The chasm between the two was underscored by recent West Virginia legislative panel meetings at which state lawmakers painted a much rosier data center landscape than the one that local residents have voiced fears about at community meetings throughout the state in recent weeks.
Legislators from the state House of Delegates at House committee meetings last month reported on what they learned as visitors to the annual Data Center World industry gathering in April in Washington, D.C., where the four-day conference, boasting what its website called “the premier gathering of the world’s leading operators, technologists, utilities, and innovators,” focused on the industry, in the exhibition’s own words, “scaling at speeds once unimaginable.”
Sessions had titles like “Scaling Your Supply Chain at Hyperspeed: A Roadmap” and “Scale at Speed — How Massively Parallel Compute [graphics processing units] Are Revolutionizing Data Center Design” that underscored the rapid pace at which the industry has grown throughout the United States.
The takeaway presented by the handful of West Virginia lawmakers who reported on their Data Center World experience at last month’s House panel meetings? West Virginia needs to get up to speed to capitalize on that growth because developers are interested in the state — and because, they asserted, the risks are lower than many of their constituents fear.
“We are very, very well-positioned to benefit here,” Delegate Tristan Leavitt, R-Kanawha, said at a May 18 data centers-focused general session in the House Chamber, citing the state’s capacity to offer developers the power generation and transmission needed to build out their projects.
“People are still surprised about what West Virginia has to offer and what we’ve done with House Bill 2014,” said Delegate Jordan Maynor, R-Raleigh.
That was a reference to the controversial 2025 state law enacted at Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s request aiming to incentivize data center development by removing local zoning and other regulatory control over data center projects from officials throughout the state and shielding developers from having to share critical information about their projects publicly.
“Everyone that we ran into, we talked about what we’ve done, we talked about what we had to offer, and people were pleasantly surprised,” Maynor said. “And so I think even from this conference, we’re going to have more folks, more developers, more off-takers looking at West Virginia and what we’re doing, and so I’m excited about that.”
The next day, at a joint meeting of House Energy and Public Works subcommittees, Chris Morris, director of the West Virginia Data Economy Office formed in August via HB 2014, said his Data Center World visit yielded feedback that officials could “help de-risk” projects by “having some control over the timing of approval.”
The state seized that control via HB 2014 on the accelerated timeline sought by developers, with the law requiring the Department of Commerce secretary to decide on state certification of “high-impact” data centers within just 14 days. The “high-impact” label applies to any facility used to house and operate equipment that receives, stores or transmits data with a “critical [information technology] load” of 90 or more megawatts.
“They want speed,” Morris said of data center developers.
And the House of Delegates’ Data Center World attendees asserted their green light for satisfying developers’ need for speed is safe, casting aside research showing significant potential adverse impacts from data centers on water access — and a lack of transparency among developers already moving forward with West Virginia projects.
“[There have been] increasing technology advancements to address some of the issues that have historically been present with data centers, again, whether it's the water issues and the amount of water availability, whether it's the power usage,” Maynor said.
“I didn’t hear concerns about being very open and transparent about what they’re doing,” Leavitt said at the May 18 general session of developers being willing to provide information about their prospective projects.
But when Delegate Evan Hansen, D-Monongalia, asked Leavitt why local ordinance and zoning regulation of projects shouldn’t be allowed, Leavitt said he didn’t “know if there’s anything new on the table that came from this conference.”
Then he pivoted away from West Virginia.
“It is very much a race, if you will, both internationally between various countries as well as here within our country, right, to try and benefit from this,” Leavitt said. “So our goal was to try and make ourselves as attractive as possible.”
Data center battle lines drawn at local meetings
What Leavitt beheld as attraction was declared a public health-sacrificing sellout at recent community meetings in Tucker and Putnam counties, where opponents of data centers impassionedly objected to development advancing in their neighborhoods.
