A new 20MW data center is being proposed in the heart of Ashburn, Virginia.
Daniel Golding, CTO of Appleby Strategy Group, this week announced plans for a new data center at the Quantum Park in Loudoun County.
"A 20MW data center in the heart of Ashburn (1 mile from Beaumeade Circle), designed especially for regional network hubs, SuperPOPs, Edge cache, inference deployments," he said on LinkedIn. "On top of an incredible concentration of conduit. 1MW to 3MW suites. Five discrete POEs. Four redundant non-SPOF paths to WAN fiber."
Included in the post are specs and a site plan for the project, seemingly named Quantum Connect.
The data center's initial 13MW will be ready for service by Q4 2026, with another 7MW available by the first half of 2028. It will support rack densities up to 30kW.
The address is 22001 Loudoun County Parkway, located within the Quantum Park business park. The park is the former UUNet/MCI Worldcom site that was a key connectivity hub dating to the early days of the Internet; Verizon had an existing data center there for many years.
The planned facility is surrounded on all sides by data centers - including Aligned, Digital Realty, Equinix, and CloudHQ - with Sabey, DataBank, and NTT across the road. Many more providers operate facilities in the vicinity.
Golding continued: "I designed this myself - flexible fit-out - PDUs, CRAHs, busway, hot aisle containment, slab floors - we are going for the state-of-the-art for hyperscale, and superscale network hubs, not to mention AI/ML CSP network concentration. Why? There is a huge need in this geographical area - there is great smaller-scale retail colocation and there are awesome full-building leases, but in between?"
Golding is a veteran of the data center industry and has a long association with Northern Virginia. He previously held roles at AOL, RagingWire (now NTT), Iron Mountain, and Google. He joined Appleby late last year after nine years at Google.
Last week Golding hinted at a "very special data center in the middle of Ashburn" that would cater to customers "too big for retail colocation and too small for full building leases."
"My aim was to design the perfect POP environment for the era of AI and cloud," he said.
The project is being developed in partnership with AREP-owned PowerHouse Data Centers.
AREP acquired what is now known as Quantum Park in 2016 for a reported $212 million alongside hedge fund Davidson Kempner Capital Management from Verizon.
DigitalBridge-backed Landmark Dividend acquired a portfolio of assets in the Quantum Park campus in 2021.
