Amazon Spends $700M on Empty Land in NoVA Primed for Data Centers
The tech giant has pledged to spend $35 billion on data centers in the region by 2040
By Nick Trombola November 7, 2025 12:30 pm
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A sprawling land parcel in Northern Virginia eyed for data center development has traded hands for $700 million, pushing the region’s digital gold rush to ludicrous speed.
Amazon paid the stunning sum to Stanley Martin Homes for Devlin Tech Park, a 270-acre raw land parcel near Bristow, already entitled for 3.5 million square feet of data center development and three substations. Yet Amazon acquired only 189 of those acres, leaving the rest as open space, according to the Business Journals, which first reported the news.
The deal is a big payday for Stanley Martin, which paid $51.3 million to muster the site between 2021 and 2022 and entitled the land for data center use. While the Prince William County Board of Supervisors approved the entitlements in late 2023, locals fought back and sparked a years-long court battle. The Virginia Court of Appeals ultimately upheld the entitlements in September, paving the way for the deal’s closure.
Yet Stanley Martin did agree to certain conditions to get the entitlements through, such as maximum building height of 81 feet, a minimum threshold of 500 feet between any facility and the nearest home, noise limits, landscape buffers and screens.
Ultimately, Amazon’s price comes out to about $3.7 million per acre, in line with the $465.5 million that Microsoft paid for 124 acres in nearby Gainesville early last year. The price is the highest paid for undeveloped land in Virginia’s history, per the Business Journals, and is among the priciest land deals ever in the U.S. In 2016, for example, billionaire and Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke purchased the 560,000-acre W.T. Waggoner Ranch in Texas for $725 million.
Representatives for Amazon and for Stanley Martin did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The House that Jeff Bezos built certainly isn’t slacking on its promise to spend $35 billion on data centers in Virginia through 2040, and the company has been busy buying land over the past two years. Amazon paid $195 million for 97 acres near Leesburg in May; $57 million for 39 acres in September 2024, $218 million for 91 acres in May 2024 and $152 million for 140 acres in January of that year, all near Manassas.
Nick Trombola can be reached at ntrombola@commercialobserver.com.
