Amazon Drops $427 Million Data Center Plan, Donates $65 Million Land

Amazon has abandoned its $427 million plan to build data centers on George Washington University's Virginia campus and will instead donate roughly 25 acres of the property to Loudoun County, land with a stated fair market value of about $65 million.

The company signed the original application in February. It filed a site plan in late July for a project called "Bridgefield Tech Center," which called for four two-story data center buildings totaling more than 800,000 square feet. Now that plan is dead.

The withdrawal is part of an agreement dubbed "Project Potomac Promise" by Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis Randall. Under its terms, Amazon withdraws its data center site plan, abandons legal action to pursue development on the property, and works with the county to rezone the remaining land for mixed-use development, with housing as the predominant use. Amazon will also contribute $5 million to the Loudoun County Affordable Housing Trust Fund.

"My goal was to disallow data centers or infrastructure that could support data centers on this property," Randall said at a press conference alongside Amazon Web Services data center delivery vice president Joshua Weissman. "Through our collaborative, respectful conversations, Amazon has agreed to forego its proposed application for data centers, and of note, forego any legal action to realize data center development on this site."

What does the county get?

The 25 acres sit along Route 7. The county intends to use them for a community arts center and an indoor sports and recreation facility.

Randall said the county will hold public meetings to gather residents' input on the redevelopment. She expects the rezoning process to take about a year, even on a "fast-track" schedule.

"What we'll probably do is focus first on the indoor sports arena," she said, "and focus more on the community arts center first as the rezoning process is going through."

Weissman framed the deal as part of a broader local commitment. "Loudoun will be a focus for Amazon's Built Together commitment we announced a few weeks ago, which includes tuition assistance for community colleges and local project funding," he told Fortune in a statement.

Why the retreat matters

Amazon is not a newcomer here. It launched its Northern Virginia cloud region in 2006. According to Weissman, the company has invested more than $63 billion in Loudoun County since 2011 and employs more than 3,400 Amazon workers there. In 2023, it announced plans to invest an additional $35 billion in data center campuses across Virginia by 2040.

Loudoun County sits in "data center alley," home to the highest concentration of data centers in the world. The county reported approximately 233 existing data center buildings, representing about 56.5 million square feet of space. Data centers generated roughly $1.2 billion in real and personal property tax revenue in fiscal 2026, or 39% of the county's overall budget.

How the deal unraveled

In February, GW president Ellen Granberg announced the university had sold its Virginia Science and Technology Campus but did not name the buyer or the price. She said the transaction would support the university's "long-term financial health," with a significant portion of proceeds marked for an endowment.

In March, the student newspaper, The GW Hatchet, identified Amazon Data Services as the buyer at $427 million.

"It just came as a sudden announcement one day that they had sold the property, and that they couldn't disclose the buyer because there was some kind of a confidentiality agreement," former GW professor Ellen Scully-Russ previously told Fortune. "But of course, a student newspaper did their due diligence, and by the end of the day, they knew who it was, and they knew the price, and they communicated that to the community."

In April, Algonkian district supervisor Juli Briskman asked county staff to examine the potential effects of the proposed development. She noted the $427 million purchase price, roughly four times the property's assessed value, made data center construction a reasonable expectation. By July, she opposed it outright.

"Replacing the George Washington University campus with four massive data center buildings would be a profound loss for our community," Briskman said in a press release. "The site offers a generational opportunity for education, research, housing, and other forms of economic development that could directly benefit Loudoun residents. I strongly oppose this proposal and will fight it every step of the way."

Amazon then chose negotiation over litigation. "There was not a moment where it was decided that this was a bad idea," Weissman said. "We just heard from the community. We partnered with Loudoun, and we just decided this was just the right thing to do."

The agreement signals that even in the world's densest data center market, community resistance can redirect capital, and Amazon still has the rest of its $35 billion Virginia pipeline to place.