On Aug. 18, Chesapeake City Council voted unanimously to end by-right data-center development, a year after rejecting a 350,000-square-foot proposal that drew hundreds of residents to the chambers. The same night, Virginia Beach imposed a 12-month moratorium while it wrote rules from scratch. Suffolk had already paused. Two hundred miles west, on the same day, Amherst County did the same thing. Hampton Roads stopped the clock before the first slab was poured.
The applications will keep coming. Loudoun County collected $1.2 billion in data-center property taxes this year, 39% of its budget, and cut its residential tax rate for the 10th straight year. Chesapeake’s planning staff counted more than 27,000 residentially zoned parcels within 500 feet of land where a data center could have been built by right. The money is real, and so is the back door it arrives through.
So the question for the next 12 months is not whether the region can keep the buildings out. It is what Chesapeake, Virginia Beach and Suffolk will require of the ones that eventually come in. And the region can ask for something no Virginia locality ever has, because no one knew it was worth asking.
Every data center is a furnace. Nearly all the electricity that goes in comes back out as heat, and the newest liquid-cooled facilities put it out as warm water, exactly the temperature a greenhouse wants in a Tidewater January. In every data center in the commonwealth, that heat is thrown into the sky at the owner’s expense, because the only thing anyone ever required of it was that it go away.
A greenhouse of 2.5 acres on that warm water can grow on the order of 695,000 pounds of fresh produce a year with no boiler and nothing burned. Write into the conditional-use permit that at least 15% of what comes off the line is covenanted to the host community, and one building’s waste feeds about 400 of its neighbors year-round. Add a fish house on the same loop and a farm store on the road, and the applicant that was going to consume farmland has built a farm.
A Chesapeake resident said it plainly at the planning commission this summer: Residents should share directly in the investment, and the commitment should be clear from the start. That is the missing sentence in the ordinance.
The state has already written it once. House Bill 323, passed this spring, is the first law in the country directing a state to put data-center waste heat to use; it cleared the Senate 39-0. Its report was due Sept. 1; the 2027 General Assembly will decide what to do with it. Hampton Roads need not wait for Richmond. A conditional-use permit is a contract, and a city can put anything reasonable in it.
So, to the Chesapeake council members who ended by-right, to the Virginia Beach planning staff who have a year and a blank page, and to Suffolk: Use the year to write one question into the code. Where does the heat go, and what share of what it produces goes to the people who live within 500 feet?
If an applicant answers “the cooling tower,” you have learned what kind of neighbor it intends to be. If it answers “the farm,” ask to see it on the same drawing as the substation, and ask when the first harvest arrives relative to the first server hall.
The moratorium was the easy vote; everybody agreed. The hard one comes in 12 months, when the rules are written and the first application under them arrives. Write the question in now, and that vote gets easy too.
Andrew Potter of Lynchburg is the founder and CEO of Intelligent Harvest, which develops greenhouses and community farms powered by data-center waste heat. He has spent this year in county hearings on data-center zoning.
