Richmond is where Northern Virginia's overflow landed, and most of it is still on paper.

Why Richmond exists as a data center market at all

Richmond is a hundred miles south of Ashburn, on the same Dominion Energy system, with land that costs a fraction of Loudoun County's and a power queue that was, for a while, considerably shorter. When Northern Virginia's constraint stopped being land and started being electricity, developers went looking for the nearest place with the same utility and fewer neighbours. That place is Richmond.

It is a genuine market rather than a spillover story, because the anchor was already here. White Oak Technology Park in eastern Henrico County has hosted large-scale computing since the semiconductor era, and the fiber that follows Interstate 95 gives Richmond a real path north to Ashburn and south to the Carolinas. What is new is the scale of what has been announced on top of it.

What has been announced in Richmond

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 was read on the page it links to.

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 above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

The rules changed under the developers, and that is now the market

On 10 January 2025 Henrico County ended by-right data center development. Every new hyperscale project now needs a provisional use permit, which means a public hearing at the Planning Commission and again at the Board of Supervisors, and the requirement reaches back to rezoned projects that have not yet reached final site plan approval.

The conditions are specific rather than symbolic: a five hundred foot tree buffer between a data center and homes, limits on when generators can be tested, enclosed and screened noise equipment, closed-loop cooling. Every one of those is a cost, and several are a schedule.

For a buyer this matters in one practical way. A Richmond delivery date is a date plus a hearing calendar. Ask which approvals a phase already holds, not which ones the developer expects, and ask what happens to your commencement date if a hearing slips a cycle.

Every Richmond facility we track

80 data centers across Richmond, from the facility database we hold as a Bridgepointe partner. It is the layer that says whether a building exists yet, which no permit record answers directly.

Operators with the most facilities here: QTS (31), STACK Infrastructure (9), AVAIO Digital (7), PointOne Development Corp. (6), Iron Mountain Data Centers (5), Chirisa Technology Parks (4), Menlo Digital (4), CleanArc Data Centers (3), PowerHouse Data Centers (2), Tract (2).

Where they cluster: Sandston (36), Ruther Glen (18), Charles City (6), Chester (5), Petersburg (4), Richmond (3).

The largest buildings coming to this market

69 facilities here are under construction or planned. These are the ten largest by floor area, and a size on file is not a promise of a delivery date.

From the Signal facility database, which we hold as a Bridgepointe partner rather than as a public record, so these rows carry no filing link and street addresses are held back. A building existing is not the same as space being available in it: every facility above may be full, pre-leased, or closed to your size. Finding out is a call, not a lookup. See how we verify capacity.

What the public construction record shows in Richmond

Virginia air permits filed in the Richmond corridor, from Henrico out to Louisa and Caroline. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.

Operators appearing by name: Amazon Web Services (3), QTS (2).

The most recent filings on the record

Collected from Virginia DEQ air permit records. A permit proves that construction is happening. It does not prove that space is available, 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, submarket by submarket

Power is the reason to be here, and the reason to check twice

Richmond runs on Dominion, the same utility as Northern Virginia, which is both the attraction and the catch. The attraction is a utility with deep data center experience and a genuine transmission plan. The catch is that Dominion's load growth is now a statewide political question, and the same regulatory pressure that reshaped Loudoun's economics reaches Chesterfield and Henrico too.

The questions worth asking are unglamorous and they decide your date.

• Is the power for this phase energized, contracted, or queued, and what is the queue position?
• Does the campus have a dedicated substation, or is it sharing distribution with everything else on the circuit?
• Which transmission work does the delivery date assume, and who is building it?
• What tariff class applies at my size, and does a large-load rider change the economics?
• If a provisional use permit hearing slips, what does my contract say about the commencement date?

When Richmond is the right answer

Richmond fits when you want Northern Virginia's network reach without Northern Virginia's pricing, when you are planning far enough ahead to buy into a phase rather than a standing hall, and when a hundred miles of separation from Ashburn is a resilience feature rather than a latency problem. For a second site to an existing Ashburn primary it is close to ideal: same utility region, same fiber routes, genuinely different local risk.

It is the wrong answer when you need space this quarter. The operational layer here is thin, and a market that is three quarters planned cannot absorb an urgent requirement. If your date is inside twelve months, run Northern Virginia first and treat Richmond as the expansion option you negotiate now and take later.