Fairfax County publishes a public record of every building permit it issues, and on August 28 the record for 2850 Towerview Road in Herndon changed to Issued. The project name on the permit reads Renaissance Tech Park Building F. That one line clears the way for another data center building on Herndon’s west side, in the industrial pocket east of Route 28 between McLearen Road and Frying Pan Road, and it lands in the same corner of the county where thousands of families just started the school year.
The permit and the parcel
Building F belongs to a two-building expansion that FFXnow first reported last December. An affiliate of Starwood Capital Group paid $25 million in June 2023 for the former Word of Grace Christian Church property at 13832 Redskin Drive, a parcel of nearly 30 acres wrapped by the larger data center campus already under construction. Starwood’s plans for the church site call for two mid-rise buildings: Building E, a 60-megawatt facility of roughly 406,000 square feet, and Building F, a smaller 32-megawatt facility. A county planner reviewing the site’s air permit application called the location suitable and fully consistent with local ordinances. The permit issued on August 28 moves Building F from paperwork toward construction.
The campus around it
Renaissance Technology Park covers roughly 60 acres of the old warehouse district along Park Center Road and Towerview Road. Starwood bought the warehouse property in 2019 for $134.1 million, started demolition in 2021, and won county approval in July 2022 for about 2.1 million square feet of data centers in four buildings, plus a six-acre electrical substation. Amazon will run the first buildings, according to permit filings FFXnow reported in 2024, and Data Center Map lists the first two facilities at 13860 and 13876 Redskin Drive as part of the US East region that anchors Amazon’s cloud business. Redskin Drive keeps the name of the old team practice facility that sat next door, on land Starwood has also acquired. Add the church-site expansion and the corridor between Route 28 and Frying Pan Road is becoming one continuous data center campus.
Two schools at McLearen and Route 28
The southern edge of this cluster sits close to the spot where McLearen Road meets Route 28. Just east of that junction, Skyview High School opened this fall at 2949 Education Drive, on the former King Abdullah Academy campus. It is the county’s first new high school in nearly two decades, starting with ninth and tenth graders. Rachel Carson Middle School serves the same area from its campus on McLearen Road. FFXnow noted in December that the Building E and F site sits less than a mile from the Skyview campus and that Fairfax County Public Schools is monitoring the project. County rules require data centers to keep a 200-foot setback from residential property lines. No equivalent setback applies to schools.
The power fight arriving at the same time
FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid told NBC4 that ten schools lost power the night before classes began, that the district logged 16 power incidents in the first week of school, and that it has counted more than 1,400 interruptions since July. She attributed the pattern to rising demand on the regional grid, likely made worse by data centers. Dominion Energy disputes that, saying it has no record of ten schools losing power that night and has established no connection between the outages and large-load customers. The schools on the outage list sit mostly in the southern part of the county, far from the Route 28 cluster, which cuts both ways: proximity to a data center does not predict outages, and distance does not prevent them.
The countywide politics sharpened the same week the county issued this permit. On August 27, the Fairfax County Federation of Citizens Associations voted to oppose Plaza 500, a proposed data center campus and Dominion substation in Lincolnia that would sit 67 feet from the nearest home. The developer there is Starwood Capital Group, the same firm building Renaissance Tech Park. The Herndon campus followed a quieter path because it replaces warehouses on land the county has long planned for industry. The Planning Commission takes up the Plaza 500 substation on December 2, and the outcome will shape how the county handles every application after it.
What we tell buyers near the Route 28 corridor
Buyers we tour through Oak Hill, Floris, and western Herndon ask three questions about the data center cluster: how loud it will be, what they will see from the yard, and whether the power will hold. Geography answers more of that than the headlines do. The campus sits on industrial land west of most neighborhoods, and Frying Pan Road, the Horsepen Run stream valley, and Frying Pan Farm Park buffer much of the housing east of Centreville Road. Power reliability is a regional grid question rather than a next-door question, as the county’s own outage list shows. Viewsheds are parcel-specific: a home backing to Copper Creek Road experiences this campus differently than one in Bradley Farm.
We track these filings weekly, and before our clients write an offer near the corridor, we pull what has been approved, what has been permitted, and what is still on paper for the surrounding parcels. If you own near Route 28 or you are considering a purchase in western Herndon or Oak Hill, reach out, and we will walk you through exactly what is planned near any address you are weighing.
