The artificial intelligence boom has created unprecedented demand for data centers, but finding somewhere to put them is becoming increasingly complicated.
Developers seeking sites for new facilities are confronting electrical grids with limited capacity, lengthy utility interconnection timelines and growing community resistance to projects that can consume enormous amounts of electricity and water. Those challenges are already reshaping the data center site-selection map, pushing development beyond established hubs and into markets where power and local support may be easier to secure.
Less discussed is what this shift is doing to the land market itself.
Sites that combine sufficient acreage with access to power, fiber infrastructure, appropriate zoning and a viable path through local approvals are increasingly separating from the broader land market. In some cases, that combination has transformed otherwise ordinary development parcels into extraordinarily valuable real estate.
New Sites, Bigger Numbers
The value being placed on data-center development sites is increasingly visible in individual transactions. In April, Digital Realty acquired approximately 1,440 acres in the Kansas City market for $475 million, securing a site capable of supporting 2 gigawatts of hyperscale data center development.
That transaction follows a series of extraordinary land purchases in Northern Virginia, where access to power and established data-center infrastructure have pushed prices for viable sites to unprecedented levels. Amazon paid approximately $700 million for 189 acres in Prince William County in late 2025, or roughly $3.7 million per acre, while SDC Capital Partners acquired 97 acres in neighboring Loudoun County for $615 million, or approximately $6.3 million per acre. The latter was roughly 67% above the $3.8 million-per-acre average for Loudoun County data-center land sales in 2025, according to county assessment data.
At the same time, the search is extending into places that historically had little connection to technology infrastructure. In West Texas’ Permian Basin, major landowners are positioning acreage for data-center development, seeking to capitalize on the region’s combination of available land and energy infrastructure. In April, Permian Basin landowner LandBridge agreed to give PowerBridge an option to lease approximately 3,400 acres in Reeves County for a proposed data-center campus capable of supporting up to 2 gigawatts of initial on-site power generation. The property sits near the Waha natural-gas hub, illustrating how energy infrastructure that historically supported the oil-and-gas industry is becoming an asset in the competition for data-center development.
Decoding Power Questions to Unlock Transaction Opportunity
The industry’s challenge is that a large tract of industrially zoned land is not necessarily a viable data center site. Increasingly, access to sufficient power — and certainty about when that power can actually be delivered — can determine whether a property is developable at all.
The International Energy Agency projects U.S. data-center electricity consumption to increase by roughly 130% between 2024 and 2030, accounting for nearly half of the country’s electricity-demand growth over that period. At the same time, grid constraints are creating lengthy connection queues in some markets, making existing or committed access to electricity an increasingly important consideration in data center site selection.
That constraint is increasingly reflected directly in land values.
An Altus Group review of 80 U.S. data center land transactions found committed electrical load to be the strongest variable influencing the price of land zoned for data center use. Northern Virginia, where extensive utility infrastructure supports the country’s largest concentration of data centers, recorded a median land price of approximately $2.8 million per acre. In other markets where utilities have committed significant capacity for data center demand, including Central Ohio, Phoenix and Atlanta, median prices ranged from approximately $100,000 to $460,000 per acre. Markets with limited committed load traded for as little as $28,000 per acre at the median.
The effect can be visible even within the same market. Altus found that sites within half a mile of a high-voltage substation traded for roughly twice the price of comparable sites two to five miles away.
The Search Is Expanding the Map
Power constraints, land availability and permitting challenges in established markets are encouraging developers to look toward Central Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Texas and other parts of the Southeast and Midwest.
The requirements can create a different site-selection calculus from more traditional commercial real estate development. A location farther from a major population center may become highly desirable if it offers abundant electricity, transmission infrastructure, large contiguous parcels and a local government receptive to development.
Concerns over electricity rates, water consumption, noise, farmland preservation and permanent employment have also prompted moratoriums and tighter development restrictions in jurisdictions around the country, adding another variable to land valuation: entitlement certainty.
A site with power but an uncertain path to local approval may carry considerably more development risk than a comparable property in a jurisdiction actively seeking data center investment.
Competition Is Spilling Into Other Property Markets
The extraordinary prices paid for viable data center sites can also affect landowners and developers with no connection to the sector.
Nowhere is that more visible than Northern Virginia. The National Association of Home Builders has highlighted instances in which land that might otherwise support housing has instead been acquired for data centers because technology companies and infrastructure investors can pay prices residential developers struggle to match.
Other transactions reinforce the scale of the competition. Microsoft paid approximately $465.5 million for 124 acres in Prince William County, while Starwood Capital Group agreed this year to pay $166.8 million for approximately 42 acres of county-owned land in neighboring Fairfax County for potential data center development.
Prices at that scale can reset landowner expectations well beyond properties that ultimately become data centers.
A New Definition of Prime Land
Data center demand will not make every large industrial parcel dramatically more valuable. Instead, values are increasingly diverging based on characteristics that may not be visible from the property itself. Two otherwise similar sites can have dramatically different prospects depending on access to power and a predictable path through local approvals.
For landowners, developers and investors, that changes the due diligence equation. Transmission infrastructure, utility commitments, interconnection timelines and local politics can be as consequential to a property’s value as its traditional real estate fundamentals.
AI may be driving the data center boom, but its impact on the land market is decidedly physical. A limited number of sites have the combination of power, infrastructure and approvals needed to accommodate the next generation of facilities. The competition for them is creating some remarkable land transactions — and redefining what constitutes prime development land in the process.
