AWS Haymarket data center, Haymarket, Virginia

Amazon Web Services operates a data center campus on John Marshall Highway in Haymarket, Prince William County, Virginia, across from the Novant Health UVA Haymarket Medical Center near Interstate 66. One building was already operating by 2017, and a second was completed on adjacent land by 2018; no more recent count of buildings or expansions has been reported.

The campus set off one of the region's longest power line fights. Dominion Energy needed a six mile transmission line to serve it, first proposed as overhead wires along the Rural Crescent and estimated at $51 million; residents fought the plan for years over property values and the historic landscape.

"In our judgment, the root problem is the Haymarket location for the Amazon data center," state Del. Bob Marshall and Sen. Richard Black wrote to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in 2015. The fight ended in 2018 when Dominion agreed to bury three miles of the line, and the final project cost $221 million, more than four times the original overhead estimate, the Prince William Times reported.

Data center fights in Prince William County have grown since. Regional grid operator PJM is now weighing 14 new transmission proposals affecting the county, worth $16.7 billion combined, driven largely by data center demand. "It's very clear that the whole reason the grid needs to expand is the data center load," said Karen Sheehan of the Coalition to Protect Prince William County.