CIA Buys Secretive NoVA Office From Peterson Companies for $250M

The Peterson Companies, the developer behind a massive Northern Virginia office campus housing the CIA, has just sold another building to the agency in a nine-figure deal. 

The Fairfax, Va.-based developer traded its 434,000-square-foot Dulles Discovery 2 property to the agency for $246.4 million, according to public records. The U.S. government acquired the asset via an entity based at the New Headquarters Building, which is part of the CIA’s Langley complex. The buyer’s ZIP code, 20505, is also a unique code used by the agency. 

The Business Journals first reported the news. 

Peterson developed Dulles Discovery 2 at 13870 Air and Space Museum Parkway in Chantilly, Va., in 2010 as part of its sprawling, 2.4 million-square-foot Dulles Discovery campus. There are currently five buildings at the campus. The developer finished the 402,000-square-foot Dulles Discovery 1 in 2007 and the most recent property, the 514,000-square-foot Dulles Discovery 5, in 2024, per Peterson’s website. 

The CIA occupies most, if not all, of the campus, though representatives for the CIA and for Peterson declined to comment.

While Peterson builds and invests in a range of asset types, the firm has carved out a lane as the developer of highly classified government offices. That includes Liberty Crossing I and II, a 39-acre campus in McClean, Va., that it sold to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2023 for $531 million. Liberty Crossing also houses the National Counterterrorism Center.

Peterson has also bet big on the data center market recently, having acquired, entitled and sold multiple properties across Northern Virginia. That includes a 504-acre site in Stafford County, which it sold earlier this year to Stack Infrastructure for $302.3 million. 

Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.