Business 5 min read By Arthur Ellington
Amazon Drops $427m Virginia Data Centre Plan and Donates Land to Loudoun County
Amazon has withdrawn its $427 million plan to build data centres on George Washington University's Virginia campus, donating 25 acres worth about $65 million to Loudoun County for community facilities and pledging $5 million for affordable housing.
Amazon has abandoned a $427 million plan to build data centres on George Washington University's Virginia campus, opting instead to hand roughly 25 acres of the site to Loudoun County for community use. The agreement, which county officials have named «Project Potomac Promise», also commits the company to withdrawing its data centre site plan, dropping any legal action to pursue development on the land, and working with the county to rezone the remaining property for mixed-use development with housing as the predominant use.
The donated land, which runs along Route 7, carries a stated fair market value of about $65 million. It is intended to accommodate a community arts centre and an indoor sports and recreation facility. Amazon will additionally contribute $5 million to the Loudoun County Affordable Housing Trust Fund to support the county's affordable housing efforts.
Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis Randall said her objective had been to prevent data centres or supporting infrastructure from being built on the property. Speaking at a press conference alongside Joshua Weissman, Amazon Web Services' vice president of data centre delivery, she said: «Through our collaborative, respectful conversations, Amazon has agreed to forego its proposed application for data centers, and of note, forego any legal action to realize data center development on this site.»
Randall said the county would organise public meetings to gather residents' views on the redevelopment, and that she expects the rezoning process to take about a year even under a fast-track schedule. «What we'll probably do is focus first on the indoor sports arena,» she said, «and focus more on the community arts center first as the rezoning process is going through.»
The retreat marks a sharp reversal for a company with deep roots in what is known as Virginia's «data center alley», home to the highest concentration of data centres in the world. Amazon launched its Northern Virginia cloud region in 2006 and, according to Weissman, has invested more than $63 billion and employs more than 3,400 people in Loudoun County since 2011. In 2023 the company said it intended to invest an additional $35 billion in data centre campuses across the state by 2040.
The county's exposure to the sector is considerable. Loudoun reported approximately 233 existing data centre buildings, representing about 56.5 million square feet of space. Data centres generated roughly $1.2 billion in real and personal property tax revenue in fiscal 2026, or 39% of the county's overall budget.
The sequence of events began in February, when George Washington University president Ellen Granberg announced the university had sold the campus without initially identifying the buyer or disclosing the price. The university said the transaction would support its «long-term financial health», with a significant portion of the proceeds marked for an endowment. In March, the student newspaper The GW Hatchet identified Amazon Data Services as the buyer at $427 million.
In late July, Amazon filed a site plan for a development named «Bridgefield Tech Center», calling for four two-storey data centre buildings totalling more than 800,000 square feet. The proposal drew opposition. In April, Algonkian district supervisor Juli Briskman asked county staff to examine the potential effects of the development, noting that the purchase price was roughly four times the assessed value of the property and that its zoning status made data centre construction a reasonable expectation. By July she had come out firmly against the plan, saying: «Replacing the George Washington University campus with four massive data center buildings would be a profound loss for our community.» She described the site as a generational opportunity for education, research, housing and other forms of economic development that could directly benefit Loudoun residents.
Weissman denied that the company had concluded data centres were a bad idea. «There was not a moment where it was decided that this was a bad idea,» he said. «We just heard from the community. We partnered with Loudoun, and we just decided this was just the right thing to do.»
An Amazon spokesperson said Loudoun would be a focus for the company's Built Together commitment, announced a few weeks ago, which includes tuition assistance for community colleges and funding for local projects.
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