Why Frederick County is a market
Frederick County is where Northern Virginia's power problem sent its overflow north instead of south. Ashburn is about twenty five miles away. Loudoun County has been rationing new grid connections for years, and the two obvious alternatives were the Richmond corridor and this one. Richmond got the earlier attention. Frederick got the bigger single site.
That site is the whole market. Alcoa's Eastalco Works aluminium smelter at Adamstown closed and left behind something almost nobody else has: 2,100 acres in one ownership, already zoned for heavy industry, already connected to high voltage transmission built to feed a smelter. A data center developer would ordinarily spend five years assembling that. Here it existed.
The county has also made a decision most jurisdictions have not. Frederick County created a Critical Digital Infrastructure overlay, which is a zoning category for data centers specifically. That is useful to a buyer for a reason that has nothing to do with politics: it means a filing inside the overlay is a data center by the county's own classification rather than by our keyword matching, so the small permit record on this page is unusually clean.
What this market does not have yet is space a tenant can take. Read the announced section below before you build a plan around supply here.
Power is the entire reason this site exists, and it is also the thing to ask about
Maryland is inside PJM, the same interconnection queue as Northern Virginia, and the same grid constraints apply. What is different at Adamstown is that the transmission infrastructure was already in the ground for the smelter, so this campus starts from a position most greenfield sites spend years trying to reach.
Starting from a good position is not the same as being energized. The published campus figure covers three phases running to 2035, and the phases will be energized in order. The question a buyer needs answered is not what the campus is planned for but what a specific building will have available on a specific date, and which phase that building sits in.
One piece of Maryland history is worth carrying into any conversation here. Aligned paused its Frederick project outright in 2023 over the state's rules on diesel backup generators, and only resumed after a change in state law in 2024 removed the certificate requirement for data center emergency generators. That is a reminder that the binding constraint in Maryland has at times been regulatory rather than physical, and it can move again.
Ask which phase the building you are being offered sits in, and what its energization date is as committed by the utility rather than as forecast by the developer. On a campus this size the difference between phase one and phase three is years. Then ask what network options will exist in that building on day one. On a greenfield campus with no interconnection history, connectivity is something a developer has to bring, and it is the part of the package most likely to be described optimistically. This campus was planned with QLoop, a roughly 40 mile fiber conduit ring to Northern Virginia, and its second Potomac River crossing was finished in 2023. We have not found a current public statement of which carriers are lit in it, so ask.
Two do, one reaches it only in part, and one does not. The announced layer is the strongest thing on this page and is collected by hand, so every figure links to the report that states it. The permit layer is here and is very thin: three filings from two registers, none of them dated. Two are open planning cases from the county, which publishes a register of what is open rather than a stream of what is new, and carries no filing date, applicant or address. The third arrived on 14 September from the federal air register and is a different kind of record: an operating building with a street address, eight miles south of the city of Frederick and nowhere near the campus this page is about. The interconnection layer is absent, and that absence is a finding rather than a gap in our collection: PeeringDB carries no registered building anywhere in Frederick County. Our own verified facility inventory holds one building here: an Aligned Data Centers building in Frederick, recorded as under construction at about 1.3 million square feet. Our source files it under Northern Virginia, so it is counted on the Ashburn page rather than here, and this page carries no building count. See how we verify capacity for what each collection proves.
What has been announced in Frederick County, Maryland
Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below links to a published report that states it, and was checked against at least one other independent report before it was written down.
