How Data Centers Became Hot Real Estate Investments

Our Take

CNBC (produced by Christian Nunley) frames this as a real estate story, and that's exactly the point we keep hammering: when land zoned for a substation and some fiber suddenly sells for ten times its old value, as they note happened in Vint Hill, Virginia, that's not tech innovation, it's a rezoning windfall. The "where to build" calculus in this video — power access, water, tax breaks, proximity to fiber — is really a checklist of what gets extracted from a community before a shovel ever hits dirt.

The "private investments" chapter is the tell. When land brokers and PE funds start treating a parcel's value as a function of how close it sits to a substation, you know the real asset isn't the building, it's the grid connection and the tax abatement some county board signed off on with little public debate. Residents only show up in the story once the pushback starts, which is backwards — they should be at the table before the deal, not protesting after the concrete's poured.

We track exactly this pattern building-by-building. Check our facility map to see what's landing near you, and if you want to know how to actually get in front of a rezoning or utility filing instead of reacting to it, our take-action page has the playbook.