At a May 16 meeting hosted by Davis Mayor Alan Tomson, Shaena Crossland of Tucker United, a Tucker County community group opposed to a data center complex project planned between the tourism-centered towns of Thomas and Davis by Purcellville, Virginia-based developer Fundamental Data, emphasized project-resisters “demand that we have a seat at the table when it comes to the future of our county.”
“Because that's what this is about,” Crossland said. “This is our home.”
“It's not a question of, 'We're doing something on private property, it's not your business,'" Amy Margolies, Tucker United executive director, said at the meeting inside the Davis fire hall. “It is our business because it's drawing on our resources, it's drawing on our water, it's drawing on every resource around us. The air, the land, all of these things are burdens on our small community. And the reason they come here is because they think that we are pushovers.”
Fundamental Data, which has been quiet about its plans, has routinely declined requests for comment about aspects of its project and got an air quality permit application approved in August by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection after heavy redactions to air pollution control equipment-related details in its permitting request that have drawn a legal challenge from Tucker United and environmental groups.
But at the May 16 meeting, Fundamental Data had two company representatives present who frequently bristled at residents’ complaints.
“I'm concerned that, of course, no matter how much reassurance that we give you about the safety and the quality of the facility here, it's not going to be enough because you don't want it,” Fundamental Data representative Scott Wyland said to the crowd of roughly 50 in-person attendees and another 50 or so via Zoom teleconference.
Distrust also pervaded a May 26 Putnam County Commission meeting at which residents urged that commissioners provide tighter oversight of a data center campus planned by Google for the Buffalo area and challenge the constitutionality of HB 2014.
“You can take on House Bill 2014,” Michael Mosteller II of Hurricane told the commission.
Dr. Kyle McCausland, an emergency room doctor who lives on the border of Putnam and Mason counties and has a fifth-generation farm, asked the three commissioners if they supported HB 2014, through which the Department of Commerce approved a high-impact data center certification allowing Google’s project to advance in March after what a Gazette-Mail Freedom of Information Act request later revealed to be six-plus months of closed-door meetings before the project was made public in a March 27 Governor’s Office announcement.
“I support the government of West Virginia, so, but no, I do not agree with that, and you're trying to put words into my mouth,” Commissioner Brian Ellis replied, asserting that McCausland was “trying to start a fight.”
Morris told West Virginia lawmakers at his May 19 House panel appearance that HB 2014 “makes it easier for” what he called “the big companies” in their review of sites statewide and that HB 2014 is “actually the very beginning” of the review process.
But the Fundamental Data project and other data center-linked projects in Mingo and Mason counties have gotten state air quality permit requests approved without that certification — with residents effectively sidelined with a lack of influence over potential project development limits.
“It takes away your voice, my voice,” Tomson said at the meeting he hosted. “In my gut, I would say that that law is unconstitutional. But if nothing else, I will tell you it's not democratic.”
Data center tax valuation horizon unclear
In a May 19 House Chamber presentation on data center tax valuation, West Virginia Tax Commissioner Matthew Irby admitted most of his outlook came with “one big, giant caveat on why our numbers aren’t really set in stone”: the lack of a data center — for now — to value.
Irby projected data center tax revenue of $10 million per megawatt in real property investment but cautioned the state couldn’t develop “an income approach to value” until there’s a data center in service and producing income.
“It’ll be, I would imagine, years that we’re looking at now before we have a large-scale data center actually in service that we’re able to apply that approach to,” Irby said.
Morris noted that data centers “generate an enormous amount of revenue,” pointing to the world’s epicenter of data center development in Loudoun County, Virginia, which reported data centers added $16 billion in value to the county’s real property portfolio in 2024, generating almost half of the county’s property tax revenues.
But Loudoun County stepped away from data center growth incentivization last year by approving zoning ordinance and comprehensive plan amendments removing data centers as a “by-right” use, requiring more stringent review of projects.
