It sounds like an offer that the 143 homeowners in The Regency, a Virginia housing community, couldn’t refuse: a roughly $4.4 million payout to sell their houses to a data center developer (1).
The $500 million-plus deal sounds even better when you consider that the average value of a home in Ashburn, where the community resides, is just over $800,000 (2). Not to mention that Ashburn is part of Loudoun County, dubbed “Data Center Alley” for its more than 250 data centers (3) — the largest concentration of the humming, energy-guzzling AI servers and storage facilities in the world — many of which border the Regency community (4).
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Yet, for a variety of reasons, some residents aren’t on board with the idea. And without all 143 households in favor, the deal doesn’t work.
But that hasn’t deterred Mital Gandhi — Regency resident, real estate developer and architect of the deal that began in 2024 — who told Moneywise that “the opportunity is very much alive” but described it as a “community transformation” that’s much more complicated than a typical real estate transaction…