A 30-megawatt data center site in Richmond, Virginia, changed hands on November 9, bringing to a close a transaction that Volterra Advisors, a Washington, D.C.-metro data center advisory firm, shepherded for its client NS Development Partners from site identification through closing. Terms were not disclosed and the buyer was not named in the announcement.
The deal is modest by the standards of a market now measured in gigawatts. What it signals is harder to dismiss: another developer has committed capital to Richmond at a moment when the city has become the fastest-growing data center market in the United States, fed almost entirely by a power crisis unfolding 100 miles north.
Northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley” — centered on Loudoun County, historically the world’s largest concentration of data center capacity — is running out of power. Dominion Energy, the primary utility serving the region, has publicly acknowledged it cannot meet current data center demand there. That shortfall forced developers who had been moving forward under the assumption that power would be available to scramble for alternatives, touching off a migration south along the Interstate 95 fiber corridor that has reshuffled the East Coast’s data center geography with striking speed…