BlackChamber Pays $160M for 38 Acres in NoVA for Data Center Development
The private equity firm landed $1.2B in financing throughout 2024 to construct hyperscale data centers in the region
By Nick Trombola October 17, 2025 1:00 pm
reprints
Owners of large land plots in Northern Virginia who bought before the data center boom are reaping what they sowed — literally, in the case of Merrifield Garden Center.
The family-owned garden center and nursery sold its 38-acre Gainesville location to BlackChamber Group for $160 million, according to Prince William County records. At over $4.2 million an acre, the sale is a 500 percent premium on the property’s 2025 assessed value of $26.5 million, and a whopping 6,857 percent premium on the $2.3 million that the Warhurst family paid for it in 2004, according to the Prince William Times, which first reported the news.
BlackChamber, a Washington, D.C.-based private equity firm, plans to redevelop the lot into a data center. The property at 6895 Wellington Road falls within Prince William County’s Data Center Opportunity Zone Overlay District, meaning that data center development is permitted by-right, though details about BlackChamber’s plans were not immediately available. A spokesperson for BlackChamber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The garden center plans to close the Gainesville location on Dec. 31, and some of its team members will relocate to its Merrifield and Fairfax locations, according to a sign recently posted at the property.
“After 17 years in operation, we have made the difficult decision to close our doors to the Gainesville location of Merrifield Garden Center,” the sign reads. “This space has been more than just a retail store. It has been a home to our plants, an education hub and a collaborative space.”
Northern Virginia is the nation’s epicenter of data center development, and BlackChamber has fully committed to the trend. The firm announced in January that it had raised $1.2 billion in construction financing over the previous year, Commercial Observer reported at the time, specifically to build hyperscale data centers in the region. Once completed, those facilities are expected to produce over 740 megawatts of capacity.
In March, BlackChamber paid an affiliate of the Pruitt Corporation $190 million for a 65-acre industrial site in Manassas, just a few miles south of its new Gainesville property. The lot is also a by-right data center site, with room for up to 2 million square feet of development, according to a JLL listing at the time.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
