Microsoft is moving forward with a new data center campus in Prince William County, Virginia, according to DatacenterDynamics. The company has filed an application with the US Army Corps of Engineers, Norfolk District, for a project it calls the MNZ07 Wellington Data Center, located at 13490 University Boulevard outside Gainesville.
The filing describes two one-story data center buildings and an on-site substation on 123 acres along the east side of University Boulevard, between Interstate 66 to the north and Wellington Road to the south. Microsoft says in the application that the campus is needed to meet growing customer demand for cloud platform services in the region.
The Corps filing is tied to environmental impacts: the project would affect 955 linear feet of stream channels and 1.95 acres of wetlands. A separate application was submitted to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality in July.
Microsoft bought the land in 2024 from local landowner Chuck Kuhn, paying $465.5 million for 124 acres. The site sits next to a 117-acre parcel owned by Amazon, which is planning a 2.3 million square foot campus split into Gainesville West and Gainesville East, and a Google-linked developer, Sharpless Enterprises, is planning another large campus nearby. Much of the surrounding land was once a military facility run by Atlantic Research Corporation.
With Microsoft, Amazon and a Google-linked developer all pursuing projects in the same area, the stretch of land between I-66 and Wellington Road is shaping up as a hyperscale cluster in its own right.