When Prince William County approved three rezonings for the Prince William Digital Gateway complex of data centers, neighbors went to court.
When a developer proposed a data center complex near Chatham, it sparked six months of controversy before the Pittsylvania County Board of Supervisors voted down the project.
When Botetourt County announced Tuesday that Google — yes, that Google — has bought 312 acres in the county’s business park for what was described as the first hyperscale data center project in the western part of the state, a room full of people cheered.
The reasons for those differences are among many lessons to draw from the “Google to Greenfield” announcement (Greenfield being the name of the business park). Let’s look at what some of them are.
1. The Botetourt project is in a place that’s hard to object to
The Balico project in Pittsylvania involved a developer finding the land, which required rezoning, and rezonings, by their nature, are often going to be controversial. The Botetout project is in a business park and requires no rezoning. In this case, the controversy over developing the land was three decades ago when the Greenfield property was purchased (more on that to come). In November, Botetourt County did rezone Greenfield to specifically allow data centers — at that point supervisors knew that talks with Google were getting serious — but because it involved rezoning land inside a business park, it drew relatively little attention. While it’s always possible that people will object to Google someday building a data center in Greenfield, the deal has long since been done from a rezoning point of view — and it seems hard to imagine people objecting to the noise from a data center when it’s already next to an auto parts factory. The old real estate adage applies here: Location, location, location.
2. This is another big sign of how data centers are spreading out of Northern Virginia
Northern Virginia is home to more data centers than anywhere else in the world, and not everyone there is happy about that. For many localities in the southern part of the state, this has been a classic case of “the rich get richer,” as the technology sector concentrates in Northern Virginia and other parts of Virginia have been left wondering why they aren’t benefiting. That’s not changing as we see more data centers develop along the Interstate 95 corridor south to Richmond. There are certainly some in rural Virginia — Microsoft has a major complex in Mecklenburg County — but bringing the Google name to a county west of the Blue Ridge is a big deal.
3. The spread of data centers into rural Virginia may change the politics surrounding them
The growth of data centers in Virginia has been enabled by tax breaks. As data centers have become more controversial, we have heard more questions about whether we should be so generous with such tax breaks. In my capacity as a taxpayer in Botetourt County, that was an academic question for me before Tuesday and it was easy to ask why data centers were getting tax breaks while I’m not. Now I’ve heard the list of all the things in the county that Google’s land purchase will help pay for — three new fire trucks, three new ambulances, a community center, more recreational facilities, and more — and that statewide tax break seems a little more abstract and the immediate benefits more real. Other people may run their personal calculations differently (I suspect the people in Pittsylvania who opposed the data center project there feel quite differently indeed), but the point is, those political questions are now being spread around the state, too.
4. This project illustrates Virginia’s energy crisis
Virginia has an energy crisis that’s been brought on by data centers. Virginia already imports more power than any other state, partly because of energy-intensive data centers. A now famous report by the General Assembly’s investigative arm, the Joint Legislative and Audit Review Commission, warned that if data centers continue to grow without restraint the state’s demand for power will triple by 2040. The most recent General Assembly did little to restrain their growth. Meanwhile, virtually every energy project — no matter what the fuel source — is controversial because not many people want to live next to an energy site.
Hanover County has become the poster child for data center critics because it once approved a data center in the same meeting where it rejected a solar project. Maybe supervisors had good reasons for doing so, but it looked as if supervisors simply wanted the money (data center tax revenue) and didn’t care about the larger consequences (the need to generate more power to run that and other data centers). There’s a simple reason why that is: Local governments are responsible for generating tax revenue but they’re not responsible for energy policy. That’s somebody else’s problem.
On Tuesday, all that was announced in Botetourt was the land purchase, not the data center project itself, so there was no discussion of how much energy the complex will require or where that power will come from. But rest assured, it will need energy, so this project will drive up the state’s demand.
What was applauded Tuesday was a big economic development win for a rural county — and as a taxpayer in Botetourt, I’m delighted. What wasn’t discussed was what this will do for the state’s energy crisis.
5. This project illustrates how complicated the energy issue is
The all-Republican Botetourt County Board of Supervisors was thrilled by Google’s announcement. So were the county’s Republican state legislators. For good reason, too: This is a company with a marquee name that will bring jobs and tax revenue to the county. People in Northern Virginia may scoff that data centers don’t produce many jobs, but let me assure you, what may seem an insignificant number in Northern Virginia is a very big deal indeed in the Roanoke Valley.