| Capacity | Operator | Project | What was announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4 GW | TPG Real Estate and Catellus | Quantum Frederick, the former Alcoa Eastalco Works site, Adamstown | This is the site the rest of the page describes, and its headline figure needs reading carefully. The current plan is roughly 17.4 million square feet of data center space supported by about 2.4 GW, built in three phases through 2035. That is a master plan for land, power routes and future buildings. It is not a figure any operator has offered to sell, and it should never be quoted as though it were. Earlier reporting on the same site carries different numbers and the row does not reconcile them: when the 2,100 acre Alcoa smelter site was bought in 2021 it was described as offering about a gigawatt of transmission capacity, one later summary puts the project at 2,800 MW, and the 2.4 GW above is the figure attached to the current three phase plan. Read the spread as a sign that the programme has been resized more than once. Ownership has also moved. Quantum Loophole formed the site's joint venture with TPG Real Estate Partners and gave the campus its name, then left the project after a legal dispute that began in September 2024 and was resolved that December. Catellus Development Corporation, a TPG affiliate, took over management. The name Quantum Frederick stayed. Master plan figure for the whole 2,100 acre site across three phases to 2035. It is a development programme, not capacity an operator has offered anyone |
| 231 MW | Rowan Digital Infrastructure | Bauxite campus, Quantum Frederick | Rowan holds site plan approval for four single storey buildings totalling about 777,150 square feet on 151 acres inside the Quantum Frederick site, at a stated 231 MW. Two other figures attach to the same name and the row keeps them apart rather than adding them up. The reporting that now carries 231 MW in its headline still carries 253 MW in its own web address, which is the earlier number it was corrected from. And Rowan's own material describes Bauxite as a three phase campus reaching about 626 MW of utility load at full build, which is a target for the whole programme rather than the capacity of the buildings approved so far. This is the one project on this page our own permit layer independently touches: two of the county's open planning cases are named Bauxite II Expansion and Bauxite III Expansion, which are the later phases. Capacity stated for the four buildings covered by the site plan approval, not for the wider Bauxite programme |
| 72 MW | Aligned Data Centers | IAD-06, Quantum Frederick | Aligned broke ground on its first Frederick building, IAD-04, in February 2025, started IAD-06 in October 2025 and topped that building out during 2026. The 72 MW here is IAD-06 on its own, which is the only figure in this project that every report states the same way. Campus totals do not agree: one puts the Aligned campus at 264 MW, another at about 260 MW across four planned buildings, and the row does not choose between them. Aligned's history on this site is also worth knowing before anyone treats the schedule as settled. It paused the project entirely in 2023 over Maryland's rules on diesel backup generators, and resumed only after a 2024 change in state law removed the certificate requirement for data center emergency generators. Capacity of the single building, as stated at groundbreaking and again when it topped out |
Read the basis column before quoting any figure above, because the three rows are three different kinds of claim. The 2.4 GW is a master plan for a 2,100 acre site through 2035. The 231 MW is a site plan a county approved. The 72 MW is one building that has been topped out. Whether any of it is operating is disputed. Rowan says Bauxite I reached substantial completion in 2025 and its backer Quinbrook describes it as fully delivered, while local reporting in June 2026 found no data center on the campus reported operational. None of it has been offered as multi-tenant space, so nothing on this page is space a buyer can occupy this year. There is a second gap worth naming. This market has no interconnection layer at all, because PeeringDB carries no registered building anywhere in Frederick County, and our own verified inventory holds a single building here, an Aligned facility under construction, which is counted on the Ashburn page rather than this one. What the page can prove about Frederick is that a very large campus is being built and who is building it. What it cannot tell you is what any of it will cost, when a hall will be ready, or whether a network you need will be reachable inside it. Read the reporting.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record below and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.
What the public construction record shows, and why there is so little of it
Three filings, from two registers, and neither register is a stream of new applications. Two are open planning cases inside the county's Critical Digital Infrastructure overlay. That register lists what is open rather than what was filed, and it carries no filing date, no applicant and no site address. We did not invent any of the three.
The third is a different kind of record and worth separating out. It is an operating building on the federal air register, the Fannie Mae UTC data center at Urbana, about eight miles south of the city of Frederick. It has a street address, which the planning cases do not, and it has nothing to do with the Quantum Frederick campus. It is here because it is in Frederick County, and it is the only evidence on this page that an enterprise data center is already running in this county rather than being built. Read the count below as confirmation that these three records exist, and read nothing else into it. The announced table above is the evidence on this page that carries weight.
