Technology companies around the world are aware of the critical importance of the Northern Virginia data center market, including the dramatic decline in available data center capacity that has impacted Ashburn and Sterling in Loudoun County over the past 12 to 18 months.
According to JLL North American Data Center ReportNorthern Virginia saw record demand for the fourth consecutive year in 2023. As a result, the region’s data center vacancy rate remains below 2%.
This shortage has inspired data center developers to Check out the surrounding counties in Virginia and neighboring states for development opportunities. Fortunately, one need not look further than 60 miles from Ashburn to Culpeper, Virginia. This was once an agricultural area with historic influence – and now it has evolved into more: Northern Virginia’s newest data center location.
Culpeper, Virginia: A Rich History
When we reminisce, Culpeper is for many the scene of numerous battles during the Civil War. But the city also played an important role during the Cold War.
In 1969, in preparation for a possible nuclear war with the Soviet Union, the Federal Reserve hoarded billions of dollars’ worth of cash in an underground, three-story, radiation-proof building in Culpeper, complete with a 30-day supply of food and water for 500 federal employees.
In addition to the currency reserves, the underground structure also housed and secured the safekeeping of the central node in the Fedwire system, known as the “Culpeper Switch,” which enables electronic bank transfers.
After the Cold War, the U.S. government transferred the facility to the Library of Congress in 1997. The highly secure, underground facility is the perfect place to store priceless audiovisual material, and today it is a mecca for film preservation, where experts add several petabytes of media each year.
Culpeper’s is not only an ideal place for important physical and digital assets, but Location has good conditions to develop into a booming data center location.
Culpeper (highlighted in green) is just 60 miles south of Loudoun County (orange)
Culpeper as a modern data center node
Thanks to the location of the Fedwire system in Culpeper, a rich Fiber optic network has grown in the region, providing redundant, ultra-low latency connectivity to data centers in Ashburn and beyond.
Due to the presence of these highly interconnected networkCulpeper has been the seat of the Capital Region NAP since 2008.
In addition to offering access to a variety of fiber optic networks, Culpeper also offers what many Tier 1 data center markets lack today: available land and power. The predominantly rural area includes a 690-acre campus called the Culpeper Tech Zone (CTZ), which is slated to house data centers and public construction companies such as Dominion Energy and Rappahannock Electric Cooperative.
Power transmission in the CTZ will be handled by Dominion, and Rappahannock and Dominion will split local power distribution throughout the CTZ into two areas to provide choice to on-campus data center developers.
The opportunity
The careful planning of the CTZ by the Culpeper County Economic Development (CCED) Board of Directors includes personnel access for the data center through the Culpeper Technology Education Center (CTEC) and Germanna Community College (GCC).
Both CTEC and GCC are working with CCED to provide students with the opportunity to develop the technical and IT skills required in the data centers operating in the Technology Zone.
In addition to providing data center staff, available land and power, and network redundancy, the CTZ also offers county and state tax incentives to developers and their customers. To ensure that the CTZ benefits both the Culpeper community and new developers, it was only approved for six data center sites—all of which have since been purchased.
Aside from the interesting backstory, some have compared today’s Culpeper to the Ashburn of pre-2008 in that it had land, power and fiber optics, making it an attractive addition to the data center market portfolio and ideal for the artificial intelligence and cloud needs of the world’s largest technology companies.
If you are looking for data center capacity to promote innovation, Culpeper, Virginia, is the right place for you – a promising location.
Michael Shaw is Vice President of Land Acquisitions at EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure.
