A national self-storage company wants to convert part of its James City County facility into a small data center to support faster artificial intelligence services.
The project is in an early stage of review and will require rezoning and a permit, but if approved, county staff believe it would be the first of its kind in the county.
Prime Storage submitted a conceptual plan for its facility in Norge early this month. Norge is one of hundreds of candidate sites Prime Storage’s parent company, New York-based private equity firm Prime Group Holdings, is looking to include in a “micro AI factory” network, according to a news release from April that was shared on its website. Prime Storage is collaborating with Microsoft and South Korean business conglomerate Hanwha Group. Edge Inference LLC, another Prime Group subsidiary, would operate the facility.
“By utilizing available power capacity and existing on-site infrastructure, Prime Group is well-positioned to support distributed solutions designed to meet the growing demands of AI-driven applications,” Tara Findlay, Prime’s marketing manager, wrote in an April release.
Data centers are a broad category, according to Peter Aiken. Aiken is a 34-year professor in the information systems department at Virginia Commonwealth University. He’s also associate director of the MIT International Society of Chief Data Officers and president of the Data Administration Management Association.
The term can refer to small data processing and storage facilities in offices and hospitals; they also can be the massive power-and-water-hungry warehouses that support cloud computing or AI tools that have popped up around the Commonwealth in recent years.
The center proposed in James City, however, is not nearly the size of many of the facilities driving public controversies. The developer characterizes the project as a 5-megawatt inference point, which Aiken said is a data center that executes already trained AI models on new data and requests from users, called inference.
Meta’s Henrico County center is a 187-megawatt facility, comparatively. Some campuses can exceed 1,000 megawatts.
The proposed facility in James City County "is almost nothing compared with everything that is happening right now in Virginia,” said João Ferreira, acting director of the Center for Economic and Policy Studies at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.
Prime states in the April release that these facilities are intended to make computing services for clients faster; that could also attract more high-tech firms to the area, according to Grady Palmer, an attorney representing the developer. Palmer wrote in an email that it could aid “robotic surgery, public safety drones, telecommunication networks, and autonomous vehicles and driver-assistance systems.”
“Similar to how telecommunications and broadband infrastructure bring connectivity closer to the community, an Inference Point brings digital intelligence closer to local users, businesses, and institutions,” Palmer said.
Aiken said there is a logic to that. If a company, such as Microsoft, sees a region uses a service more than others, it could make sense to store the computing power closer to reduce the distance data would have to flow. The diffuse nature of the network could also have less strain on the grid and, potentially, serve as an experimental model that’s a “logical next step in terms of how these things are rolled out.”
“If we could not go after big, big data centers, but instead put in a lightweight network of these things around, it might be better for everybody,” he said. “There’s a lot of wisdom in looking to see whether those approaches will work correctly.”
Gov. Abigail Spanberger on Friday unveiled a wide-range data center accountability framework that banned non-disclosure agreements between developers and communities and called on legislators to come up with standards for energy efficiency and water usage. It also directed Virginia Energy, the agency managing the state’s energy policies, to look at opportunities for supporting distributed development models and edge data centers such as Prime’s proposal.
The entirety of Prime’s network, according to Edge Inference’s website, could exceed 3,500 megawatts across 347 locations in 33 states if fully completed. It does not state a timeline for completion.
Aiken, however, said he would want to see more information on how the company will cool the facility’s data infrastructure as the project’s design is refined. Prime said it would employ a closed-loop cooling system and use no potable drinking water, as well as have no wastewater discharges.
Aiken said there isn’t a perfect cooling system and, whether potable or not, it will need to be replenished to some degree. The state is hinting at reducing groundwater withdrawals next year for localities, including James City County, because of impacts from climate change, saltwater contamination and increasing use from industry.
“I don’t care what type of water it is; we don’t want it taken out of the ground,” he said. “It’s just not a good idea to put it into that kind of usage when you have other people that are depending on it.”
Staff review of the conceptual plan for the project is scheduled for Oct. 21.
