California Data Center Campus Planned for Perry

A California-based real estate investment and development company has set its sights on Perry — and the project they're proposing isn't small. Plans call for a full data center campus on the former Champion Farm property, a site that's about to trade its agricultural legacy for something considerably more wired.

That pivot from farmland to digital infrastructure highlights where capital is flowing right now. Data centers have become the defining infrastructure bet of the decade, and smaller markets like Perry are increasingly where developers look when land costs, power availability, and zoning flexibility align.

What's Being Built — and Why Perry

The former Champion Farm property gives the developer something genuinely hard to find: a large, contiguous parcel with room to scale. Data center campuses — as opposed to single standalone facilities — require that kind of footprint. You need space not just for server halls, but for cooling infrastructure, power substations, redundant fiber entry points, and future expansion phases. A cramped urban infill site doesn't work. A former farm often does.

The choice of Perry isn't incidental — it reflects a deliberate site-selection calculus that larger coastal markets can no longer satisfy.

California-based developers building in-state face a peculiar tension. The state generates enormous demand for data processing — from Silicon Valley hyperscalers to LA's entertainment and streaming economy — but land and power costs in primary markets have pushed development outward. Perry represents that outward push made concrete.

Details on the developer's specific capacity targets, investment totals, and construction timeline haven't been fully disclosed, but a campus-scale project in this asset class typically implies hundreds of megawatts of potential capacity built out over multiple phases — along with capital commitments that run into the hundreds of millions of dollars for even a modest build.

The Economic Gravity of a Project Like This

Here's what a data center campus actually means for a local economy, and it's more complicated than the headline job numbers suggest.

Construction employment comes first, and it's substantial — large data center builds routinely employ 1,000 or more construction workers across a multi-year build-out. Those are real wages circulating through local businesses, hotels, restaurants, and supply chains. Perry will feel that before a single server goes live.

Permanent employment is smaller but higher-value. A typical hyperscale data center might employ 30 to 50 full-time workers directly, but those positions — electrical engineers, facility technicians, security personnel, network operations staff — pay well above median local wages. The downstream effect on local tax revenues, school funding, and municipal services can be disproportionate to the raw headcount.

The more significant long-term economic lever is property tax and utility revenue — data centers are extraordinarily capital-intensive assets that generate substantial assessable value on a relatively small land footprint.

Then there's the infrastructure halo effect. When a serious data center operator commits to a location, they typically negotiate for — or directly fund — upgrades to local power grid capacity, fiber connectivity, and road access. Those improvements don't disappear when the data center is built. They become community assets that attract the next wave of investment.

What This Means for Real Estate and Infrastructure Investors

Perry is now on the map for a category of investor who wasn't looking there before. That's not a trivial thing.

Data center development anchors tend to catalyze surrounding real estate activity. Workforce housing demand increases. Light industrial and logistics facilities follow to serve the operational supply chain. Hospitality and retail capture spending from an expanded local workforce. Investors paying attention to Perry data center development right now are getting in ahead of that secondary demand curve — which is where the asymmetric returns tend to live.

For infrastructure-focused investors specifically, the Champion Farm project signals something worth tracking: the continued geographic diversification of California's digital infrastructure buildout creates land and adjacent infrastructure investment opportunities well outside the traditional primary markets.

Industrial land adjacent to or near the campus site, parcels with existing power infrastructure, and properties that could serve a growing technical workforce all deserve a closer look. These aren't speculative plays — they're logical extensions of a confirmed anchor investment.

The broader real estate investment case for data center-adjacent markets has been well-documented in markets like Quincy, Washington; Ashburn, Virginia; and Mesa, Arizona — all of which experienced significant secondary development activity following major data center campus announcements. Perry won't replicate those markets exactly, but the mechanism is the same.

Community Considerations Worth Watching

No infrastructure project of this scale lands without friction points, and being clear-eyed about them is more useful than pretending they don't exist.

Data centers are power-intensive by nature. A campus-scale facility can draw as much electricity as a small city, and integrating that load onto existing regional grid infrastructure requires careful coordination with utilities and grid operators. How that power is sourced matters — both to regulators and increasingly to the corporate tenants who will lease capacity in the facility. California's renewable portfolio standards create both a compliance floor and a market expectation that the facility will incorporate clean energy sourcing, whether through direct PPAs, on-site solar and storage, or utility green tariff programs.

Water consumption is the other variable that community stakeholders will scrutinize. Cooling systems — the primary water consumer in most data centers — have improved dramatically in efficiency, but a campus-scale deployment still represents a meaningful draw on local water resources. Developers who get ahead of this with transparent disclosures and demonstrated commitments to water-efficient cooling architectures tend to move through the permitting and community relations process faster.

On balance, the Champion Farm site's agricultural history actually helps here. Converting former farmland to an industrial use that consumes less water per acre than active agriculture is a defensible environmental trade-off — one that experienced developers in this space know how to make clearly to local planning authorities.

The Bigger Picture for California Data Center Development

Perry's project is one data point in a much larger trend reshaping where digital infrastructure gets built in California and across the West.

Power constraints in the Bay Area have become severe enough that new large-scale data center development there has effectively stalled for hyperscale users. Los Angeles faces similar dynamics. The result is a systematic search for locations that offer acceptable latency to major demand centers, available power capacity, and room to build. Inland California, historically overlooked for this asset class, checks more of those boxes than it used to — particularly as long-haul fiber networks have improved connectivity to previously underserved corridors.

The demand side of this equation isn't slowing down. Generative AI workloads require substantially more compute density than traditional cloud applications — industry estimates suggest AI inference and training workloads can require three to five times the power density of conventional server deployments. That's accelerating the pace of new data center development across the country, and California's internal demand means the state can't simply export all of that build to Nevada or Arizona indefinitely.

Developers who can identify sites like Champion Farm — large, serviceable, and outside the congested primary markets — are sitting on a genuinely scarce asset class right now.

For anyone tracking infrastructure growth in California's secondary markets, Perry just became a location worth monitoring closely. The project is early, the details are still emerging, and that's precisely when the most interesting conversations — and opportunities — tend to happen.

*Interested in data center land, industrial parcels, or infrastructure-adjacent real estate opportunities? Browse current listings on InfraSale Marketplace or contact our team for off-market deal flow in high-growth infrastructure corridors.*