Data centers in Culpeper County, VA
Everything on file with the regulator, added up. Every figure links to the filing it came from.
Ranked 8 of 14 counties.
Culpeper County holds 147 permitted backup generators across 4 sites. The median tracked county with any generator data has 248.
Counties with permitted generator counts Groundwork has read from permit documents. Only Virginia publishes permits in a form that makes this countable today, so this ranking is Virginia-only — not a claim that no county elsewhere is denser.
What this does — and doesn't — mean.
These are emergency backup generators. They are permitted to run during grid outages and for routine testing — typically tens of hours a year, not continuously. A permit is a ceiling on what a site may emit, not a measurement of what it does emit.
A permit also is not a building. An issued permit establishes approval; it does not establish that anything is built, energised or running.
None of the 3 sites here that Groundwork could locate sits in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area.
No single permit discloses the 147 generators permitted in this county. That number exists only because 4 separately-published filings were added together. Each one, read alone, looks routine.
1 of the 3 permits here with a readable NOx figure are permitted at 90–99.99 tons per year — just beneath the 100 ton/year threshold that triggers major-source review and public participation. Statewide the pattern is sharper still: 70 permits sit in that band and 2 reach 100.
| Site | Operator | Permitted NOx (t/yr) | Under 100 by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Data Services Inc - DCA-060 | Amazon | 96.03 | 3.97 |
Read from the emissions table of each permit and labelled probable accordingly. A permit sized below a review threshold is lawful and common; Groundwork reports the pattern, and takes no view on any individual application.
Every tracked site in Culpeper County.
| Site | Operator | Permits | Generators | NOx t/yr | Flood zone |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DataBank Data Center Culpeper LLC | DataBank | 1 | 112 | 2.59 | Zone X |
| Amazon DCA-50 | Amazon | 1 | 16 | — | Pending |
| Amazon Data Services Inc - DCA-060 | Amazon | 1 | 15 | 96.03 | Zone X |
| Equinix, LLC - CU 1-4 | Equinix | 1 | 4 | 53.7 | Zone X |
3 operators of record.
Virginia is the only state that publishes a data-center-specific air permit list, with the issuance document for every permit. That is why Virginia pages carry permit counts, generator counts and permitted NOx, and most other states do not.
- VA DEQ — Issued Air Permits for Data Centers — in use. 201 permits, each with its issuance PDF, read for address, equipment and permitted emissions.
Spotted an error?
Fuzzy-matched fields are labelled as such and some will be wrong. Open an issue — corrections are tracked in public and noted on the page.