Despite the high concentration of data centers in the Commonwealth, Charlottesville has few actual or proposed sites—no matter how you define “data center.”
Virginia has a lot of data centers, with 371 operating and more than 800 proposed as of August 2026, per Cleanview estimates. None are in Charlottesville or Albemarle. Other sources, using different criteria for what constitutes a data center, list a handful of local sites (including datacentermap.com, which notes four within city limits).
The term “data center” has become shorthand for massive sites, sometimes city-sized, providing the energy-hungry computing power that enables AI. But the phrase has been around since at least the ’90s, and traditionally refers to a site of any size housing servers and other computing equipment…