Is a $1.7 Billion Data Center the Future of Infrastructure?

A $1.7 billion bet on a single piece of infrastructure doesn't happen quietly. When Joe Eisenhauer, Vice President of Development at Inch & Co., stepped forward to outline the company's proposed data center project, it sent a clear signal: the race to build the backbone of the digital economy is accelerating, and it's landing in unexpected places.

This isn't a story about a tech giant dropping another hyperscale campus in Northern Virginia. It's about a developer making a massive capital commitment to regional infrastructure — and what that says about where the industry is headed.

What Inch & Co. Is Actually Proposing

The core of the data center proposal, as Eisenhauer outlined in a LebTown exclusive, is a project valued at $1.7 billion. That number alone warrants attention. For context, the average hyperscale data center construction project runs somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. A $1.7 billion commitment from a regional developer signals this isn't a speculative land play — it's a serious, phased infrastructure buildout with real capital behind it.

What separates ambitious proposals from vaporware is specificity, and Inch & Co. appears to be operating with a clear development thesis.

Inch & Co. is not a household name in the data center world the way Equinix or Digital Realty are. That's precisely why this project is interesting. Regional developers entering the data center space typically bring something the hyperscalers don't: relationships with local governments, knowledge of regional grid constraints, and the agility to navigate zoning and permitting without a fleet of lobbyists. They also carry more risk — because they don't have the balance sheet cushion that absorbs delays and cost overruns.

The proposal represents a calculated move into one of the most capital-intensive asset classes in infrastructure. Eisenhauer's decision to go public with it signals the company is past the concept stage.

Technology and Sustainability at the Core

Data centers built today aren't the power-hungry, water-guzzling facilities of fifteen years ago — at least the good ones aren't. Any serious data center proposal coming to market in 2024 and beyond has to address two things head-on: energy efficiency and cooling infrastructure.

The projects that attract institutional capital right now are the ones designing around Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratios below 1.3 — meaning less than 30% of total energy consumed goes to overhead like cooling and power distribution, with the rest going to actual compute. Best-in-class facilities are pushing toward 1.1 or lower.

The clean energy angle isn't just optics anymore — it's a procurement requirement for the hyperscale tenants that make these projects financially viable.

Major cloud providers — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud — have aggressive sustainability commitments that flow directly into their colocation and leasing decisions. If you're building a data center and you can't demonstrate a credible path to renewable energy supply, you're competing for a shrinking pool of tenants. That reality is shaping how developers like Inch & Co. structure their projects from the ground up, not as an afterthought.

The infrastructure investment required to deliver clean energy to a facility of this scale — whether through direct PPAs (power purchase agreements), on-site generation, or utility partnerships — is substantial. It's often the variable that separates a project that closes financing from one that stalls.

What the Numbers Mean for Investors

$1.7 billion is a figure that demands a financing structure, not a checkbook. Projects at this scale typically involve a combination of equity from the developer, construction debt, and increasingly, infrastructure-focused private equity or sovereign wealth participation.

Data center assets have become among the most sought-after in the infrastructure investment universe for one simple reason: the demand curve is nearly vertical. Global IP traffic is projected to keep growing at double-digit annual rates, driven by AI workloads, video, edge computing, and the continued migration of enterprise IT to cloud platforms. Every gigabyte needs a home, and that home is a data center.

From an investor's perspective, stabilized data center assets offer long-term, contracted cash flows — typically triple-net leases with creditworthy tenants. Returns on stabilized assets have historically landed in the 6-8% cap rate range, though the current capital intensity and interest rate environment have compressed some of that.

The real upside isn't in stabilized yield — it's in development spread: the difference between what it costs to build and what the stabilized asset is worth on the open market.

For a project of this magnitude, that spread can be significant. But so can the execution risk. Construction timelines, power availability, permitting delays, and tenant pre-leasing are the variables that determine whether a $1.7 billion proposal becomes a landmark asset or a cautionary tale.

Regional Impact: Beyond the Press Release

Data center projects generate two types of economic impact, and they're not equally distributed. Construction phase employment — electricians, ironworkers, concrete crews, mechanical contractors — is substantial but temporary. A project of this size could represent thousands of construction job-years. The permanent employment picture is more modest: data centers are highly automated facilities, and a large campus might employ 50 to 200 permanent staff depending on its configuration.

That doesn't mean the regional economic case is weak. It means it has to be made honestly.

The more durable economic argument is in the tax base. Data centers are among the highest-assessed commercial properties in any jurisdiction that hosts them. Prince William County in Virginia built a $1 billion-plus annual tax revenue stream largely on the back of its data center corridor. A $1.7 billion facility generates significant assessed value, and that assessed value translates into school funding, road maintenance, and municipal services for decades.

There's also the infrastructure halo effect. Data centers require serious power and fiber infrastructure. When a developer commits to bringing that infrastructure online, it often upgrades the surrounding region's connectivity and grid resilience in ways that benefit other businesses and residents.

The political economy here matters too. Local officials and economic development agencies are increasingly sophisticated about data center negotiations — pushing for community benefit agreements, local hiring commitments, and infrastructure cost-sharing. Developers who get ahead of those conversations move faster through approvals.

Where the Market Is Heading

The data center sector is in the middle of a structural demand surge unlike anything it has seen before. Generative AI is the proximate cause — training a large language model can consume more energy than thousands of homes use in a year, and inference workloads are just as hungry. The buildout required to support this demand is measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars globally over the next decade.

That creates opportunity, but it also creates constraint. Power availability has become the single biggest bottleneck in data center development. In established markets like Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, and Chicago, interconnection queues stretch years into the future. Developers who can secure power commitments in emerging markets — where grid capacity exists and land costs haven't been bid up by hyperscaler competition — have a genuine first-mover advantage.

This is where regional developers like Inch & Co. can actually outcompete larger players. They know the utility relationships. They know the permitting environment. They can move through local government processes without the adversarial dynamic that sometimes develops when a tech giant descends on a community with little warning.

The clean energy data center thesis is also maturing from a marketing message into an underwriting requirement. Green tariff programs, direct renewable PPAs, and on-site battery storage are moving from differentiators to baseline expectations. Projects that don't address this at the design stage will face tenant and financing friction down the road.

What Inch & Co.'s proposal ultimately represents is a confluence of the right asset class, the right moment, and — if executed well — the right developer profile. A $1.7 billion data center proposal doesn't guarantee a $1.7 billion data center. What gets built depends on power, capital, tenants, and timing.

But the direction of travel is clear. Infrastructure investment is flowing toward digital infrastructure at a rate that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. The developers who understand both the technology and the local context — who can bridge the gap between a utility substation and a hyperscale lease — are the ones who will define what regional infrastructure looks like for the next generation. Inch & Co. is making a public claim to be one of them. The market will render its verdict.

[INTERNAL LINK: data center investment trends]

[INTERNAL LINK: renewable energy in data centers]

[INTERNAL LINK: economic impact of data centers]

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