A map of the proposed Roxbury Technology Park site. (Courtesy diodeventures.com)
Charles City County is the latest locality in the region with a chance to get in on the data center boom.
Kansas-based Diode Ventures recently submitted plans to the county Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors to rezone around 515 acres about 20 miles due east of Richmond to allow for a data center campus called Roxbury Technology Park.
Project costs and how many data center buildings would be on the campus are not yet known, a Diode representative confirmed. In its application, Diode estimates that construction of the data center campus would take seven to 10 years. An end user has not been identified for the project.
The project site is in an area southwest of the unincorporated community Roxbury, and comprises five contiguous parcels of private land, which are mainly forested and vacant.
On its website, Diode Ventures said the area is ideal for a data center because of “available land, overhead transmission lines, proximity to fiber networks, available workforce, and support of economic development in targeted areas as described in the 2014 Comprehensive Land Use Plan.”
Charles City County staff recommended Planning Commission approval of the rezoning in a staff report, pending the adjustment of some of the proffers. The report states that the application is in accordance with the economic development sections of the county’s land use plan.
“Digital commerce is the next industrial revolution and it’s vitally important that Charles City has an opportunity to be included in the new digital economy of the next generation,” a county staff report reads.
Charles City County’s 2014 comprehensive land use plan identified the five parcels as part of the Roxbury Development Center, a primary development area within the county that has been identified as such since 1979 and has grown.
While the proposed site has some wetland areas that lie within the Chesapeake Bay Preservation Area, they are resource management areas, which can be developed with mitigation strategies to offset development impacts, according to the staff report.
The property is bordered by existing agricultural use and some industrial use, according to the zoning application. Nearby businesses include the Dominion Energy Chickahominy Substation, Chaney Enterprises Concrete Plant and Tire Recycling Solutions.
There are no existing zoning, conditional use permits or variances previously granted to the five parcels, according to a staff report. Two of the parcels are owned by trustee Andrea K. Greene, while the rest are owned by separate owners.
A larger view of Charles City County. The Roxbury Technology Park site is shown in blue in the upper left corner. (Courtesy diodeventures.com)
An original zoning application for the project was submitted last November. A revised application was submitted in February.
The county Planning Commission will review the proposal and allow for public comment before making a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors for final approval. The Planning Commission is set to host the public hearing on the application April 10.
Among the 10 proffers included in the rezoning application are prohibited uses like intensive agriculture or junk yard, building setbacks from exterior boundary lines, noise attenuation standards and more. County staff gave several recommendations with regard to the proffers, including things like amended construction hours on Sundays.
Preston Lloyd of Williams Mullen is representing Diode in its zoning request.
Upon completion, there would be 120 to 200 permanent jobs at the data center, including professions such as data center technicians, network engineers, maintenance staff and more, according to Diode. A November letter from Diode also said that data center projects can create about 1,200 skilled trade jobs during construction.
Diode Ventures was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in Overland Park, Kansas. Diode is a subsidiary of engineering and construction company Black & Veatch. Diode has worked on data center developments in Kansas City, Missouri, and Kuna, Idaho. It is unclear whether this is Diode’s first Virginia project.
Charles City County isn’t the only Richmond-area locality getting in on the data center trend. In eastern Henrico, Atlanta-based DC Blox is moving forward with a 65,000-square-foot data center on part of the property that, until recently, housed Azalea Flea Market.
And in Chesterfield, the county’s Economic Development Authority recently filed rezoning requests to tee up two data center campuses, one near Westchester Commons and the other on a portion of the Upper Magnolia Green site near Moseley.
I suppose we’ll have to wade into Bayesian probability to determine if Roko’s basilisk has led humanity into this subservient and detrimental eusocial behavior towards AI and all its trappings. Or, it’s nothing more than greed.
I think this mega data center project will not get build. In that I think Virginia is currently in the final phase of data center specification. Were everyone in their mother is proposing a data center. And there has to be a limit at which ai needs data centers.