Starwood Plaza 500 data center, Fairfax County, Virginia

Starwood Capital Group filed permit plans in July 2026 for Plaza 500 South, the first of two data centers it wants on the 34-acre Plaza 500 site at 6295 and 6299 Edsall Road in Lincolnia, in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside the Alexandria city line. The Starwood data center itself is allowed by right, so the fight has turned to the Dominion Energy substation it needs, whose Fairfax County Planning Commission hearing was pushed from September 24 to December 2, 2026 at Dominion's request.

The first building would be 75 feet tall and 226,469 square feet, according to the Washington Business Journal. Starwood bought the property in 2022 for $165 million. The site has held warehouse, office and retail uses and was once home to a Social Security office and Smoot Lumber.

Resident leader Tyler Ray says the roughly five-acre substation would sit 67 feet from the Ridges at Edsall townhouses and power 176 megawatts for the data center, and the State Corporation Commission has already signed off on nearly a mile of transmission line to the existing Van Dorn substation.

"Because in 2022 the developer Starwood Capital wouldn't agree to not build a data center there by kind of adding what's called a proffer to the rezoning, they came back and submitted a site plan in 2024 to build a data center by right," said Tyler Ray, president of the Bren Pointe Homeowners Association and founder of the Save Bren Mar Coalition.

"They are manipulating the process and going out of order intentionally to try to force the county to approve this despite the process not fully playing out yet," Ray said of the permit filing.

More than 100 residents came to the Mason District Land Use Committee's July 28 briefing, and the coalition now counts five homeowner and civic associations representing about 1,000 homes. On August 27 the Fairfax County Federation of Citizens Associations voted to oppose both the campus and the substation, citing the 67-foot distance and a resource protection area along Turkeycock Run.

Rep. Don Beyer, Mason District Supervisor Andres Jimenez, Alexandria Mayor Alyia Gaskins and City Council, state Sen. Elizabeth Bennett-Parker and House Majority Leader Charniele Herring have all opposed the substation. "However, as we continue to experience unprecedented growth in data center development, we must ensure that these projects are appropriately located outside of residential areas," Beyer wrote to the Planning Commission. "Our community supports a reliable electric grid, but reliability and thoughtful planning are not mutually exclusive," Jimenez said.

Starwood is also buying nearly 42 acres of county land in Chantilly for $166.8 million for data centers and is developing a data center at the former Washington Commanders training site in Herndon.

The Fairfax County Planning Commission rules on the substation in its 2232 review on December 2, and Dominion can appeal a denial to the Board of Supervisors, which adopted stricter data center rules in 2024 but exempted pending applications like Plaza 500. The building plans themselves go through Fairfax County Land Development Services for permit review.