Frederick County data center planning cases, most of them in the Critical Digital Infrastructure overlay at the Quantum Frederick campus. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Filings we track | 4 | Deduplicated. Across 2 sources, none of which publishes filing dates |
| Distinct addresses | 1 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Operators we can name | None | Every filing names an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
| Filings with no date published | 4 | The source publishes the facility, not the filing date |
The filings on the record
| Filed | Named on the filing | What it says | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| No date published | Not an identifiable operator | Bauxite II Expansion | Expansion or phase |
| No date published | Not an identifiable operator | Bauxite III Expansion | Expansion or phase |
| No date published | Not an identifiable operator | Fannie Mae Utc Data Center | Power and cooling |
| No date published | Not an identifiable operator | Fannie Mae Utc Data Center | Power and cooling |
Collected from Frederick County planning and permitting register and EPA ECHO air facility records for Maryland. A permit or air-register entry documents a site or proposed work. It does not establish current construction or available space, and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.
Where the market actually is
The Quantum Frederick campus at Adamstown
This is the market. A 2,100 acre former smelter site with its own transmission legacy, managed by Catellus for TPG Real Estate, being developed in three phases to 2035. Every operator named on this page is inside it. If you are looking at Frederick County, you are looking at a building on this campus.
Rowan's Bauxite phases
The largest approved programme on the site: four buildings and about 777,150 square feet on 151 acres, with two later phases open in the county's planning register right now. Rowan says the first phase reached substantial completion in 2025 and that the later phases are due in 2026 and 2027. This is the one project where our permit record and the announced reporting independently point at the same campus.
Aligned's buildings
Well along in construction terms. IAD-04 broke ground in early 2025, IAD-06 followed in October 2025 and has since topped out. If anything in this county is going to be able to quote you a realistic date, it is most likely to be here.
The rest of the county
Very little, and it is worth saying plainly. Frederick city carries no listed interconnected building and no separate data center cluster. The one operating building we can point at outside the campus is the Fannie Mae data center at Urbana, which is an enterprise site rather than merchant space. A requirement that needs to be in Frederick County but not on this campus has no colocation option we can currently name.
When Frederick County is right, and when it is the wrong choice
It is right when you need real scale in the mid Atlantic, your date is 2027 or later, and Ashburn either cannot connect you or has priced you out. This is the largest single development site in the region, it has the power story to support it, and it is close enough to Northern Virginia that latency to Ashburn is not a concern. For a requirement measured in tens of megawatts with room to grow, it is a serious option and should be on the list.
It is the wrong choice if you need space this year. Rowan's first phase is reported complete, but it is part of a hyperscale campus, and a June 2026 local report still found nothing on the campus operational. We know of no multi-tenant space here. It is also the wrong choice if your requirement is network led. A market with no registered interconnected building is a market where every network you need has to be brought in and paid for, and that is a materially different cost structure from taking space in an established carrier hotel. Ashburn is twenty five miles away and has the densest interconnection in the world; if connectivity is the driver, that is the comparison to make.
It is also the wrong choice for a small requirement. Campuses at this scale are built for wholesale and hyperscale tenants. A few racks is not the conversation being had here, and you would be better served in Northern Virginia or Baltimore.
Ask for the utility's committed energization date for your specific building, in writing, and ask what happens to your rent if it slips. Ask which phase you are in and what the phase before yours has actually delivered. Because this is greenfield, ask what carriers will be lit in the building on your day one, who is paying to bring them, and what your options look like if only one arrives. Ask how backup generation is permitted for your building given Maryland's history on that question. And if anyone quotes you the campus master plan figure as though it were available capacity, ask them how many megawatts are energized today.
Pricing context. We found no posted list price in Frederick County that we would stand behind. A number here comes from a quote. For the nearest rates we track, see Ashburn colocation pricing. The cost estimator gives an illustrative range based on Ashburn. Use it as a reference point, not a local price.