How much do data centers pay for land?

The short answer

Across 26 closed US sales in our table, data center buyers paid a median of $372,509 per acre. Half of the deals fell between $163,975 and $977,915. The cheapest was $31,000 an acre for farmland near Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2019; the most expensive was $6,000,000 an acre in Loudoun County, Virginia, in November 2025. For scale, USDA put the average value of US cropland at $6,020 an acre in 2026.

That basis is deliberately narrow: closed sales only, in the US, verified on the source page, and land-only. It leaves out options and contracts that have not closed, sales that included buildings, a deal whose price included grid interconnection equipment, and one deal we could only see in a search snippet. Those rows are still in the table, labelled.

Every deal in the table

US deals come first, highest price per acre first, followed by the deals outside the US. "Computed" means we divided the reported price by the reported acreage; "reported" means the source stated the per-acre figure. Search or filter by state, country, status or year.

Download the table: CSV · JSON (CC BY 4.0 — cite Megawatt Acres and the row's source). 38 deals: 33 in the US, of which 29 closed, and 5 outside it. Dates are closing or recording dates where the source gives them, otherwise the month reported. The record or report behind each row is listed on the Sources page.

Outside the US. Non-US prices stay in their original currency; a US-dollar figure appears only where the source gave the conversion. The international rows are too few and too different to summarise as a range.

Where the money goes: by state

Grouping the 26 basis deals by state shows how much of the spread is geography. States with a single deal are shown for completeness but say little on their own.

Cropland averages: USDA NASS Land Values 2026 Summary. Deals span 2017–2026, so the farmland column is a reference point, not a like-for-like comparison.

Northern Virginia is in a league of its own: the 6 Virginia deals have a median of $3,225,339 an acre, and the four most expensive closed US sales in the table are all there. Excluding Virginia, the remaining 20 deals have a median of $282,071. Prices in Prince William County show how fast that market moved: AWS paid about $903,000 an acre in Gainesville in 2021, and the same source noted Digital Realty had paid $266,000 an acre for a similar parcel in 2018; by late 2025, buyers there were paying $3.7M–$4.2M an acre.

Arizona's Phoenix suburbs form a second tier, from industrial-zoned parcels near the city at roughly $0.9–1.3 million an acre to large raw tracts in Buckeye bought as long-term land banks well below $150,000. Central Ohio around New Albany sits at $290,000–$741,000. Rural sites bought by hyperscalers for whole campuses — Mount Pleasant in Wisconsin, St. Joseph County in Indiana, the Des Moines area, Monroe and Lamar counties in Georgia — mostly cluster between about $45,000 and $275,000 an acre.

Bigger parcels, lower price per acre

The smallest parcels in the table are the most expensive per acre, and the largest are the cheapest. That is not because acreage is worth less, but because small, expensive parcels tend to be infill sites inside established markets with power and fiber already there, while thousand-acre purchases are rural campuses where the buyer will build much of the infrastructure itself. The two Georgia deals show the gap within one region: Amazon paid about $274,142 an acre for 985 acres in Lamar County, while Google paid about $45,000 an acre for 948 acres in neighbouring Monroe County a few months later.

What drives the price

Power, above everything

Two comparisons published in October 2026 isolate the effect. In Northern Virginia, Avison Young puts entitled land without power at around $4 million an acre and powered land at $6 million or more; Altus Group found that sites tied to 230 kV or 500 kV lines traded at about 2.4 times sites served at 138 kV or lower. Further out, the gap is wider in relative terms. A JLL broker told Bisnow in January 2026 that land which went for $10,000–$30,000 an acre before the boom now sells for $200,000 to $1 million an acre once powered. In West Texas, bitcoin-mining sites converting to data centers have closed as low as $2,200 an acre — bare land before power was priced in.

Zoning and entitlements

Rezoning and site plans turn farmland into a buildable site, and the uplift lands on whoever holds the land when approval comes. The Twin Creeks site in Leesburg was assembled for about $57 million and sold roughly four years later for $615M; the Devlin Tech Park site in Bristow was assembled for about $51 million and sold to Amazon for $700 million. Counties that remove by-right development (see our restrictions list) make existing entitled land scarcer and new entitlements slower.

Fiber, interconnection points and an existing cluster

Proximity to an established data center cluster brings dense fiber, a trained workforce and a utility already used to large loads. It explains why Ashburn, Gainesville and New Albany command more than greenfield sites with similar power potential.

Scarcity and competition

About $3.3 billion of US land sales in Q1 2026 were earmarked for data centers, up 141% year on year, even as the number of sites sold fell from 20 to 16 (Avison Young via Bisnow). Data Center Knowledge reported about $6 billion of US data center land purchases in the first half of 2026.

Incentives

State sales-tax exemptions on equipment mostly benefit the operator rather than the seller, but they decide which states make the shortlist — and land in a shortlisted state is worth more. The site selection guide lists the programs by state.

Asking prices and offers are not closed prices

Headlines often quote the number a seller hopes for or the value of a conditional contract. Both can be far from what is eventually paid, if anything is paid at all. These asking prices were published while we compiled the table:

The 8 "not closed" rows in the deal table show the other gap. In Hill County, Texas, purchase contracts value more than 800 acres at roughly $100,000 an acre, which local reporting set against a county appraisal of about $7,100 — around 14 times. In Graham, Texas, a $50.0M agreement for about 66 acres works out to $757,576 an acre, but the price includes grid interconnection assets, which is precisely the point: what is being bought is the power position. Contracts like these are typically conditional on rezoning, utility studies and permits.

Why asking prices and closed deals diverge:

• Conditions. Options and contracts pay in full only if zoning, power and permits come through. Many do not.
• Power on paper vs power in a contract. A listing near a 345 kV line is not the same as a utility commitment to serve 300 MW by a date. Buyers pay for the second.
• Who does the work. A buyer that must fund studies, rezoning and a substation discounts the land for that cost and risk.
• Optimism. One listing in Goshen, Utah, marketed on nearby 345 kV lines and gas pipelines, had been on the market for about eleven months when we checked.

What this means if you own land

Your land's value to a data center developer depends on whether it can get power, not on what the farm next door sold for. The table shows the realistic span: rural campus land in the tens to low hundreds of thousands per acre, metro-edge sites with power and zoning in the high hundreds of thousands, and the extreme prices only in the tightest market in the world. Before you anchor on a number, find out three things: how far you are from transmission and a substation with headroom, what your county allows, and whether anyone has asked the utility about load near you. We do that check for free — send the land and we will tell you what we find.

Every figure on this page is traced to its document on our Sources page.