where the more interesting deals live.

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