Nobody talked about the energy issue Tuesday, but it’s there nonetheless. Google’s stated policy is to power all its data centers with carbon-free power by 2030 — just five years away. However, a Republican-controlled Congress is currently in the process of making it more difficult to generate carbon-free power. The Big, Beautiful Bill now before the Senate would undo most of the tax credits that have enabled the development of renewable energy. Whether that’s a wise policy or an unwise one is a separate question. Simply from a practical standpoint, we have a conflict here: Tech companies want carbon-free power; Washington is skeptical, unless that carbon-free power is nuclear power, which takes a long time to build and so isn’t going to happen anytime soon. How is this conflict between what the marketplace wants and what Republicans in Washington want going to work out? We don’t know. I understand the philosophy behind not wanting to offer tax credits for renewables, but it’s not clear that members of Congress have thought through the practical implications — which in the short term could lead to less power and more expensive power, and slower economic growth from the company that a lot of Republicans on Tuesday were applauding.
6. This project shows why local governments benefit from cooperating with their neighbors
Officially, this project was set in motion in January 2024 when the Virginia Economic Development Partnership sent out a routine request for any localities that met certain criteria to respond to a potential opportunity. Those requests are quite routine; Botetourt was one of multiple localities that responded. It was clear pretty early on that the inquiry dealt with a potential data center but it wasn’t until September, as Google’s search intensified, that Botetourt learned who the company was.
In another way, though, Botetourt can trace this project back to 1981 — and a decision made in an adjoining locality. It was in 1981 that Roanoke County, looking ahead to future growth, saw the need to develop a new water supply. That led to a 1983 proposal to build the Spring Hollow reservoir in the western part of the county — and the 1986 voter referendum that approved paying for the project. All that was intensely controversial at the time, even though it all seems so obvious now. How did Roanoke County’s decision to build a reservoir in 1986 translate into Google buying land in Botetourt in 2025? Sit tight.
In 1999, the Roanoke Valley suffered a water crisis. Well, Roanoke suffered a water crisis. A drought drained its Carvins Cove reservoir dangerously low, while Roanoke County had plenty of water in Spring Hollow. The two water systems didn’t really connect. The solution — this was controversial, too — was to merge the two systems into a single system run by the Western Virginia Water Authority. The Roanoke Valley hasn’t had a water crisis since. The authority has now expanded to include other localities. Botetourt joined in 2015. The first payoff was that meant Botetourt had enough water to attract a brewery to the Greenfield business park the following year. That robust and reliable water supply also made Botetourt a contender for Google, because data centers require a lot of water.
If every locality in the Roanoke Valley had insisted on going it alone with a separate water supply (as some voices years ago thought they should), Botetourt wouldn’t have landed the Ballast Point (now Constellation) brewery or Google. When those brewery workers or future Google workers spend their money in Roanoke or Roanoke County or Salem, everybody benefits. So, yes, in a way, the planning for Google began long before Google was even founded, even long before there was even the internet as we know it today.
7. This project shows why local governments must think long-term
Another decision made decades ago played an even more direct role in Google coming to Botetourt. The Roanoke Valley went through an economic trauma in the 1980s when Norfolk & Western Railway moved its headquarters out of town and took a lot of jobs with it. The ensuing decades also saw larger dislocations in the national economy. That led to a lot of soul-searching in the Roanoke Valley about how to build a new economy. One small piece of that was in 1994, when Botetourt County voters approved a $19.7 million bond referendum that, among other things, included money for industrial sites. The following year, the county bought the old Greenfield farm. This was a controversial decision; one county supervisor got voted out of office because of it — the political argument was that the business park wouldn’t do anything to benefit the northern part of the county.
That 923-acre property (of which about 750 acres was the business park, the rest recreational) then proceeded to sit vacant for decades. Economic development is a long game. In an opinion piece published in Cardinal today, Botetourt County Supervisor Steve Clinton explains how people wanted the county to unload the property because it seemed to be a waste of taxpayers’ money. Nobody thinks that now. It hasn’t been until the last decade that Greenfield started attracting tenants in a big way; with Google buying 312 acres, the property is now essentially full.
When Ray Ferris was a city council member in Roanoke, he used to talk about visiting the great cathedrals in Europe that took generations to build. He likened local governance to “cathedral-building” because so many things require taking a long view of history. The challenge, of course, is that we elect officeholders for four-year terms. Three decades ago, Botetourt supervisors — some now no longer among the living — looked at an empty piece of land and saw opportunity. They paid a political price. Today, though, there are 2,200 jobs in a place where once there were none, with more on the way as other tenants complete expansions and Google develops its plans.
8. Leadership matters
In 2016, the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors changed county administrators. The supervisors specifically sought an administrator skilled in economic development. The board told Gary Larrowe, who had been the county administrator in Carroll County, that his mission was to fill up the mostly empty Greenfield. On Tuesday, he was able to stand before the board and tell the supervisors: “Today, we’re filled out.”
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