Area Development
Compass Datacenters received approval from Loudoun County, Virginia, for the company's first data center campus in Northern Virginia.

The project is zoned for up to 750,000 square feet of data center facilities that support mission critical IT needs of cloud providers and enterprise customers with operations seeking data center infrastructure in the Washington, D.C. area. According to company officials, Compass Datacenters' facilities are aesthetically-pleasing data centers that blend into the locations where they are built far more than the "big gray boxes" of typical large-scale data center projects.

Compass facilities are also designed to conserve water and energy as well as minimize their impact on the environment to a degree that is remarkable for data centers. This site in Loudoun County has 56 MVA of day-one utility power capacity with substantial capability to add more in the future. Compass Datacenters will begin site work construction on the project in February.The project was approved after extensive collaboration between Compass Datacenters and Loudoun County to ensure that environmentally-sensitive land adjacent to the project is protected.

"I'm proud of how responsive my team has been to the requests of the County and feedback from residents who rightfully want to protect a place they love," said Chris Curtis, Senior Vice President of Development & Acquisitions at Compass. "Our team worked closely with the County to make a series of revisions to our plan to ensure that those environmental concerns are all addressed, and I see this as a model for how data centers companies, counties and residents can work together on these complex projects so everyone's needs are met."

"I'm thankful for the commitment that Compass Data Centers has made to Loudoun County," said Buddy Rizer, Executive Director, Loudoun County Economic Development. "I also appreciate the lengths they have gone to in order address the concerns of the local community, and I'm confident that there is not a more responsible or thoughtful commercial developer to act as the steward of this property. Compass is a world-class operator, and we're very excited to add them as a corporate citizen in the world's most dynamic data center market."

"Compass already has interest in the data centers on this site from some of the major cloud providers, and we will move forward quickly on development with the target of delivering the first data center space in the Fall of 2018," said Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters. "This project in Loudoun County is a great example of our business model in action, which is to not only build exactly where customer want us to but also to acquire sites in strategic markets so that we can respond quickly to future demand. Our land development expertise is second to none in the industry. That is a major reason why so many customers trust us to be a strategic partner for their IT infrastructure needs."