Data center provider CoreSite is powering up the next phase of its planned expansion in Reston.
Fairfax County staff are currently reviewing a site plan for a three-story data center facility that would replace a one-story, vacant office building on the company’s 21.7-acre campus at 12369 Sunrise Valley Drive, just east of Fairfax County Parkway.
The latest iteration of the site plan, submitted on June 20, shows an approximately 215,000-square-foot, 75-foot-tall building on the property’s southern edge abutting homes on Cocquina Drive. The expansion will require demolishing the existing, 19-foot-tall office building and removing much of the surrounding pavement, loading docks and landscaping, including a few trees.
The impending expansion, dubbed V3 Phase 2, is the latest step in a development plan approved by the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors in 2018 that will ultimately deliver a total of 943,600 square feet of data center space on the campus.
Acquired by CoreSite from Brookfield Properties in 2016 for $60 million, the former Sunrise Technology Park on the south side of Sunrise Valley Drive consisted of four office buildings from the 1980s. Two of the buildings were renovated into data centers as part of the first phase of CoreSite’s V3 buildout, which also added a new, two-story data center building in 2019.
The building currently under review will have the address 12367 Sunrise Valley Drive, per the submitted site plan, and constitute the second phase of the buildout. Two more three-story data center facilities are planned for the final third and fourth phases.
When the full expansion is complete, CoreSite will have 1.3 million square feet of data centers in Reston, including its existing VA1 and VA2 facilities on the north side of Sunrise Valley Drive. Opened at 12100 Sunrise Valley Drive in 2008, that campus was previously occupied by AOL.
The V3 expansion will help CoreSite “meet growing business and consumer demand” as internet usage and other digital services become increasingly ubiquitous, according to CoreSite’s Mid-Atlantic General Manager Chris Lettiere.
“CoreSite data centers provide significant value to Fairfax County and Northern Virginia, including substantial tax revenue and high-paying permanent and construction jobs,” Lettiere said in a statement to FFXnow. “In fact, our expansion will create an estimated 300 construction jobs and 50 new permanent jobs.”
Residents ‘alarmed’ by notice
Though it’s part of the approved 2018 development plan, the proposal to replace a one-story building with a three-story data center has taken many nearby residents by surprise.
Most residents of the Cocquina Cluster, which is just south of the CoreSite property, only became aware of the planned expansion when one homeowner asked the neighborhood’s internal Facebook group on June 16 if anyone else had been notified about the site plan filing, Cocquina Cluster Homeowners Association President Maggie Urbanik says.
As of last Thursday (June 26), Urbanik knows of only two homeowners receiving the notice from Langan Engineering, which crafted the site plan for CoreSite. Dated June 2, the letter confusingly lists the proposed facility’s address as 12098 Sunrise Valley Drive and describes its location as the northwest corner of Sunrise Valley and Edmund Halley Drive — referring, it appears, to CoreSite’s original V1 data center.
The notice came with a layout of the site that displays the correct address, but the “misleading” information in the letter has raised residents’ suspicions, Urbanik says. The letters also note that the site plan can be approved by county staff 30 days after its postmarked date, giving residents little time to submit comments.
“Some residents may have received certified letters, but not all of us were notified. As the HOA president, I received nothing,” Urbanik told FFXnow. “Our homes are shown on the site plan, yet we weren’t given a fair opportunity to respond. On top of that, the listed address suggests the expansion is across the street — not directly behind us. That feels, at best, careless — and at worst, intentionally misleading.”
One resident who received the notice around mid-June observed that it was “written in legalese” that’s difficult to interpret and didn’t include a translation into Spanish, the native language of many Cocquina Cluster residents.
“I am very disappointed and alarmed by this process,” Caitlin O’Dwyer said. “The map we received is zoomed in so far that it is impossible to tell where the building is in relation to our neighborhood. If the stated purpose of the letter was to engage members of Cocquina Cluster, then why hide that?”
On top of questioning what they see as a lack of transparency and outreach from CoreSite, Urbanik and O’Dwyer shared concerns about the expanded data center’s height, proximity to residences and potential impacts on noise, traffic, light pollution, the electrical grid, the environment and their neighborhood’s quality of life.
O’Dwyer describes the existing data center building on the campus as “an absolute blight,” saying CoreSite “made zero effort” to beautify the area. The evaporative cooling process used by the data center — which takes in water that’s then expelled as steam — is also already having a visible impact, she says.
“Extra data center space will worsen this significantly effect the micro climates surrounding the property, including our cluster,” O’Dwyer said by email. “When there are snow storms in the area you can actually see a hole in the weather pattern over areas in Northern Virginia with data centers.”
Lettiere didn’t directly address the residents’ concerns, including any public outreach plans, when contacted by FFXnow, but he said CoreSite is working “closely with Fairfax County on all aspects of the permitting process, including following all ordinances.”
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors adopted new regulations for data centers last year, including size limits, a requirement for noise studies and a prohibition on facilities within 200 feet of residential neighborhoods.
However, the rules don’t apply to previously approved applications, so CoreSite’s development isn’t subject to them, Hunter Mill District Supervisor Walter Alcorn’s office confirmed.
Correction: This story initially stated that CoreSite’s campus on Sunrise Valley Drive was previously a headquarters for AOL. While the property did belong to AOL, it was a data center site, not the company’s headquarters.
