AWS Renaissance Technology Park (Herndon) data center, Herndon, Virginia

Amazon Web Services is the end user of Renaissance Technology Park, a 60-acre data center campus that Starwood Capital Group is building on Redskin Drive in Herndon, in Fairfax County, Virginia. Amazon Data Services filed for state air permits in 2024 for its first two buildings there, IAD-500 at 13860 Redskin Drive and IAD-501 at 13876 Redskin Drive, asking to install 72 stationary engine generators and two transitory generators.

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors approved Starwood's special exception on July 19, 2022, for four data center buildings totaling about 2.1 million square feet, a 6-acre electrical substation and support buildings, with the first building up to 102 feet tall. That makes it the largest data center campus in Fairfax County. Starwood bought the warehouse park for $134.1 million in 2019 and began demolishing the 1970s and 1980s warehouses in 2021. The building permit for 13860 Redskin Drive was approved in February 2024, and the later buildings are to follow as "market conditions" allow.

The campus is growing. In June 2023 a Starwood affiliate paid $25 million for the nearly 30-acre former Word of Grace Christian Church property at 13832 Redskin Drive, once part of a Washington Commanders training facility, which the Renaissance park surrounds. Its air permit application describes two more data centers there, a 60-megawatt Building E of about 406,000 square feet and a 32-megawatt Building F, with 62 generator engines. County staff approved the site plan on November 19, 2025, and a county planner found the site "suitable" and "fully consistent" with local ordinances. Fairfax County's permit record shows the building permit for Building F, at 2850 Towerview Road, was issued on August 28, 2026.

The school next door is the new concern. The Word of Grace site is less than a mile from the former King Abdullah Academy campus, which Fairfax County Public Schools planned to reopen as a high school, and FCPS said it was "monitoring" the data center project. That school, Skyview High School, opened this fall at 2949 Education Drive, the county's first new high school in nearly two decades. County rules adopted in 2024 require data centers to be at least 200 feet from residential property lines, but set no such distance from schools. Those rules also require noise studies before and after construction and keep backup generators 300 feet from homes.

Starwood's generator permits go through the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, which approves the air permits for the diesel engines. The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors sets the county's data center rules, which it tightened after residents raised noise, water, air pollution and energy concerns.