CyrusOne Shaw Road data center, Sterling, Virginia

CyrusOne operates a data center at 511 Shaw Road in Sterling, Loudoun County, Virginia, one of several CyrusOne campuses clustered in the town. The company opened its first Loudoun County data center in 2015, and by early 2023 said it operated 10 data centers at five campus locations in the county. It was bought in 2022 by the investment firms KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners in a $15 billion deal.

Loudoun County has more data centers than anywhere else in the country, a concentration that has drawn scrutiny over water use, noise and power lines. In 2000 the county's zoning administrator ruled that data centers would be treated like office buildings, letting them go up by right in office parks near homes, one reason sites like this one sit inside Sterling neighborhoods. Residents have since raised concerns about water use, noise, air quality, land values and power lines across the county.

Loudoun now has about 233 data center buildings built or under construction, and data centers produced $1.2 billion in property taxes in fiscal 2026, 39% of the county's budget. In March 2025 the Board of Supervisors voted 7-2 to end by-right data center development, so new data centers now need a special exception with public hearings before the Planning Commission and the board.

Applications filed before February 12, 2025 for sites more than 500 feet from homes were allowed to continue under the old rules. The county expects to finish its Data Center Standards and Locations project, which will set further rules for where new data centers can go, in spring or summer 2027.