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Data centers in Stafford County, VA

Everything on file with the regulator, added up. Every figure links to the filing it came from.

2data center sites
2issued air permits
30permitted backup generators
189tons/year NOx permitted

Ranked 11 of 14 counties.

Stafford County holds 30 permitted backup generators across 2 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.

It is smaller than it sounds

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 2 sites here that Groundwork could locate sits in a FEMA Special Flood Hazard Area.

It is bigger than any one filing shows

No single permit discloses the 30 generators permitted in this county. That number exists only because 2 separately-published filings were added together. Each one, read alone, looks routine.

2 of the 2 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.

SiteOperatorPermitted NOx (t/yr)Under 100 by
Amazon Data Services Inc IAD-350Amazon94.685.32
Vantage Data Centers VA41 LLCVantage Data Centers94.55.5

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 Stafford County.

SiteOperatorPermitsGeneratorsNOx t/yrFlood zone
Vantage Data Centers VA41 LLCVantage Data Centers11594.5Zone X
Amazon Data Services Inc IAD-350Amazon11594.68Zone X

2 operators of record · 2 of 2 located sites draw from a basin WRI rates high or extremely high for water stress.

What VA publishes

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 Centersin 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.