Fred McGhee didn’t mince words. The Hanover County planning commissioner looked at the 430 acres of land before his board and saw one thing: dollar signs.
“We want something substantial on this parcel, specifically to generate revenue,” McGhee said at this week’s meeting. “And nothing else that could go in there, unless they strike oil on it tomorrow, would produce that type of revenue.”
With that blunt assessment, the Hanover Planning Commission recommended approval of another massive data center project, continuing the county’s aggressive pursuit of the digital infrastructure facilities that have reshaped Virginia’s rural landscape over the past decade.
The project would transform nearly 700 acres of Hanover real estate into humming servers and cooling systems — the invisible backbone of America’s cloud computing economy. For a county that has long balanced its agricultural heritage against suburban development pressure from the Richmond metro, the decision represents a clear choice: revenue over restraint.
Hanover officials have watched neighboring Henrico County bank millions from its data center corridor along Staples Mill Road, where companies like Facebook parent Meta and QTS Realty Trust have built sprawling facilities. The tax math is seductive. Data centers generate substantial property tax revenue with minimal demand on county services — no school children to educate, no rush-hour traffic, no parks to maintain. Just rows of servers, a skeleton crew of technicians, and monthly checks to the county coffers.
But the calculus McGhee laid bare raises uncomfortable questions about how localities make development decisions. When a planning commissioner frames the choice as “data center or nothing worthwhile,” it suggests the outcome was never really in doubt.
The 430-acre footprint dwarfs typical commercial developments. For comparison, Short Pump Town Center — Henrico’s massive retail complex — sits on roughly 100 acres. This single project would consume land equivalent to four Short Pumps, converting it to a use that employs perhaps a few dozen permanent workers.
Critics of Virginia’s data center gold rush point to the environmental costs that rarely appear in county revenue projections. The facilities consume enormous quantities of electricity and water for cooling, straining power grids and aquifers. Dominion Energy has cited data center growth as a primary driver of its need for new power generation — costs ultimately borne by ratepayers across the Commonwealth.
For Hanover residents living near the proposed site, the calculation is more personal. Data centers may not generate traffic like a shopping center, but they produce constant noise from cooling systems and generators. They transform rural viewsheds into industrial campuses ringed with security fencing.
The commission’s recommendation now moves to the Board of Supervisors for final approval. Given McGhee’s candid enthusiasm, the outcome seems predetermined.
But his oil metaphor deserves scrutiny. When a county strikes oil, it extracts a finite resource until the well runs dry. Perhaps data centers, with their twenty-year lifecycles and ever-evolving technology demands, aren’t so different. The question is whether Hanover will still be counting its windfall when the servers go dark.
- Hanover Planning Commission recommended approval of a 430-acre data center project
- Commissioner Fred McGhee explicitly prioritized tax revenue potential over alternative land uses
- The project footprint equals approximately four times the size of Short Pump Town Center