A Virginia state legislative staff report to Virginia's then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin and the state’s General Assembly in December 2024 found data centers’ increased energy demand would likely increase system costs for all customers, including non-data center customers, due to the following reasons:
* A large amount of new generation and transmission will need to be constructed that would not otherwise be built, creating fixed costs for utilities to recover.
* It will be difficult to supply enough energy to keep pace with growing data center demand, so energy prices are likely to increase for all customers.
* Utilities may not always be able to get lower-cost power if they are more dependent on importing power, leaving them more prone to spikes in energy market prices.
A typical Dominion Energy residential customer could see an increase in generation- and transmission-related costs of an estimated $14 to $37 monthly by 2040, the report found.
The report found that even though data centers’ industrial scale makes them incompatible with residential uses, one-third of them are located near residential areas, with industry trends making future residential impacts more likely.
The Virginia Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission staff report on data center industry impacts in Virginia said establishing a separate data center customer class, changing cost allocations and adjusting utility rates more frequently could help protect non-data center customers from statewide cost increases.
At the May 18 West Virginia House Chamber general session on data centers, Delegate Michael Hite, R-Berkeley, said in a presentation the state would collect property taxes under HB 2014, unlike other real property taxes collected by counties — another assertion of state control of the data center development process.
HB 2014 diverts most of any property tax revenue they would generate away from local taxing bodies, a move estimated to cost counties and school districts millions.
HB 2014 splits property tax proceeds from high-impact data centers as follows:
* 50% in a fund for reducing personal income tax
* 30% to the county or counties where a data center is located
* 10% to all counties on a per capita basis
* 5% to the West Virginia Water Development Authority-administered Economic Enhancement Grant Fund, used for water and wastewater infrastructure but also economic development
* 5% to an Electric Grid Stabilization Fund HB 2014 would create to help maintain utility-owned coal and gas electric generation
Hite indicated he didn’t know how “this significant influx of income to a county” from data center tax revenue would impact the state’s school funding formula.
“I've gotten different answers, too, depending on who you talk to,” Hite said. “So this still remains an issue that should be, I believe, determined by legislation or rules within the House and Senate and not be left up to agency interpretation.”
“[T]he decision is not being made by us,” Margolies said at the meeting in Davis. “It's being made by folks in Charleston who are also taking all the money.”
Oversight gap admitted on water use plan enforcement
At the Davis meeting, Tomson highlighted a study via the Harvard T.H. School of Public Health's Dominici Lab released in February estimating Fundamental Data’s planned operation could inflict up to $35 million in health-related damages.
“We want a thriving community, but we don't have to trade our lives and our livelihoods and our health for a few jobs here,” Canaan Valley resident Beth Boehme of Tucker United said at the meeting.
Wyland and the other fundamental Data representative at the meeting, Lewis Reynolds, questioned the validity of the Harvard lab-generated study, calling it unobjective and overly reliant on assumptions.
But Tomson observed the study by the Dominici Lab, which focuses on air pollution impacts, used the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s COBRA (CO-Benefits Risk Assessment screening model), which is generally viewed as a conservative estimator of potential health effects.
Fundamental Data’s representatives indicated they were still determining details on how they’d be sourcing water for the project, a source of concern for residents given large data centers’ drain on area water supplies throughout the country and recent drought impacts within Tucker County.
Hansen asked Morris at the May 19 meeting whether there was any requirement for a developer to implement any water planning as proposed as part of state certification applications, which require project water source and use confirmation.
“That’s a great question,” Morris replied. “When you implement a law, it takes a little while to perfect it. We are actually contemplating the enforceability of those provisions as we speak.”
But many West Virginians feel trapped under the kinks of the state’s data center welcome mat.
“We all came here or are from here to get away from the ill effects of extractive corporations and health erosion [from] pollutants and other ill effects,” Tucker United member Clare Anderson said to Fundamental Data’s representatives. “And we implore you to move on.”
© 2026 The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, W.Va.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
