Alphabet’s Google is investing an additional $9 billion in Virginia through 2026 to enhance cloud and AI infrastructure across the state, marking the latest in a series of big tech investments in US data centers.
The money will go toward building a new data center in Chesterfield County and expanding existing campuses in Loudoun and Prince William counties, the company said Wednesday in a blog post.
A slew of major technology companies are rushing to build data centres in the US, citing a need to sustain the massive AI boom. They’re also showing that they are making investments domestically amid President Donald Trump’s nationalist policies to propel the US to the forefront of the global AI race.
Google’s commitment to expanding AI infrastructure follows similar commitments from other technology companies, with Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com, Alphabet, and Meta Platforms, expected to spend hundreds of billions this year altogether, much of it on AI-related expenditures. Google raised its annual capital expenditures guidance by $10 billion to $85 billion in its last quarterly earnings report.
It can take as many as seven years to power up a new data centre in Virginia, which is home to many of them. The company has not committed to a timeline for its Chesterfield data centre to be operational, a spokesperson said in an email, adding that data centre projects typically take 18 to 24 months to complete. Dominion Energy will be its power partner.
Google framed its decision as an investment in Virginia. It is also working with local partners in the state on solutions for growing energy capacity demand, including efficiency programs and innovation. The company also committed $1 billion on August 6 to enable all Virginia-based college students to have access to the Google AI Pro plan and AI training for a year, free of cost.
Meta’s data center expansion in rural Louisiana is going to cost around $50 billion, according to Trump, and JPMorgan Chase & Co and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group are leading a loan of more than $22 billion to support Vantage Data Centers’ plan to build a massive data-center campus.
The data centres in the US have largely been concentrated in northern Virginia, nicknamed “Data Centre Alley,” since the initial cloud buildout in the early 2000s. Loudoun County, the wealthiest county in the US and home to two of Google’s data centres, is at the centre of the current boom.
