Data centers have been a major topic of discussion in 2025, and for good reason. This summer, the conversation hit Delaware in a big way.
As the reality of AI energy consumption ramps up, it has become clear that there are more massive data centers coming.
In Delaware, the largest proposed data center project is called Project Washington, a massive 6.1 million-square-foot project that would cover undeveloped lots of land on the edge of New Castle and Delaware City with a dozen data centers, to be owned by Miami-based Starwood Digital Holdings, the global data center investment strategy of Starwood Capital.
These won’t be the first data centers in Delaware. According to the Data Center Map, there are five existing data centers for businesses in the state, not counting the proposed Project Washington sites.
Community members and civil servants have largely pushed back against the project as proposed, which would plug into the Delmarva Power grid, consuming more energy than all of the state’s residents combined (and almost definitely raising electric bills in the state). Whether the project in one form or another becomes a reality remains to be seen, but even if it doesn’t, large-scale data centers are coming to many communities across the country.
Keep scrolling for photos of data centers in Delaware and to see what the site of Project Washington looks like.
What is a data center?
Back in the 1960s, when computers were primarily used at universities and government agencies, they were so large that they need entire rooms to house them.
Computers themselves became smaller over the decades, but servers and storage still needed space — sometimes entire floors of office buildings. The dot-com boom and internet explosion of the 1990s led to larger, off-site data centers to support web hosting and e-commerce. In the 2000s, cloud computing led to warehouse-sized data centers, and eventually, “hyperscale” data centers approaching millions of square feet in the 2010s. Many of these centers are located in Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley.
Now, with the rise in AI, data centers are getting even bigger and are becoming more geographically spread out — so, while they are nothing new, they are raising new concerns as well as hope for the potential for economic development.
First, the good: Data centers mean jobs, both in construction and in the running of the completed centers. Not as many as, say, an auto plant or one of the potentially doomed semiconductor fabs that were planned under the Chips and Science Act, but they do mean new jobs.
On the flip side, the energy that massive data centers need to keep up with the new level of resources needed to run tech in the early AI era has potential environmental consequences, especially if they run on fossil fuels.
In Memphis, Elon Musk’s Grok data center runs on 35 methane turbines that neighbors say has made it hard to breathe the air in their own homes. At the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in July, President Donald Trump suggested that recently announced data centers funded by billions in private investments might be fueled by coal.
There are cleaner, more sustainable options for powering data centers, including nuclear — an energy source that has never had a good reputation in the US, but can handle powering large data centers. The Delaware state legislature passed a bill establishing a Nuclear Power Feasibility Task Force to explore the use of small modular reactors, which is currently seeking members.
What does a data center look like?
In Delaware, many of the existing data centers live within buildings and warehouses around New Castle County, in industrial parks, suburban corporate developments and city blocks.
There are three basic kinds of data centers:
- Enterprise data centers, which are privately owned by companies and usually live on their property;
- Colocation data centers, also known as multi-tenant data centers, are used by multiple organizations to house their hardware, servers and supporting infrastructure in an off-site location;
- Hyperscale data centers, also known as cloud data centers, are large centralized facilities that are operated by a single company to support cloud service providers and large internet companies.
Enterprise and hyperscale data centers do not appear on the Data Center Map.
Project Washington, though it is planned to be the size of a hyperscale data center, would be a colocation data center serving many different companies.
Here’s what Delaware’s colocation data centers look like.
Located inside the tallest building in Wilmington, less than a block from the Corporation Trust Center in downtown Wilmington, it was launched in 2010 by IPR Secure as a “data center of the future.” DaSTOR acquired IPR in 2021.
Trijit Web Services colocation servers are equipped with space and bandwidth for rental to retail customers.
Opened by Level 3, acquired by CenturyLink in 2016. CenturyLink rebranded as Lumen in 2020.
DaSTOR’s New Castle data center.
Hosting.com data center was acquired by Ntirety in 2009; Data Canopy acquired Ntirety’s colocation data center business in 2023.
What Project Washington looks like
Representatives of Starwood Digital Ventures appeared at a town hall in July, where they said that the centers would bring about 200 jobs to the area, and that it would rely on the existing grid for power.
Starwood Capital acknowledged Technical.ly’s request for comment, but did not provide a statement about why it chose Delaware for Project Washington.
A look at the area on Google Earth shows a large green undeveloped area near the Delaware City Oil Refinery. It’s a lot of land that appears unused and close to industrial sites that are fairly removed (though not far) from residential areas.
Here’s what the area looks like on the ground.
Not much to see yet, but this patch of land could be in for a long fight. Stay tuned.
