Amazon’s HQ2 headquarters build out in Arlington County, Virginia, has been a high-profile project for the company, but over the past decade and a half, it has quietly been building out a huge network of data centers in Northern Virginia as well.
In a recent report, Amazon Web Services said since 2011, it has invested $51.9 billion in Virginia.
The report said Amazon Web Services contributed $8.2 billion in total gross domestic product to Virginia’s economy between 2011 and 2022.
Amazon Web Services construction, operations and on-site maintenance has supported 11,180 full- and part-time jobs in Virginia in 2021.
Amazon Web Services paid $334 million in business personal property taxes in connection with its Virginia data centers in 2022, the Amazon report said.
Amazon also said it remains on track to power all of its operations, including data centers, with 100% renewable energy by 2025, with 18 solar farms in Virginia operational by then.
Earlier this year, Amazon announced intentions to invest an additional $35 billion in Virginia by 2040 to expand its data center campuses, which it said would create an additional 1,000 jobs.
Amazon opened its first data center in the country in Virginia in 2006.
Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in the world, with 3,400 megawatts of data center inventory, according to an annual report from JLL, which is three times larger than the next biggest data center market, Singapore.
Northern Virginia had its third straight year of record data center absorption in 2022.
