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Virginia Data Center Intel
Latest data center news, projects, power and policy across Virginia — updated daily.
Virginia · Construction & power moves · 40
full tracker →Land, power, and interconnection moves across Virginia — each traced to primary filings.
Top JUST IN — Virginia
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PJM proposes reliability standards for large-load ride-through (no docket)
Source: PJM Inside Lines · Sep 10, 2026PJM Inside Lines reports that PJM has proposed new interconnection reliability requirements for large loads, including data centers and crypto-mining facilities, to require facilities to stay connected during grid disturbances and “riding through” voltage and frequency excursions. The article says the proposal responds to a June 18 FERC order and that “PJM plans to file proposed solutions to FERC in November.”
Backed by 1 primary filing — sign in or book a call to see all sources.
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PJM, Dominion Review Large Load Transfer Event
Source: PJM Inside Lines · Aug 11, 2026PJM Inside Lines reports that PJM is reviewing changes to interconnection reliability requirements for Large Loads after a July 22 event in Virginia in which “nearly 4,000 MW of data center load trip offline unexpectedly.” The article also says FERC ordered NERC to create enforceable Reliability Standards for computational loads and that the first phase of new enforcement provisions is due Dec. 31, 2026.
Backed by 1 primary filing — sign in or book a call to see all sources.
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Opening Statement of Commissioner Christie to House Subcommittee on Energy, Climate, and Grid Security
Source: FERCFERC Commissioner Christie warned that U.S. grid reliability faces “potentially catastrophic consequences” as “unprecedented forecasts for demand increases” from “data centers, including Artificial Intelligence (AI)” collide with fast-retiring dispatchable generation and policy pressure. In PJM, he said, “PJM faces unprecedented load growth due to the proliferation of data centers,” while also noting that EPA power-plant rules could “forcibly” accelerate coal retirements and make new gas generation “extremely difficult, if not virtually impossible” to build. Christie also said the PJM interconnection queue “largely consists of intermittent generation, primarily wind and solar,” and that legal challenges are delaying needed natural-gas pipeline infrastructure.
Backed by 1 primary filing — sign in or book a call to see all sources.
Recent Virginia data center news
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VFP, INC., Invests $35 Million to Expand Operations in Scott County, VA
VFP, Inc. has announced a $35 million expansion of its Duffield, Scott County, Virginia operations.
- Main action: VFP will invest $35 million to build two new buildings in Duffield to double manufacturing capacity (metal and concrete structures), add 200 new jobs, and begin construction December 2025. The expansion is supported by VCEDA with a $312,500 workforce development grant and a $3 million loan to the Scott County Economic Development Authority for equipment acquisition.
- Background and other details: The project is VFP’s third and largest expansion in five years and coincides with the company’s 60th anniversary; it is also backed by a $1 million award from the Workforce Housing Economic Development Incentive Pilot Program (Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission and Scott County) to launch a housing development that will include at least 50 units reserved for households earning 80–150% of AMI. VCEDA and Scott County financing are specifically allocated for workforce development, equipment acquisition, and housing support with construction slated to start in December 2025.
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VFP, INC., Invests $35 Million to Expand Operations in Scott County, VA
VFP, Inc. has announced a $35 million investment to expand operations in Scott County (Duffield), Virginia, adding two new buildings, doubling manufacturing capacity and creating 200 new jobs; construction is expected to begin December 2025.
- Main announcement: VFP will invest $35 million in its Duffield facility to add two new buildings, double production capacity for metal and concrete structures, and add 200 new jobs in Southwest Virginia; construction is scheduled to begin December 2025 and this is VFP’s third and largest expansion in five years.
- Support and background: The expansion is supported by VCEDA with a $312,500 workforce development grant and a $3 million loan to the Scott County Economic Development Authority for equipment acquisition; additionally the Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission awarded $1 million from the Workforce Housing Economic Development Incentive Pilot Program to launch a housing development that will include at least 50 units reserved for households earning 80–150% of AMI. VFP is headquartered in Roanoke, VA, was founded in 1965, and serves utilities, data centers and broadband customers across all 50 U.S. states and 82 countries.
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New Data Center Developments: November 2025
Data Center Knowledge published a monthly roundup summarizing recent global data center developments and investments across North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.
- Main roundup details: The report aggregates announcements including a $70 billion Pennsylvania initiative launched at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit; Amazon’s $8 billion Project Rainier (30 interconnected data centers in Indiana); Google’s multi-billion-dollar West Memphis campus plan; Meta’s >$1.5 billion GW-scale data center in El Paso (expected launch 2028); and a collaboration where OpenAI, Oracle, and Vantage will deliver almost a GW of AI capacity in Port Washington, Wisconsin, with campus construction starting soon and completion targeted for 2028.
