Google's Project Cannoli: What a Massive Data Center Siting Decision Really Tells Us
Discover how Google's Project Cannoli is set to transform data center development and investment opportunities in Van Buren!
Google doesn't name things casually. When the company quietly filed plans for a major data center campus under the codename "Project Cannoli" in Van Buren—a small community with the industrial zoning and geographic profile that hyperscalers quietly covet—it wasn't just another facility announcement. It was a signal about where the industry is heading and why secondary markets are increasingly where the real infrastructure action is.
Here's what we know, what it means, and what the industry should be paying attention to.
Why Van Buren? The Logic Behind the Location
Google's site selection process for data centers is methodical to the point of being almost clinical. Power availability, land cost, fiber connectivity, tax incentives, water access, and seismic stability all feed into a scoring matrix that most municipalities never fully understand when they're competing for a project like this.
Van Buren checks boxes that aren't obvious from the outside. The region has existing industrial infrastructure—the kind of heavy electrical capacity and zoning flexibility that makes utility interconnection timelines shorter and permitting friction lower. That matters enormously. A data center that can reach energization six months faster than a competing site is worth tens of millions of dollars in accelerated revenue to an operator like Google.
This is the non-obvious angle that most coverage of Project Cannoli misses: Van Buren isn't a consolation prize. It's a deliberate choice made by a company that has spent two decades optimizing where it puts its compute infrastructure. Secondary and tertiary markets—places outside the legacy Northern Virginia, Phoenix, and Dallas clusters—are being selected precisely because the legacy markets are increasingly constrained. Power queues in Loudoun County, Virginia, stretch years into the future. Land in the West Valley of Phoenix is no longer cheap. Van Buren represents a repeatable playbook that Google and its hyperscaler peers are running across dozens of communities simultaneously.
What We Know About the Project's Scale and Ambitions
The "Project Cannoli" designation follows Google's long-standing practice of using codenames during the early permitting and land acquisition phases—a strategy that limits competitive intelligence leakage and gives the company negotiating room with local governments and utilities before the full scope becomes public.
At the scale Google typically operates, a single campus can represent anywhere from 100 MW to 500 MW of eventual IT load—equivalent to powering hundreds of thousands of homes, all concentrated in a single facility complex.
What makes data center development at this scale genuinely complex isn't the buildings—it's the electrical infrastructure. A facility pulling 200+ MW requires substation upgrades, transmission line work, and utility coordination that can dwarf the construction cost of the data center itself. Communities that have pre-positioned themselves with industrial-grade electrical infrastructure have a measurable advantage, and Van Buren's existing industrial base appears to be part of why the site penciled out.
On the technology side, Google's newer data center builds reflect years of learning from its custom silicon program—the Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that now handle much of its AI workload. These chips run hot and dense, which changes the cooling calculus significantly. Modern Google facilities increasingly lean on liquid cooling architectures rather than traditional raised-floor air cooling, which has implications for water usage, facility design, and long-term operational costs.
The Economic Equation for Van Buren
Data centers are often oversold to local communities as job-creation engines. The reality is more nuanced—and understanding that nuance actually makes the Van Buren case more interesting, not less.
A facility of this type directly employs somewhere between 50 and 200 full-time workers during operations, depending on automation levels. That's a far cry from a traditional manufacturing plant. But the economic multiplier effect runs through different channels. The construction phase alone—typically 18 to 36 months for a campus of this scale—generates significant skilled trades employment, materials procurement, and local contractor revenue that's often underestimated in the initial projections.
The more durable economic impact comes through the property tax base and utility revenue. A $1 billion data center investment generates assessed value that can materially reshape a county's fiscal position over a 20-year horizon. School districts, road maintenance funds, and public safety budgets all benefit from that expanded tax base—without the ongoing demands on municipal services that a residential development of equivalent cost would create. From a land-use economics perspective, data centers are among the most favorable uses a community can attract: high value, low service demand, long operational life.
Local business growth tends to concentrate in facility services—security, landscaping, HVAC maintenance, food service—rather than the technology supply chain, which Google manages globally. Communities that understand this going in can shape their economic development expectations realistically and still find the investment compelling.
What Project Cannoli Signals for the Broader Industry
The data center development pipeline in the United States right now is unlike anything the industry has seen. AI workload demand—driven by model training, inference at scale, and the gradual embedding of AI capability into every major software product—has compressed timelines and expanded geographic appetite simultaneously. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are all running versions of the same playbook: acquire land, secure power commitments, and build capacity ahead of demand rather than in response to it.
The shift toward secondary markets like Van Buren isn't a trend—it's a structural adaptation to the fact that primary markets can no longer absorb the pace of development the hyperscalers require.
For infrastructure investors and land developers watching this space, the Project Cannoli announcement carries a specific lesson: the sites that will attract the next generation of data center investment aren't necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated marketing. They're the ones that have done the unglamorous work of pre-permitted industrial zoning, utility upgrade coordination, and fiber route planning. Google's site selection team isn't impressed by economic development brochures. They're impressed by sites that can get to shovel-ready in 90 days.
For communities adjacent to Van Buren, the project creates a secondary opportunity that's worth taking seriously. Hyperscalers tend to cluster—once one major operator validates a market, others follow because the infrastructure investments made for the first project (utility upgrades, road improvements, fiber buildout) reduce the risk for subsequent ones. Northern Virginia didn't become the world's largest data center market because of one facility. It became that because the first facilities made the second wave easier.
The Sustainability Dimension
Google has public commitments to operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030—a more demanding standard than the renewable energy certificates that many competitors use to claim "100% renewable" status. That commitment shapes where and how the company builds.
Van Buren's regional grid mix and proximity to renewable generation sources will have factored into the site evaluation. This isn't greenwashing calculus—it's operational necessity. Meeting a 24/7 CFE commitment in a market with limited local renewable generation requires either long-term power purchase agreements with new build wind or solar, on-site generation, or battery storage integration. Each of those options has cost and complexity implications that affect whether a site makes financial sense over a 20-year operating horizon.
The sustainability piece also intersects with water. Cooling a large data center in a non-coastal, non-tropical climate requires significant water resources unless the facility uses closed-loop or air-side economization. Google has been a leader in water efficiency metrics across its fleet, but local water availability and watershed politics are increasingly part of the community negotiation around large facilities—and Van Buren stakeholders would be wise to ensure those conversations happen early and transparently.
What Comes Next
Project Cannoli is in early stages, which means the most consequential decisions—final power agreements, construction contracts, operational partnerships—are still ahead. For local stakeholders, the window to shape how this project integrates into the community is now, not after groundbreaking.
For the broader infrastructure industry, the more important takeaway is geographic: the data center map of the United States is being redrawn in real time, and communities that position themselves correctly over the next 24 months have a genuine shot at attracting capital that would have flowed exclusively to a handful of coastal and sunbelt markets just five years ago.
Van Buren may not have been on anyone's shortlist before Project Cannoli surfaced. It is now—and that's exactly how Google intended it.