Research Shelf · RichmondThe Richmond Resource Library
White Oak Technology Park: How a Closed Chip Fab Became Richmond's Data Center Corridor
There is a stretch of eastern Henrico County, out where I-295 crosses I-64 in Sandston, that has now absorbed two entirely separate waves of large scale technical construction thirty years apart. The park is called White Oak Technology Park, it covers roughly 2,270 acres, and it sits minutes from Richmond International Airport. Understanding what happened there explains more about why crews keep needing delivered break space in this corridor than any market forecast could.
The first wave was semiconductors. White Oak Semiconductor opened inside the park in 1998, later became Qimonda, and at its peak employed roughly 1,500 workers. Greater Richmond Partnership notes it was the single largest employer of graduates from Virginia Commonwealth University's College of Engineering. In February 2009 the fab closed, leaving more than 1.3 million square feet of building standing empty on about 210 acres of prepared industrial ground.
The second wave started with a bankruptcy auction. In April 2010 an affiliate named Richmond Semiconductor LLC, tied to the data center company QTS, bought the property for 12 million dollars. Texas Instruments purchased most of the production equipment separately. QTS then converted the fab shell into a data center campus, which worked for a reason that is obvious in hindsight: a memory fab already had the electrical service, the water and sewer capacity, the floor loading, and the clean column free bays that a data hall wants.
Fifteen years later that decision looks considerably larger than it did at the time. Henrico County's own planning staff analysis, dated May 1, 2025, counts 37 data centers of varying sizes across the county, with the largest facilities, QTS's and Meta's, inside White Oak at the I-295 and I-64 interchange. Meta's Phase 1 there was approved for 1,000,000 square feet of floor area. Of roughly 2,700 acres in data center use countywide, about 2,300 sit in this single park. The county attributes the underlying draw to four undersea cables reaching Virginia, alongside water and sewer capacity, electrical capacity, and transportation access.
Then came May 2026. QTS filed to add 17 new data center buildings across two campuses, RIC4 and RIC5, totalling nearly 8 million square feet on roughly 1,100 acres, on top of the more than 3 million square feet already built at White Oak across roughly 16 facilities. No construction start or completion timeline had been released at the time of that reporting, and these remain filings rather than schedules.
For anyone who has to put a workforce on that ground, the operational reality is well documented by the Commonwealth's own audit agency. JLARC's December 2024 report on data centers in Virginia, quoting data center representatives directly, found that construction of an individual building usually takes about 12 to 18 months, and that at the height of construction roughly 1,500 workers are on site from various construction related industries. A full campus can take five or more years. The finished building, by contrast, runs about 50 full time workers for a typical 250,000 square foot facility.
That gap between construction headcount and operating headcount is the entire reason temporary crew infrastructure exists in this corridor. Fifteen hundred people arrive on a pad that had nothing on it eighteen months earlier, work through two summers and a winter, and leave. Meanwhile the building's own break room and restrooms sit near the back of the finish schedule, because server halls have to be conditioned inside a tight temperature and humidity band before racks go in, which pushes HVAC commissioning ahead of the largest phase of interior work. A delivered, already conditioned trailer removes that dependency completely.
Sources: Henrico County Planning Department, Staff Analysis: Data Center Regulation, May 2025
Virginia's Heat Illness Law, Chapter 731: What It Says and What Comes Next
Virginia now has a heat illness statute in the Code, and it is worth reading carefully rather than through a headline, because the statute and the regulation it calls for are two different things arriving at two different times.
The 2026 General Assembly enacted HB 1092, which became Chapter 731 of the 2026 Acts of Assembly, approved April 13, 2026. It adds section 40.1-44.2 to the Code of Virginia under the heading Standards for heat illness prevention. The statute directs the Safety and Health Codes Board to adopt standards requiring employers to provide water, access to shade or climate controlled environments when practicable, rest periods, acclimatization to working in heat, and effective training regarding heat illness prevention. It further requires employers to implement heat and high heat procedures when temperatures equal or exceed thresholds the Board sets, and to establish effective emergency response procedures.
