Ask the Planning Commission to recommend denial before the July 16 hearing.
This text was taken from an email alert sent out on July 10, 2026. Sign up for email alerts →
Dear Supporter,
As you may remember from our recent Fauquier update, Gigaland is back with its latest proposal, renamed Remington Digital Campus. While the new proposal represents a smaller footprint (a relative term when talking about millions of square feet) for its six data center buildings, the meaningful changes stop there.
The new application still has the same major implications for Remington, Bealeton and Fauquier County as a whole as the previous proposal (which the Planning Commission recommended for denial) around construction; noise, air and light pollution; water and electricity usage; surface and groundwater, and extreme energy demand.
Once again, this massive proposal would require a Comprehensive Plan amendment, rezoning request, special exceptions, and access waiver, all just to accommodate Gigaland.
Speak Up at the Planning Commission Hearing on July 16
We are urging residents of Fauquier to come out to the upcoming Fauquier County Planning Commission hearing and speak up in opposition to the Gigaland/Remington Digital Campus project. Please also send in written comments before the hearing. It is critical that you do both, if possible. The Planning Commission needs to see and hear you, so they know this is important to you.*
What: Fauquier County Planning Commission Hearing on Remington Digital Campus Proposal
When: Thursday, July 16 at 6:30 p.m.
Where: Warren Green Building, First Floor Meeting Room, 10 Hotel Street, Warrenton, Virginia
* We expect those in support of Gigaland to have a visible presence at the hearing, but our strength comes from good letters and brief comments.
What’s in the New Gigaland Proposal?
Gigaland’s proposed Remington Digital Campus site is just over 200 acres situated between Lucky Hill, Strodes Mill and Old Grassdale roads. The project would include six data center buildings totaling nearly one million square feet — the equivalent of six Walmart Supercenters — as well as two municipal groundwater wells, a water treatment plant, a 125-foot water tower (solely for purposes of fire suppression for Gigaland alone), two electrical substations, 136 backup diesel generators, and an unknown number of air conditioning units (known as chillers).
For comparison, the previous Gigaland proposal included 2.2 million square feet across seven data center buildings, as well as four substations and more backup generators. While reducing the data center square footage, this new proposal has retained most everything else from the original proposal and fails to address the majority of the Planning Commission’s concerns that underpinned its 2025 recommendation of denial.
The Impacts of this Project will be Felt by Fauquier Residents, not Gigaland
This project’s unresolved and numerous impacts — which mirror the original 2025 application and led the Planning Commission to recommend denial — still remain. These are not minor details to be addressed later, but represent basic threshold failures that undermine our county’s land-use standards.
1. Wall-to-Wall Data Centers: The proposed Gigaland/Remington Digital Campus is in addition to – and right next to – the already-approved Remington Technology Park, a 2 million-square-foot data center campus currently under construction. If the Remington Digital Campus application is approved, it will add well over 1 million total square feet of impervious surface right next to Remington Tech Park, totaling 3.5 million square feet of contiguous data center space and infrastructure. The only thing separating the two campuses will be two-lane Lucky Hill Road. This area would be 430 acres of heavy industrial development: roads, generator yards, and data center buildings.
This massive industrial-scale, utility-dependent project is incompatible with nearby homes, farms, parks, and rural roads, and approval of the Remington Digital Campus would contradict Fauquier County’s Comprehensive Plan, Zoning Ordinance and Data Center Policy. For these reasons, in PEC’s recent letter to the Fauquier County Planning Commission, we asked the commission to recommend denial of this application as it did in 2025.
2. Permanent loss of rural land that includes rare wildlife habitat and natural resources: Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank reported on the extremely rare and precious grassland environment on the Remington Digital Campus site. This type of grassland, which has been gradually disappearing from the landscape, pulls carbon from the atmosphere, promotes biodiversity, and provides habitat for rare plant, animal and insect species. Destruction of these fragile grasslands should be avoided, as once they are gone, these losses cannot be reversed.
3. Noise, light and air pollution: Constant noise from construction – beginning with excavation and continuing for several years while Gigaland builds the data center structures and electrical substations – will impact residents’ quality of life and sense of peace, which is one of the reasons many people move to Fauquier. In the long-term, residents will have to contend with regular generator and chiller noise. The structures will impact the viewshed, tarnishing the rural landscape, and data center light emissions (see above) will impact the dark-sky. The eventual use of fossil-fuel backup generators by both the Remington Digital Campus and Remington Tech Park will increase the cumulative emissions from the nearby natural gas peaker plants.
For more on emissions, read about our newly released study, which estimated the air pollution and public health impacts of Remington Tech Park’s originally-proposed 13 natural gas turbines (which it recently replaced with 488 fuel cells). When the utility can’t meet the overly ambitious in-service dates they’ve committed to, these are the “solutions” data center developers are increasingly falling back on. Read our blog post on the study →
4. Massive energy demand and grid uncertainty: The new Gigaland/Remington Digital Campus proposal would require 600 megawatts (MW) of power, the equivalent of 150,000 homes, or as much energy as the entire state of Vermont.Approving this project would put even more stress on an already strained electrical grid, and potentially require ever-increasing reliance on backup diesel generators, especially in the hotter summer months.
5. Impacts to cultural and historic resources: The project would permanently alter or destroy important natural and cultural resources, such as portions of the historic Rappahannock Station Battlefield. When considered in addition to the development across Lucky Hill Road, over 400 acres of significant and documented history will be lost forever.
The developers of Remington Digital Campus will not be the ones living with these consequences. Remington, Bealeton and Fauquier more broadly, will pay a devastating price for this project that will change the social, cultural and natural landscape forever.
We hope you will join us in voicing opposition to the Remington Digital Campus and not let this data center development proceed.
Please share this with anyone in Fauquier County who would be impacted and might like to weigh in.
Please send me an email if you have any questions. Thank you for staying engaged and I hope to see you at the hearing on July 16!
Sincerely,
Evelyn Eichorn
Senior Land Use Field Representative
Fauquier County
[email protected]
(540) 347-2334 x7046
