Menlo Equities MD-VA3 Data Center, Petersburg, Virginia

Menlo Digital, the data center arm of California real estate investor Menlo Equities, plans a four-building campus it calls MD-VA3 on 74 acres at 2255 Jamestown Drive in Petersburg, Virginia, offering 104 megawatts of power at full build-out, fed by a 300-megawatt substation built as part of the campus. Its site plan has not been approved: Petersburg's interim planning director, Jared Crews, said in July 2026 that comments on Menlo's latest submission went back to late April and an updated plan had not been resubmitted.

Menlo's conceptual plan shows four buildings totaling 1.2 million square feet, and the company markets the project as "Richmond Virginia Data Center." An earlier 2024 staff memo to the planning commission described a proposal for two buildings totaling more than 1 million square feet and a substation. The land was zoned for agriculture until city council rezoned it for an initial version of Menlo's project in 2023, and Menlo Digital did not respond to requests for comment.

After that rezoning, council changed the city's zoning code in 2024 to let data centers be built "by right," meaning without a council vote or public hearing, in its M-1 light industrial and M-2 heavy industrial districts. When Richmond BizSense reported four data center projects in the city's pipeline in July 2026, using records obtained under public records law, the mayor and several council members said it was news to them.

"I read about them in the news," Mayor Samuel Parham told Councilman Charlie Cuthbert at the council meeting. Ward 1 council member Marlow Jones, whose district includes the Menlo site, said he also only learned about the projects that day. "We talk about transparency, and yet it's like we're in a cave with the lights out," said Cuthbert, who represents Ward 4. "From the get-go, I have thought that no data center should be allowed without a special-use permit," he told BizSense.

Menlo's site is one of three data center campuses planned off U.S. Route 460 Business. Just south of it, NuVu Real Estate won the city's first data center site plan approval in February 2026 for a three-building, 75-acre, 300-megawatt campus estimated at $1.1 billion, and Wagner Properties' three-building, 73-acre project was approved in April. Warrenton Group's six-building, 175-acre campus went through council hearings, the only one of the three to do so.

Menlo's next step is to resubmit its site plan to the city's planning office; NuVu and Wagner won their site plans at staff level, with no council vote or public hearing. Cuthbert has called the by-right zoning change "one of the problems" behind council's lack of knowledge about the projects. Gov. Abigail Spanberger's office dismissed the idea of a statewide data center moratorium in an August 2026 interview with the Petersburg Progress-Index.