The statute carries two exemptions worth knowing. Emergency services work is excluded, specifically law enforcement, emergency medical services, firefighting, rescue and evacuation, emergency highway work, and emergency utility restoration. So is heat exposure lasting no longer than 15 consecutive minutes.
The deadline is the detail most likely to be reported wrong, so here it is verbatim from the enacted text: no later than May 1, 2028, the Board, in consultation with the Department of Labor and Industry, shall develop and adopt regulations that require employers to implement heat illness prevention plans pursuant to section 40.1-44.2. Earlier introduced versions of the bill carried a May 1, 2027 date, and secondary write ups still repeat it. The enacted chapter says 2028.
Enforcement in Virginia runs through the Commonwealth's own approved OSHA State Plan, VOSH, which covers most private sector workers along with all state and local government workers. That is a meaningful distinction from a neighboring state operating under federal OSHA directly, because a State Plan is required to be at least as effective as the federal program and can go further.
The single most useful phrase in the whole statute, for anyone deciding what to put on a job site, is the one naming access to shade or climate controlled environments when practicable. That language was written by the General Assembly, not by an equipment vendor. Virginia's own Code contemplates a conditioned space on the work site as a control an employer should be considering, and a delivered, air conditioned crew room is a direct and literal answer to it.
None of that makes a trailer a compliance certificate, and no honest supplier should claim otherwise while the regulation is still unwritten. What it does mean is that the direction of travel is settled, the deadline is fixed, and contractors who put conditioned break space on their sites now will not be scrambling to source it in the spring of 2028 alongside everyone else who waited.
The full enacted chapter text is public and short enough to read in a sitting.
Sources: Virginia Acts of Assembly 2026, Chapter 731, enacted text of HB 1092
Why a Normal Richmond July Afternoon Already Reads 92 Degrees
There is a difference between the temperature a thermometer reads on a Richmond job site and the temperature a crew's body has to deal with, and in Central Virginia that difference is roughly four degrees every July afternoon. It is also the exact metric the federal proposed heat rule is written around, which makes it worth understanding precisely rather than approximately.
NOAA's 1991 to 2020 United States Climate Normals for Richmond International Airport, station USW00013740, put the July 15 afternoon air temperature at 88.1 degrees and the heat index at that same hour at 92.0 degrees. Those are normals, not records. They describe an ordinary Tuesday in the middle of July, averaged across three decades. The gap between the two numbers is humidity, and the peak July dew point at this station is 69.0 degrees.
The comparison that matters most is a regional one. The Washington Dulles station, which covers Northern Virginia's data center corridor, reads 86.2 degrees air temperature and an 89.1 degree heat index at the same hour. Atlanta comes in at 87.4 and 90.7. Richmond is warmer on the felt scale than either, and it is the difference between clearing the federal proposed rule's 90 degree high heat trigger on an average afternoon and not quite reaching it.
Frequency backs up the single afternoon. Richmond averages 42.0 days a year at or above 90 degrees against 30.3 at Dulles, with 15.9 of them falling in July alone and roughly 1.3 days a year clearing 100. The July average high sits at 89.7 degrees.
What the proposed federal rule actually says about all of this is more specific than most summaries suggest. Published in the Federal Register, and still proposed rather than final, it sets an 80 degree heat index initial trigger and a 90 degree high heat trigger. On break areas its language is direct: the area must have artificial or natural shade, or be an air conditioned space, and it names trailers, vehicles, and structures as qualifying examples. For mobile work sites, the employer would be expected to relocate the break area as needed. The rule's own baseline assumption for an employer with no dedicated break area at all is a 12 by 12 tent.
