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Data Center Planning Briefing

At a glance

  • What: An informal briefing to the Planning Commission on data centers: what they are, what they use, and what local governments can ask for before approving one.
  • Where it stands: Information only. No vote and no ordinance proposed. Commissioners asked for more briefings and one suggested the city revisit its 2017 data center incentives.
  • What's next: Staff said they brought the presenter back after a data center workshop they attended over the summer, given the ongoing conversations about data centers in the city. No date for a follow-up was set.

What the presenter said

  • Presenter: the acting director for economic and policy studies at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service (University of Virginia). His name is garbled in the captions. He said he is an economist, not an engineer, and that this was his first briefing aimed at local rather than state decisions.
  • Small "retail" and telecom data centers are the old, mostly invisible kind. Hyperscale facilities are far larger (roughly seven football fields) and draw about 25 times the power of the small ones.
  • Nationally about 3,000 data centers operate and about 1,500 more are coming; he said roughly 350 more are planned in Virginia, clustered in Northern Virginia, Richmond and Mecklenburg, drifting south and toward rural areas. Little is happening in Hampton Roads.
  • Jobs: mostly construction jobs; permanent jobs are few. The main local benefit is tax revenue (he cited Loudoun County at about 1.2 billion dollars a year, close to 40 percent of its budget), but counties competing for projects risk giving revenue away.
  • Electricity: demand could double by 2040. Because Virginia is in the PJM regional grid, Virginia Beach residents would feel rate pressure even with no data centers in the city.
  • Water: all Virginia data centers draw from local utilities, not groundwater. Use varies by cooling type and peaks in summer, when water is already tight; he said the peak matters more than the annual total.
  • Other impacts: noise, diesel backup generators and air quality, drainage, traffic during construction, and appearance.
  • His advice: require transparency before approval (full campus plans, power and water needs, peak use, noise, stormwater, jobs, tax terms), tie incentives to verifiable performance, and require public reporting after opening. He pointed to the Virginia Institute of Government for ordinance help.

Commission questions and comments

  • One commissioner asked how large a data center the city would need for a tech corridor drawing on military and contractor expertise. The presenter said AI jobs and data center locations are largely unrelated and that proximity matters less and less.
  • A commissioner raised the city's water supply from Lake Gaston (about 60 million gallons a day, in drought) and asked about effects on it. The presenter said power-related water use is displaced elsewhere on the grid and that local utilities, not state permits, supply data centers.
  • Commissioner Camp asked about equipment replacement cycles and whether the city's 2017 data center incentive package, which includes a lowered business property rate and a definition of "data center", should be revisited. He also asked about private computing facilities such as those at universities.
  • Commissioner Skunover asked how big and how many data centers the city might need.
  • Another commissioner asked whether energy production planning is keeping up and whether the current model is sustainable; the presenter shared some of the concern.

Sources

Discussion time

About 70 minutes across 1 meeting (from transcript timestamps; approximate).

Meeting Minutes
2026-10-14 - Planning Commission 70

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