Virginia
Start by having somebody check the electrical picture around your property before you talk price with anyone. In Virginia that means finding out whether you sit in Dominion Energy Virginia territory, Appalachian Power territory, or one of the thirteen cooperatives, and what transmission runs near you. Send us the county, a rough acreage, and anything you have noticed nearby such as a substation or a line of steel towers. We check it against public records at no cost and come back either way. If it does not fit we say so, and you have lost an afternoon rather than a year.
Everybody asks this first and it deserves a direct response rather than a deflection. We are not going to publish a per acre number for Virginia, because a figure quoted before anyone has looked at your particular ground is not a real figure, and repeating it would only mislead you. What we can do is explain honestly what moves it, so that when a number does appear you can tell whether it makes any sense.
Two hundred acres a mile from a substation with room to grow and two hundred acres fifteen miles from anything are not the same asset, whatever the deed or the tax assessment says about them. The distance to real electrical capacity, and whether that capacity has headroom, moves the number further than any other single thing.
Ground that holds together as a single contiguous parcel is worth more than the same acreage divided by a road, a creek, or an inholding somebody else owns. Assembling pieces afterwards is slow, uncertain, and priced accordingly.
A locality that has been through this before, has a settled position, and knows how it handles the zoning is a different proposition to one that has never considered it. That difference shows up as time, and time shows up in what a project can pay.
Some Virginia landowners take a payment for a period of exclusivity while a project works out whether it can build, and keep farming throughout. Others sell outright. These carry different money, different risk, and different tax treatment, and which suits you depends on things about your family rather than about your land.
An option period commonly runs a year or more, and in nearly every case the ground carries on being farmed or hayed exactly as before. Surveyors and soil crews turn up occasionally, and they work around you rather than the other way round.
A campus of this kind is large low buildings, a substation, and a great deal of fencing and lighting. It is an industrial site and we are not going to describe it as anything else. It is quieter than a highway and considerably busier than a hayfield.
Newer designs use far less water than the ones that gave this industry its reputation, and cooling approach is one of the first things worth asking a developer about. It is a fair question, and anybody unwilling to answer it plainly is telling you something.
In Southside Virginia this has been an open and sometimes uncomfortable local conversation, with real opposition alongside real support. If you go forward, you become part of that. Better to know it going in than to be surprised at a county meeting.
Virginia assigns exclusive service territories through the State Corporation Commission, so your address determines your provider rather than you choosing one. It keeps coming up because the utility decides what capacity exists near your ground and how quickly more can be brought to it, which is the single biggest factor in whether a project is possible. Your electric bill names your provider, and telling us which it is saves a step.
Yes, and more so than it would have been five years ago. Assembly has moved into Southside and along the southern border precisely because those counties have land and grid access the northern corridor no longer has spare. Distance from Loudoun is not the disqualifier people assume it is.
There is no single number, and anybody who gives you one without seeing your ground is guessing. What matters more is whether the acreage holds together as one block and what sits near it electrically. Smaller properties near real capacity are often more interesting than larger ones that are not.
Do not sign anything yet, and do not feel rushed by a deadline printed in the letter. Find out who they are and whether they are buying for themselves or on behalf of somebody unnamed. Have an attorney read whatever they sent before you agree to it. That advice holds whether the letter came from us or from anyone else.
Both exist. An option pays you for a period of exclusivity while a project works out whether it can build, and you generally keep farming through it. A purchase is a purchase. They carry different money, different certainty, and different tax consequences, and the right one depends on your circumstances rather than on your acreage.
Directly, nothing. It applies to equipment a data center operator buys, not to anything you own or sell. It matters indirectly, because it is a substantial part of why developers want Virginia sites, and because its investment and job thresholds push projects towards larger properties in certain localities.
That depends on what is being looked at and how your place is laid out. Plenty of arrangements involve part of a property while the rest carries on as it was. It is a fair thing to raise early rather than late, and we would rather hear it in the first conversation than the fifth.
Service territory in Virginia is assigned rather than chosen, with the State Corporation Commission holding the boundaries, so your address decides your provider. It matters because the utility determines what capacity exists near you and how quickly more can be brought. Dominion Energy Virginia covers roughly two thirds of the Commonwealth across central and eastern Virginia, Appalachian Power covers the west, and thirteen cooperatives serve a great deal of the rural ground in between. If you do not know which one you are in, your electric bill says so, and it is worth telling us.
Virginia exempts qualifying data center equipment from retail sales and use tax, and that exemption shapes where these projects go. It covers servers, networking equipment, enabling software, and the chillers and backup generators that run them. To qualify, a data center must represent new capital investment of at least 150 million dollars in the locality and create at least 50 new jobs paying at least one and a half times the local prevailing average wage. That job requirement falls to 25 in localities with higher unemployment or in an enterprise zone. Before claiming anything, the operator has to enter a memorandum of understanding with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership setting out the investment, the jobs, the timeline, and what has to be repaid if those are not met. The exemption is currently written to run until 30 June 2035. Virginia has also added an electricity consumption tax affecting these facilities, which is worth understanding alongside the exemption rather than separately. None of this is money that reaches you as a landowner. It matters because it is a large part of why a developer wants Virginia ground at all, and because those investment and job thresholds push projects towards larger sites in localities that qualify for the lower job count.
Programs change. Confirm anything that matters to your decision with your own advisor before acting on it.
The Southern Virginia Megasite at Berry Hill has drawn a multi decade campus proposal from a national developer working with Appalachian Power, approved by local leaders in 2026. Whatever anyone makes of it, it has changed how this part of the state is regarded, and interest has spread to surrounding ground rather than stopping at the megasite boundary.
Mecklenburg has hosted data centers for around fifteen years, starting with Microsoft, and now has roughly a dozen of them. It is the part of Southside with the longest experience of this, which shows in how the county handles it and in what its tax base looks like next to its neighbours.
Halifax, Charlotte, Lunenburg, and Brunswick sit between those two areas, share much of the same character, and have drawn far less attention so far. Ground here is worth checking rather than assuming, particularly where transmission crosses it.
Appalachian Power territory, with established transmission and a workforce already used to industrial employment. Terrain does more of the deciding here than elsewhere in the state, since a site needs a genuinely usable flat block rather than acreage on a map.
Land inside the corridor has been priced for this use for years and the grid there is heavily spoken for. Ground in the counties beyond it, still within reach of the same transmission network, is where a good deal of the current looking is happening.