Virginia’s data center boom is expanding even faster than most people realize, and one company is behind the lion’s share of it. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, Big Tech firms filed permits for 54 new data centers across the state, according to a local newspapers tally. That figure marks the largest single-year jump in planned data centers in Virginia’s history and represents a 16% increase over the total reported in 2024. Leading this new wave is Amazon, which is responsible for 28 of the newly permitted facilities. By the end of 2024, the tech giant had already constructed or begun building 177 data centers across the U.S. With the new batch in Virginia, Amazon’s data center count will rise to 205 a 15% expansion of its already massive footprint.
These new permits also highlight a major trend: companies are not only building more data centers they’re building much bigger, more power-hungry ones. local newspapers had previously identified 322 “hyperscale” data centers either completed or underway across the country at the end of 2024, each requiring at least 40 megawatts of electricity. With the latest filings, that number now rises to 370. Virtually all of Amazon’s new sites fall into the hyperscale category. Facilities of this size can consume as much electricity as a small city and demand millions of gallons of water daily for cooling. While Amazon has pushed back on local newspapers’s methodology for calculating electricity usage, calling it flawed and potentially misleading, the expansion trend is unmistakable.
The surge in Virginia’s data center construction coincides with record levels of U.S. investment in AI infrastructure. In June, Bank of America Institute reported that construction spending on data centers reached an all-time high of $40 billion. The tech giants Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta are aggressively ramping up capital spending in the race to dominate AI infrastructure. local newspapers’s financial analysis estimated that their combined capex for 2025 could hit $320 billion, with the bulk directed toward powering and expanding data center networks. Virginia has long been the heart of this trend. Northern Virginia, commonly referred to as “Data Center Alley,” is home to more data centers than anywhere else in the country. While this boom has promised significant local tax revenue, it’s also sparked backlash from residents concerned about its impact on housing, the environment, and quality of life.
By 2023, data centers in Virginia were already consuming one-quarter of the state’s total electricity. local newspapers projected that if all the facilities built or under construction by the end of 2024 become operational, their combined power use would rival New York City’s electricity consumption for the same year. The addition of 54 new facilities in 2025 pushes the estimate even higher by another 26%, according to the outlet’s calculations. Altogether, Virginia had 383 data centers built or in construction as of September 2025. If all of them go live, their total annual electricity demand would range between 66.5 and 106.4 terawatt-hours. At the low end, that’s equivalent to what the entire state of Minnesota used in 2023. At the high end, it surpasses Tennessee’s total power usage for that year.
To gather data on this expansion, local newspapers filed requests in all 50 states and Washington, DC, seeking air permits that regulate backup generators at data centers. This was part of a broader investigation into the scale and environmental impact of the U.S. data center surge. Back in 2010, there were just 311 known data centers nationwide. That number nearly quadrupled over the next 14 years, with 1,240 built or approved by the end of 2024 the most comprehensive tally to date. Virginia remains the focal point of this transformation, and Amazon continues to be its most powerful force.
