Maple Tree Farm data center, Warrenton, Virginia

Maple Tree Farm, a 145-acre family farm on the southeastern edge of Warrenton, in Fauquier County, Virginia, is being marketed as a data center site; its owners have never filed an application to build one. In September 2026 the county Planning Commission recommended zoning changes that would limit new data centers to the Vint Hill area, which would leave the farm outside the only district open to them.

The farm belongs to the Dick and Leonard families and sits in a rough triangle bordered on the north by the Greenway extension and on the west by U.S. 15/29, the town's eastern bypass; once a dairy and cattle farm, it has lately hosted Christmas lights, a corn maze and a Halloween Haunted Hollow.

In early 2023 the families asked Warrenton to take the farm into town limits, putting it on town water and sewer, so they could seek industrial zoning and a special use permit for data centers; a conceptual plan showed six buildings and a substation on 60 acres, and the land was priced at $950,000 an acre. "We really have hardly any residents around, so we think it's a good location," said Bill Chipman, the broker marketing the property.

The Warrenton Town Council had already voted unanimously in January 2023 to rescind its own request to extend town limits, so the farm stayed outside town boundaries; it does not fall under the town's later ban on data centers. Julie Bolthouse of the Piedmont Environmental Council said "the proliferation of data centers around the town would be concerning."

In December 2023 the Board of Supervisors adopted a data center policy that both sides called the strictest in Northern Virginia, limiting buildings to 45 feet and barring data centers and their power lines along scenic byways; U.S. 15, which the farm sits just off, is a National Scenic Byway. Chipman walked out of the committee that drafted it, and in January 2024 said of the farm's chances: "We have just a glimmer of hope."

The zoning amendment the Planning Commission recommended in September 2026 would require every future data center to win a special exception from the Board of Supervisors, and would restrict new projects to the Vint Hill area; county staff told planners there are "no appropriate areas for data center development" elsewhere in the county.

Fauquier has two data centers running, an Amazon Web Services facility at the Warrenton Training Center and OVHcloud in Vint Hill, with several more proposed nearby, including CyrusOne's 870,000-square-foot campus in Vint Hill. The Board of Supervisors has not yet voted on the Planning Commission's recommendation; that vote is the next decision affecting whether the farm could ever be rezoned.