- Energy and implementation details: Highlights include deployment of a 31 MW, 62 MWh BESS by Aligned Data Centers and Calibrant Energy to accelerate site commissioning; DOE opening the Oak Ridge Reservation for private AI data center development; Blue Energy planning a gas-to-small-reactor plant supplying up to 1.5 GW to Crusoe Energy Systems with a planned reactor transition by 2031; and Google committing €5 billion in Belgium plus new PPAs with Eneco/Luminus/Renner. Timelines specified in the article include 2026–2030 for Google’s $15 billion India hub and 2028 targets for several GW-scale facilities.
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FSNet finds feasible power grid solutions in minutes, outperforming tried-and-true tools
MIT researchers developed FSNet, a feasibility-seeking neural-network tool that finds deployable power-grid optimization solutions orders of magnitude faster than conventional solvers.
- Main announcement: MIT (Priya Donti and lead author Hoang Nguyen) unveiled FSNet, a two-step framework that combines a neural-network predictor with a feasibility-seeking optimization step to ensure solutions meet equality and inequality constraints; the paper is open-access on arXiv (DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2506.00362) and will be presented at NeurIPS 2025 (Dec. 2–7, San Diego). The team reports FSNet cut solving times by orders of magnitude versus baseline approaches and sometimes produced better solutions for very complex problems.
- Background and details: FSNet uses the neural network prediction as a starting point and an incorporated traditional solver to iteratively refine until constraints are satisfied; it is designed to be plug-and-play with different solvers, handle both constraint types simultaneously, outperformed pure ML approaches on feasibility, and the authors plan to make FSNet less memory-intensive and scale it to more realistic problems.
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AWS Outage: What Are the Lessons for Enterprises?
AWS experienced a significant service disruption in the us-east-1 (North Virginia, US) region on October 19–20, 2025, lasting nearly 15 hours and causing cascading failures across multiple services.
- Main incident details: The outage was caused by a domain name system (DNS) failure that prevented routing to DynamoDB, which is used to track EC2 virtual machine lifecycles; this cascading failure hindered VM creation/management and affected thousands of AWS customers and millions of consumers, including major platforms Snapchat, Fortnite, Venmo, and Robinhood; Downdetector recorded more than 16 million problem reports worldwide; the incident lasted nearly 15 hours and breached AWS’s 99.99% dual-zone EC2 SLA (equivalent to four minutes downtime per month).
- Background and technical context: The root cause of the initial DNS failure is not yet clear; the report highlights concentration risk from reliance on a single region (us-east-1) and notes many organizations had not implemented multi-region architectures due to cost and complexity; Uptime Intelligence/Audit data on regional availability is cited to explain why most customers accept single-region risk despite worst-case regional outages; DNS is identified as a notable single point of failure across cloud providers.
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Data Centers Are Turning to Gas Generators for Prime Power to Eliminate Long Lead Times for Grid Connections
Data center developers and equipment suppliers are increasingly using natural gas generator sets and packaged generator solutions as near-term prime power to meet rapid AI-driven compute demand.
- Main announcement/action: Data center developers (notably Joule Capital Partners with Caterpillar and CAT dealer Wheeler Machinery) are deploying natural gas gensets as prime power at large campuses (Millard County, Utah up to 4 GW planned) with fleets of Caterpillar G3520K (2.5 MW each) and >1 GWh battery storage; the Wonder Valley, Alberta project will use onsite natural gas to power an 8-GW data center with the first 1.5 GW scheduled for completion by 2027. Lead times for utility power can be three to seven years, prompting BYOP (bring your own power) and rapid delivery advantages for gas packages.
- Background and supporting details:Global Market Insights (GMI) valued the global gas generator market at $6.9 billion in 2024, projecting 8.8% CAGR to $16 billion by 2034, with >330 kVA and >750 kVA segments growing fastest; Fidelity Manufacturing expanded staffing from 40 to >500 and opened a second 86,000 sq ft factory (additional 25,000 sq ft production and warehouse planned) to meet data-center-driven demand. Typical large gas engines available up to ~2.5 MW; custom packaged features, ASCE/SEI and local codes, and OSHA/IBC-compliant access (aluminum framing, anti-slip surfaces) are emphasized. Lead times for larger packaged deliveries can be up to one year or more.
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From Grid to Chip: How Schneider Electric combines expertise and innovation to enable AI’s future with NVIDIA
Schneider Electric is partnering with NVIDIA on the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint and related reference designs at the AI Factory Research Center in Virginia, while planning more than $700 million of U.S. investments through 2027.
Main announcement/action: Schneider Electric will collaborate on the NVIDIA Omniverse DSX Blueprint and develop AI-ready infrastructure reference designs and digital twins at the AI Factory Research Center (Virginia); the company has announced planned investments of more than $700 million in U.S. operations through 2027 to support manufacturing expansions, workforce development, and strengthened energy/data center infrastructure. The partnership includes two published reference designs: one for integrated power management and liquid cooling control systems (interoperable with NVIDIA Mission Control and compatible with NVIDIA Grace Blackwell systems) and a second design for AI factories up to 142 kW per rack targeting the NVIDIA GB300 NVL72 rack, with configurations for ANSI and IEC standards.
