Land buying hits 6 billion dollars, and speed to power is the reason
US land purchases earmarked for future data center development reached approximately $6 billion in the first half of 2026, an increase of 79 percent year over year, according to data from real estate firm Avison Young. The headline number alone tells an incomplete story, because the real driver of pricing in this market is no longer acreage, location relative to a metro area, or even zoning status. It is how quickly a given parcel can be connected to meaningful electricity supply, a variable that has come to dominate every other factor in how developers and brokers price raw land for AI infrastructure.
John Andril of Avison Young put the dynamic bluntly: "the biggest thing right now is speed to power." He added that a site without a viable power path until the early-to-mid 2030s is unlikely to attract much developer interest at all, regardless of how otherwise attractive the land might be. That framing marks a real shift from traditional site selection, where power availability was one input among several. In the current AI buildout, it has become close to the only input that matters once a parcel clears basic entitlement checks.
The premium for power, quantified
In Northern Virginia, still the densest data center market in the country, unpowered but fully entitled land now sells for roughly $4 million per acre, while comparable land with a confirmed power path commands at least $6 million per acre, a premium of 50 percent or more for the same underlying real estate. An Altus Group analysis of 80 verified transactions found that committed utility load, not zoning status or raw acreage, was the single strongest predictor of final land pricing across the dataset, confirming that buyers are effectively paying for certainty about electrons rather than for dirt.
The transmission infrastructure underlying a site matters as much as whether power exists at all. Sites connected to high-voltage 230 kV or 500 kV transmission lines traded at roughly 2.4 times the price of otherwise comparable sites tied only to 138 kV or lower-voltage infrastructure, according to the same analysis. Developers typically need electrical infrastructure deliverable within about 18 months to make a deal pencil out, and use a rule of thumb of 0.5 to 1 acre per megawatt of planned capacity when sizing a purchase against the power they expect to secure.
What a single Loudoun County transaction reveals
Public records from Loudoun County, Virginia illustrate how far these premiums have run in the market's most contested corridor. SDC Twin Creeks Parent LLC paid $615.05 million for 97.15 acres in the development in November 2025, working out to roughly $6.33 million per acre, among the highest confirmed per-acre data center land prices on record. In the same development, Dominion Energy separately paid $45 million for about 14 acres, a transaction that underscores how even the local utility is willing to pay a premium to secure land positioning near the load it ultimately has to serve.
Industry analyst Neil Osnato framed the broader pricing logic succinctly: "the premium is increasingly payment for uncertainty removed, not just for megawatts nearby." That distinction matters for how enterprises should think about site economics going forward. Buyers are not simply paying for proximity to transmission infrastructure, they are paying to eliminate the multi-year uncertainty of interconnection queues, utility capacity studies and generation buildout timelines that have become the single biggest schedule risk in any new data center project.
The chicken-and-egg problem driving creative deal structures
Andril described the underlying market dynamic as a "chicken-and-egg problem": utilities want firm commitments from developers before building out generation and transmission capacity for a large new load, while developers need committed power secured before they are willing to commit capital to a site. That mutual hesitation is pushing both sides toward contractual structures that would have been unusual just a few years ago, including letters of credit, take-or-pay power purchase agreements, stricter interconnection-queue requirements that penalize developers who do not follow through, and a growing willingness among developers to fund onsite generation themselves rather than wait for utility buildout.
Those structural shifts are visible beyond Virginia. In lower-cost markets, land that would otherwise be worth around $10,000 per acre without a viable power path can command six-figure per-acre pricing once infrastructure and firm utility relationships are secured, a multiple that rivals or exceeds the premiums seen in established markets like Northern Virginia. The implication is that power access, not geography, has become the primary variable separating cheap land from expensive land anywhere in the country, flattening what used to be a much more location-driven pricing map.
What this means for enterprise site selection
For CIOs and infrastructure teams evaluating build versus lease versus colocation decisions, these figures are a useful corrective to any assumption that data center capacity costs are primarily a function of construction and hardware. Land with a credible power path now carries a standalone premium large enough to materially change a project's total cost basis before a single building permit is filed, and that premium is rising faster than general construction cost inflation. Enterprises partnering with developers or neoclouds on new capacity should ask pointed questions about the underlying land's power position, voltage class and interconnection timeline rather than taking a developer's stated completion date at face value.
The broader lesson is that power access has become the scarce resource that land, construction capacity and even GPU allocation all now trail behind. A developer who has secured a 500 kV interconnection with a firm timeline has effectively locked in the hardest part of a data center project before breaking ground, while a developer without one is gambling on a utility queue that, per Avison Young's own data, can stretch into the 2030s. Enterprises signing multi-year capacity commitments should treat a provider's power position as a leading indicator of delivery risk, well ahead of the usual proxies like company size or publicly announced timelines.
