Red Ace data center campus (Keyser Road) Approved
69.19 acres of farmland at Nalles Mill and Keyser roads rezoned Rural to Light Industrial 4-3 on Jul 2, 2026 after being tabled in June: two four-story, 290,000 sq ft buildings (1.16M sq ft total) plus a substation, about $350M, completion not before 2028. Approved under the county's Sep 2025 rule that industrial-land data centers need a conditional use permit.
Key facts
- Operator
- Red Ace Capital Management
- Owner
- Red Ace Capital Management
- Size
- 69 ac
- Location
- Culpeper County, Virginia
- First proposed
- 2026-06-01
- Decided
- 2026-07-02
- Stage today
- Approved
Source
read 2026-09-05
What to do next
Next step: Approved — pivot from stopping it to a binding CBA: enforceable caps on noise, water and cost, plus a community benefit.
What has happened so far (2 events)
- 2026-06-01vote
In June the Board of Supervisors tabled the Red Ace rezoning. · source - 2026-07-02vote
Board of Supervisors approved the rezoning 4-3 (Deal, Durr, Gugino, Underwood for; Bates, Lee, Rosenberger against) for 69.19 acres from Rural to Light Industrial for a two-building, 1.16M sq ft campus with an electrical substation. · source
Find the paper trail
Find the paper trail (0 filed · 12 places to look)
State environmental permits
Backup generators, water withdrawal and stormwater are permitted by the state, usually earlier and in more detail than anything filed locally.
- Virginia DEQThe program page: which permits this state requires, and the office that issues them.
- Search Virginia DEQ for this projectsearchThis state publishes no searchable permit database, so a written records request to the agency is the reliable route. Use this search only to find the right office.
County & town filings
The rezoning application, site plan, traffic and noise studies, staff report and every revision.
- Board of Supervisors agendas & packetsThe meeting packet carries the staff report, site plan and conditions — verified page for this locality.
- Search Culpeper County planning filingssearchPlanning departments post application files under many different names. Find the department, then ask the clerk for the application number — that number unlocks everything else.
- Search Culpeper County property records / GISsearchThe parcel record names the buying LLC and the sale date, which is what ties an anonymous filing to an operator.
Utility & grid records
The electricity request is filed with the grid operator and the utility long before the town hears about it — and states the real load.
- PJM Interconnection (Mid-Atlantic, Ohio Valley) — interconnection queueRequested megawatts, queue position and target in-service date. The MW here is the real number; the one at the town meeting is often phase one.
- Virginia State Corporation Commission — docket searchSpecial contracts, large-load tariffs and rate cases are docketed here. Testimony and exhibits are public, and are usually more candid than the press release.
- FERC eLibraryFederal filings: transmission agreements, interconnection service agreements, and co-location disputes.
- Search the serving utility for a will-serve lettersearchThe will-serve or load-service letter is the utility's own written commitment. Ask the utility and the PUC for it by name — it is frequently the first document to exist.
Federal databases
Works anywhere, and covers the operator's record at its other sites.
- EPA ECHO facility searchEvery federally-reported air, water and waste permit at a facility, plus its inspection and violation history. Search by address or draw a radius around the site. This project's locality centres on 38.490, -77.970 — search that point with a 5-mile radius.
- EPA EnvirofactsThe same underlying records, queryable by county — useful for 'what else is permitted near this site' rather than one facility.
- EPA Facility Registry ServiceResolves the shell LLC on a permit to the facility it belongs to. Worth a look when the filing name means nothing locally.
These are places to look, not evidence that anything has been filed. Links were checked on 2026-08-21; search links are queries, not records. What to ask for.
Around here
- Culpeper County community briefing — Enactedno end date — permanent
- Virginia briefing — rates, grid carbon, PUC contacts.
Other tracked projects in Virginia
- Amazon Warrenton (Blackwell Road) — Warrenton (Fauquier County), 19 mi Approved
- PW Digital Gateway — Prince William County, 28 mi Withdrawn
- Dulles Cloud South — Prince William County, 28 mi Denied
- Google Bristow — Bristow (Prince William County), 29 mi
- STACK Infrastructure NVA02 — Manassas, 32 mi Under construction
Cite this page: GridWatch AI, “Red Ace data center campus (Keyser Road)”, aigridwatch.com/projects/red-ace-keyser-road-culpeper-va, retrieved 2026-10-11.
As of August 2026 (2m ago) · changes weekly — re-check before citing
A working set of identified proposals a community can track, not a census — most of the country's activity is not in here yet. Pennsylvania is the exception: its rows are synced from PA DEP's own data-center permit tracker, so the state's coverage is close to complete and carries the permit trail with it. **Each row carries its own provenance.** Rows showing a verification date link to reporting or the governing body's own record and were read on that date; rows marked *unverified* have no source on record — a lead to check, not a fact to cite. **Stage is derived, not asserted.** *Hearing scheduled*, *Awaiting decision*, *Approved* and *Withdrawn* are computed from each row's milestone dates on every rebuild, so a hearing date that has passed stops reading 'scheduled'. Hearings get moved and projects re-file under new names — treat a scheduled date as the earliest to act by, and confirm with the clerk before relying on it. Leads are mined into data/project_candidates.json and promoted here only after a human reads a primary source.
Part of the data center project tracker — open data, CC BY 4.0 (JSON · CSV).