Background and implementation details: Schneider Electric and ETAP are developing Omniverse-based digital twins using a “Grid to Chip“ approach to model mechanical, thermal, networking and electrical systems down to chip-level dynamic load behavior to improve power-system design and energy efficiency; the reference designs include facility power, facility cooling, IT space, and lifecycle software guidance. For stakeholder engagement: Innovation Summit North America — November 2025 (see event page) — agenda includes demonstrations and discussions on shaping AI-ready infrastructure and Omniverse digital twin applications.
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NVIDIA Launches Omniverse DSX Blueprint, Enabling Global AI Infrastructure Ecosystem to Build Gigawatt-Scale AI Factories
NVIDIA announced the Omniverse DSX blueprint at GTC Washington, D.C., validating it at the AI Factory Research Center on Digital Realty’s Manassas, Virginia site.
- Main announcement: NVIDIA introduced Omniverse DSX, an open blueprint and digital-twin operating model for designing and operating gigawatt-scale AI factories, validated in a real-world deployment at Digital Realty’s Manassas, Virginia AI Factory Research Center; partners include Jacobs, Bechtel, Vertiv, Siemens, Schneider Electric, Trane Technologies, PTC, Cadence, Phaidra, Emerald AI, Eaton, GE Vernova, Hitachi, Siemens Energy, and Switch.
- Details & implementation: DSX uses OpenUSD and SimReady assets aggregated into PTC’s PLM and integrates Omniverse libraries and NVIDIA CUDA/Cadence Reality Digital Twin for simulation; it supports scaling from 100 megawatts to multi-gigawatts, targets tapping ~100 gigawatts of underutilized grid capacity, and claims up to 30% higher GPU throughput using Max-Q power-optimization. The Manassas build-out is captured as a scalable, repeatable recipe for modular prefabricated delivery by partners (no explicit timeline given).
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Virginia Faces New Headwinds in Data Center Growth
DCByte report: Virginia’s data center market is shifting development away from Loudoun County toward counties like Prince William, Henrico, and Culpeper because of zoning changes, power constraints, and community resistance.
- Main announcement/action: The DCByte report highlights that Loudoun County’s 2025 removal of by-right zoning for data centers and Dominion Energy’s power shortages have slowed automatic approvals, prompting developers to redirect projects to counties with more flexible permitting and available land (e.g., Prince William, Henrico, Culpeper). Key facts: Loudoun zoning change (2025); Dominion contractual commitments rose from 21 GW to 40 GW in 2024; Culpeper’s Technology Zone (CTZ) supports over 1 GW and offers tax incentives.
- Background and details: Counties are adopting varied responses—Fauquier requires special exceptions for campuses >50,000 sq ft in Vint Hill; Culpeper passed a zoning amendment requiring conditional use permits outside the CTZ. Several projects faced withdrawal or cancellation (e.g., Tract’s 744-acre Chesterfield development withdrawn, AWS abandoned Louisa campus) and developers are phasing construction to match incremental power availability while Dominion upgrades substations and transmission. Also noted: interest in alternative energy (e.g., plans for a small modular reactor at North Anna Power Station).
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Pennsylvania’s $70 Billion Race for America’s Data Centers
Pennsylvania has announced an ambitious $70 billion state-led initiative to attract major AI data center investments and related infrastructure upgrades, unveiled in July at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit at Carnegie Mellon University.
- Main announcement and projects:$70 billion initiative announced in July at the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit (Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh). Key commitments include $25 billion Aliquippa steel mill redevelopment (Blackstone; joint venture with PPL Corp. on power generation), CoreWeave $6 billion for up to 300 MW in Lancaster, Energy Capital Partners $5 billion at York II Energy Center, PA Data Center Partners & Powerhouse $15 billion three-campus hub near Carlisle with 1.3 GW capacity, and Google/Brookfield 20-year repowering deal for Safe Harbor and Holtwood hydropower totaling 670 MW. The plan also includes workforce development via the Energy Innovation Center Infrastructure Academy and Meta’s $2.5 million investment to CMU’s Schwartz Center for Entrepreneurship.
- Background and implementation details: The plan is state-coordinated and privately funded (not federally backed like the CHIPS Act). It focuses primarily on power delivery and grid enhancements (rather than direct data center construction), leveraging Pennsylvania’s status as the 2nd-largest U.S. natural gas producer and a major coal producer. The Google-Brookfield arrangement is a 20-year repowering commitment; other projects are announced as multi-billion-dollar investments without explicit completion timelines. Industry sources quoted include Forrester Research (Alvin Nguyen), DVM Power + Control (Bob Ricci), and DataBank (Joe Minarik).