That tent comparison is worth sitting with, because it reveals what the rule is really measuring. Shade lowers the radiant load on a worker. It does not lower the heat index, and it does nothing at all about dew point. On a 92 degree heat index afternoon in Sandston or Chester, a canopy keeps the sun off and leaves the air exactly as it was. A conditioned space is a different category of intervention, which is why the proposed text names air conditioning separately rather than treating shade as sufficient.
The other half of the Richmond year is easy to overlook on a page about heat, and it changes the economics of the equipment. Richmond averages 73.5 nights a year at or below freezing, against Atlanta's 36.3. That is roughly double, and it means concrete pours, steel erection, and outdoor mechanical work in this region run through genuine cold. A crew room that only cools would sit idle from December through February. One that carries heat mode plus backup electric heaters works both ends of the calendar.
Sources: OSHA's proposed heat injury and illness prevention rule, Federal Register
Chesterfield's Build Decade: A Toy Factory, a Power Station, and a Pad Waiting on a Chip Plant
If Henrico County's construction story is data centers, Chesterfield County's is more varied and, for anyone running crews, arguably more interesting. Three projects on very different timelines are reshaping the industrial ground south of the James, and each one produces a different shape of temporary workforce.
The largest is the LEGO Group's first United States manufacturing facility in Meadowville Technology Park in Chester: more than 1 billion dollars, 1.7 million square feet, and more than 1,760 planned jobs, making it the company's seventh plant worldwide and its second in the Americas. Crews topped out the main production building's frame on October 1, 2025, and production is on track for 2027, with a regional distribution center in Virginia planned for the same year.
One design decision on that project matters more to crew logistics than it might appear: the plant is being built carbon neutral, powered by an on site solar park. Renewable generation and a highly automated production line both mean a long commissioning tail after the shell closes in, with mechanical, electrical, controls, and original equipment manufacturer vendor teams working on top of each other for months. Vendor commissioning crews in particular fly in for weeks at a stretch and need somewhere to sit, eat, and write up reports without walking into a live production area.
The second is Dominion Energy's Chesterfield Energy Reliability Center, a 1.47 billion dollar, 944 megawatt gas peaking station going in beside the existing Chesterfield Power Station near Dutch Gap on the footprint of a former coal plant. The State Corporation Commission approved it in November 2025, construction was slated to start in 2026, and commercial operation is planned for 2029. The station is expected to run roughly a third of the year, covering the hottest and coldest stretches, and needs no new pipeline or transmission infrastructure.
A generating station is close to the purest case for delivered crew space that exists. The site is fenced, there is no occupied building anywhere on it, the craft workforce is heavily mechanical and electrical, and the schedule runs for years rather than months. Whatever the crew needs has to be brought in and kept there.
The third is still prospective, and it connects Chesterfield to the same industry that built Henrico's corridor. Upper Magnolia Green Technology Park holds 1,000 acres, and a 25 million dollar grant has funded a pad site aimed at bringing semiconductor manufacturing back to the Richmond region. Nothing has been announced for that pad. But the supporting structure is being built out around it: the Virginia Alliance for Semiconductor Technology brings Virginia Commonwealth University together with four other universities plus community college partners to build a workforce pipeline, and an 8,000 square foot Virginia Microelectronics Center operates on the VCU campus. The federal CHIPS and Science Act put roughly 52 billion dollars behind domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing.
Add the healthcare layer and the picture fills in. In March 2026 the Commonwealth approved 672 million dollars of competing Chesterfield hospital projects from VCU, HCA, and Bon Secours. Hospital construction has its own constraint that industrial work does not: the campus stays open, so the trade workforce cannot borrow a cafeteria or a conference room, and every support function has to live on the construction side of the fence.
Between a toy factory, a power station, a semiconductor pad, and three hospitals, Chesterfield is producing a steady sequence of large fenced job sites with no borrowed interior space available on any of them. The county's own updates on the LEGO build are a good running record of how that first one is progressing.
Sources: Chesterfield County: LEGO marks a construction milestone at its Chesterfield facility
