Data center land in Virginia

What the Virginia deals show

Virginia is where data center land stopped being priced like farmland. Our table holds 10 Virginia land deals from 2017 to 2026, and 9 of them closed. The closed sales that were land only — no buildings, no grid equipment in the price — have a median of $3,225,339 per acre. The cheapest of those was $903,000 an acre and the most expensive $6,000,000. For comparison, USDA’s 2026 survey put the average value of Virginia cropland at $6,400 per acre, which makes the median data center sale about 504× the farmland average.

Two things stand out in the list. The first is geography: every dated sale sits in just 2 counties, Loudoun and Prince William, plus one Northern Virginia purchase whose site was not named. None of the rows is outside Northern Virginia. That is not because the rest of the state has no data center demand, but because no other Virginia sale has yet been reported with both a price and an acreage we could check. If you own land elsewhere in the state, these prices are a ceiling, not a benchmark.

The second is the size of the parcels. The median Virginia deal is just 51 acres, and the largest is 424. Elsewhere in the country, campus buyers take hundreds or thousands of acres of open land. In Northern Virginia the land is already zoned, fibered and close to substations, so buyers pay for small, entitled infill sites and build several storeys up.

How fast the price moved

Read the table by date and the market’s last decade is visible in a few rows. The oldest sale in our Virginia set, from 2017, was an Ashburn parcel at the bottom of the range. Gainesville land sold to Amazon Web Services a few years later still sat at the low end. By the end of the run, buyers were paying several times as much in the same corridor, and the Twin Creeks sale in Leesburg set the record in our table at $6,000,000 an acre. The rise was not driven by the soil. It came from the scarcity of parcels that already have three things at once: zoning that allows data centers, an approved path to a large power connection, and a county willing to process the site plan quickly.

That combination is exactly what the counties are now changing, which is why the most recent rows matter more than the median.

The rules changed in 2025 and 2026

Our restrictions table lists 5 Virginia measures, 4 of them still in force. Read together, they show the counties that built the market pulling back from it:

• Dominion Energy paused new data center connections in eastern Loudoun in 2022 while it built transmission. That pause has since been lifted, but it was the first sign that power, not land, would set the pace.
• Fairfax County adopted stricter data center zoning standards in 2024.
• Loudoun County removed by-right data center development in 2025, so every new data center needs a special exception with public hearings.
• Prince William County ended by-right data center development countywide in 2026.
• Loudoun voted in 2026 to pause new data center applications for twelve months.

For a landowner, the effect cuts two ways. Land that already holds an approved data center use, or sits in a project that was approved before the changes, has become scarcer and therefore more valuable: a buyer can no longer count on turning the farm next door into a competing site by right. Land that does not yet have approval now faces a longer and less certain path, and buyers will discount it for the time and the risk. An option or contract on such land should say clearly who pays for the rezoning work and what happens if the county says no — terms to settle with your own attorney before you sign.

What the state offers buyers

Virginia’s incentive is a sales and use tax exemption on data center equipment, and our incentives table shows 1 active program. It applies to the operator’s computers, software, chillers and generators, not to the land, and it comes with investment and job thresholds that are lower in distressed localities. That detail matters for owners outside Northern Virginia: the lower threshold in distressed localities is one of the few state-level levers that can pull a project toward the south and west of the state, where land is far cheaper and the transmission grid still has room in places.

What this means if you own land in Virginia

If your land is in Loudoun or Prince William, the table is directly relevant, but the question is no longer only power. It is whether your parcel can still get a data center approval under the new rules, and how long that will take. If your land is elsewhere in Virginia, the Northern Virginia prices will not transfer, yet the same forces that pushed buyers out of Ashburn are pushing them to look for powered sites in new counties. In both cases, start with three checks: the distance to a high-voltage line and a substation with spare capacity, your county’s current position on data centers, and whether the parcel is large and regular enough for a campus. Send us the county and the acreage and we will look at all three.