Berkeley County: The Next Data Center Hub?

The data center industry doesn't wait for anyone. Hyperscalers are signing land deals before permits clear, utilities are scrambling to keep up with interconnection queues, and secondary markets are suddenly very interesting to investors who've been priced out of Northern Virginia. Berkeley County, West Virginia, is one of those markets—and a project taking shape there suggests it may be more than a backup plan.

A campus currently under development in Berkeley County will eventually reach approximately 1.9 million square feet of data center space, positioned roughly an hour northwest of Virginia's Data Center Alley. That proximity is significant. It's close enough to benefit from the same dense fiber networks and power infrastructure ecosystems that made Northern Virginia the world's largest data center market—but far enough away to avoid the land scarcity, utility congestion, and eye-watering costs that are increasingly choking new development there.

When the dominant market starts turning projects away, capital has to go somewhere. Berkeley County is starting to look like where.

Why Northern Virginia's Loss Becomes Berkeley County's Gain

Loudoun County, Virginia—the epicenter of Data Center Alley—has been dealing with a genuine infrastructure crisis. Dominion Energy has faced a years-long interconnection backlog. Some developers waited 18 to 24 months just to get a power commitment. Land that sold for $200,000 an acre five years ago now trades at multiples of that, when it's available at all.

The knock-on effect is predictable: developers and hyperscalers start drawing circles on maps at 60, 90, and 120-mile radii from Ashburn, looking for jurisdictions that have land, power capacity, and enough fiber connectivity to be viable. Berkeley County sits squarely in that radius.

This isn't speculation—it's a pattern playing out across the country. Phoenix overflow is landing in Tucson and the East Valley. Chicago capacity constraints are pushing projects into northwest Indiana. The same dynamic is reshaping the Mid-Atlantic corridor, and Berkeley County is positioned to catch a meaningful share of that displaced demand.

The infrastructure investment thesis here isn't "Berkeley County is special"—it's that the market upstream has run out of room.

What 1.9 Million Square Feet Actually Means

To put the scale in context: 1.9 million square feet of data center space is not a speculative boutique project. A single hyperscale data center building typically runs between 200,000 and 500,000 square feet. A campus at 1.9 million square feet represents a multi-building, phased development with serious long-term capital commitment behind it.

For comparison, major campuses operated by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in Northern Virginia each span millions of square feet—but those were built incrementally over a decade or more. A greenfield project targeting that scale in Berkeley County signals that whoever is behind this development is thinking in 10- to 15-year horizons, not 18-month flip cycles.

That kind of long-duration infrastructure project carries a different risk profile than a single-building development. It requires—and typically locks in—substantial power infrastructure, water supply agreements, fiber redundancy, and local workforce pipelines. Once those foundations are in place, they tend to attract additional investment. Infrastructure begets infrastructure.

The Location Advantages That Actually Matter

Geographic proximity to Ashburn gets the headlines, but there are more fundamental reasons Berkeley County makes sense for large-scale data center development.

West Virginia has historically had some of the lowest industrial electricity rates in the eastern United States, a legacy of its coal-heavy generation mix. That equation is shifting as the state—like everywhere else—transitions toward cleaner generation, but the underlying grid infrastructure and transmission capacity remain assets. For an energy-intensive use like a hyperscale data center, even a few cents per kilowatt-hour difference in power cost compounds dramatically at scale. A 100MW facility running at 85% utilization burns through roughly 745 million kWh annually. A $0.02/kWh cost advantage translates to nearly $15 million per year in operating savings.

The region also sits along established fiber corridors connecting the Mid-Atlantic to the Midwest. Connectivity isn't an afterthought—it's a prerequisite. The fact that Berkeley County can check that box without heroic infrastructure investment is part of what makes the location viable for enterprise and hyperscale tenants alike.

Land availability and cost are equally important. Development sites large enough to accommodate a multi-building campus of this scale are increasingly rare in saturated markets. Berkeley County offers the kind of contiguous acreage that makes phased master-planned development possible—which is exactly what a 1.9 million square foot build-out requires.

Economic Impact: The Numbers Behind the Headlines

Large data center campuses have an economic profile that local governments find hard to resist. Construction phases generate thousands of temporary jobs. Permanent operations staffing is smaller—a facility this size might employ 200 to 500 people directly—but those tend to be high-wage technical and engineering roles.

The bigger economic driver is often the tax base. Data centers carry enormous assessed values relative to their land footprint and employment count. In jurisdictions that have structured favorable agreements, a single large campus can become one of the top property taxpayers in the county within a few years of operation.

West Virginia has been aggressive about positioning itself for exactly this kind of investment, recognizing that data infrastructure represents a form of economic development that doesn't require replicating the manufacturing clusters of the 20th century. Clean, high-value, grid-connected infrastructure is the new industrial anchor tenant.

The sustainability dimension is increasingly non-negotiable for major data center operators. Hyperscalers have made public commitments to 100% renewable energy matching, and many are pushing toward 24/7 carbon-free energy goals. That means any serious large-scale project in Berkeley County will need a credible clean energy strategy—whether through power purchase agreements with regional solar or wind developers, on-site generation, or utility green tariff programs. The Mid-Atlantic region has growing renewable resources to draw from; West Virginia's own energy mix is evolving. How developers in Berkeley County address this will be a key factor in which tenants they can attract.

What This Project Signals for Infrastructure Development

The Berkeley County campus is a data point in a much larger pattern reshaping where American digital infrastructure gets built.

For the past 15 years, the industry concentrated in a handful of markets—Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta—because network effects, fiber density, and talent pools made those locations self-reinforcing. That concentration made sense when demand was manageable. It's now creating bottlenecks that the industry can't optimize its way out of.

The solution isn't one massive secondary market emerging to absorb all the overflow. It's a dozen Berkeley Counties—regional markets with specific locational advantages, available power capacity, and favorable regulatory environments—collectively absorbing what the primary markets can no longer accommodate. The decentralization of digital infrastructure is underway, and it's being driven by physics and economics more than by planning.

For investors and developers tracking infrastructure opportunities, the implication is straightforward: the value creation in data center development is shifting from primary markets (where yield compression has been severe) toward well-located secondary and tertiary markets where land, power, and policy create genuine margin opportunity.

The Road Ahead

Berkeley County's 1.9 million square foot campus won't be built overnight. Phased data center development of this scale typically unfolds over five to ten years, with early buildings proving out the market before later phases are financed and constructed. The critical milestones to watch are power commitments from the utility, anchor tenant announcements, and whether the local permitting and infrastructure environment can keep pace with development timelines.

If those pieces align—and the geographic and economic fundamentals suggest they should—Berkeley County has a credible path to becoming a meaningful node in the eastern U.S. data center network. Not a replacement for Northern Virginia, but a genuine alternative that serves a market with nowhere else to go.

That's not a minor opportunity. For counties and regions that understand how to attract and support this kind of infrastructure investment, the long-term returns—in tax revenue, economic activity, and energy infrastructure upgrades—are substantial. Berkeley County appears to be positioning itself to capture them.

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