Data Centers in West Virginia: A Factual Account of the State's Largest Industrial Bet

Background: Why West Virginia Is Competing for Data Centers

State economic development agencies pursue data centers because they bring large private capital investments and new tax revenue without requiring direct state spending. West Virginia's Division of Economic Development has framed data center attraction as a strategy for capturing the infrastructure investment driven by surging demand for artificial intelligence computing and cloud storage.

Data center operators are looking for sites with reliable, high-capacity power; adequate land; access to water for cooling; and regulatory environments offering permitting certainty and speed. West Virginia's government has marketed the state as competitive on all of these factors, primarily through legislation enacted in 2025 that streamlines approvals, creates dedicated incentive programs, and authorizes on-site fossil-fuel power generation tied directly to data center campuses.

The current wave of investment is historically unusual in scale. A December 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report estimated that U.S. data center electricity consumption could grow at a compound annual rate of 27% between 2023 and 2028, compared to 7% annual growth from 2014 to 2018. The primary driver is AI: training and running large language models requires orders of magnitude more computing power than the cloud workloads that previously dominated data center demand. Modern AI training runs consume as much electricity as hundreds of thousands of homes — and generate proportional heat, which requires massive cooling systems that in turn consume large volumes of water.

The Legislative Framework

House Bill 2014 (2025) — The Primary Enabling Law

In April 2025, Governor Patrick Morrisey signed House Bill 2014, the Power Generation and Consumption Act — the foundation of West Virginia's data center program. It passed the House 88–12, nearly along party lines.

Key provisions:

Certified Microgrid Program. Data centers may build and operate captive, on-site power generation facilities fueled by coal, natural gas, nuclear, or any other source, allowing them to operate partially or fully off the main grid.

High Impact Intelligence Center certification. Creates a new state certification category for large-scale data center investments (generally those requiring 90 megawatts or more of critical power capacity), administered by the Department of Commerce.

Fast-tracked permitting. Certified projects receive a streamlined state-level approval process.

Preemption of local authority. Certified data center projects are not subject to county or municipal zoning and are exempt from local noise, lighting, and land use ordinances. Local and county governments are prohibited from enacting or enforcing any regulation that limits the creation, development, or operation of a certified project. Conservation West Virginia described this as "the first of its kind in the nation."

FOIA exemption. Any information provided by a data center applicant that the applicant designates as "confidential business information" is exempt from West Virginia's Freedom of Information Act.

Revenue distribution formula. Tax revenues from certified projects are distributed by formula rather than through the standard local property tax system (see below).

The law was signed despite active community opposition. Tucker County residents organized against it; a petition asking the governor to veto the bill was not acted upon. Residents in Tucker County later reported learning of the local-control preemption only after the bill had already passed.

Revenue Distribution — Who Gets What

HB 2014 established a formula directing data center tax revenue away from the standard local allocation:

School districts, municipalities, and local taxing entities that would normally receive a proportional share of property tax revenue from a large commercial development receive nothing directly under this formula. The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy concluded that this revenue-routing, combined with available tax exemptions, significantly limits the local fiscal benefit compared to conventional commercial development. The Putnam County Commission noted at a public meeting in April 2026 that the county would receive only 30% of data center tax revenue — a figure commissioners found concerning.

Tax Incentive Bills — SB 623

Senate Bill 623, the "West Virginia-Powered Data Center Incentive Act," was introduced in the 2026 legislative session. It would have provided property tax at salvage value (the lower of fair market value or 5% of total facility value), business and occupation tax exemptions for coal-fired utilities supplying qualifying centers, and sales and use tax exemptions for construction and equipment — for data centers that used coal-generated electricity for at least 80% of their primary operational capacity. The West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy concluded the combination of exemptions could "potentially offset all state taxes" for qualifying data centers.

SB 623 was referred to committee and did not advance to a floor vote in 2026. No enacted law currently ties West Virginia data center tax incentives specifically to coal use.

House Bill 4983 (2026) — Certification Rules and Expanded Confidentiality

The only data center legislation enacted in the 2026 session was House Bill 4983, a Department of Commerce rules bundle governing the certification process. It passed the House 78–16 and was signed by Governor Morrisey in late March 2026.

HB 4983 codified confidentiality for all petitions seeking data center certification and all letters of intent for microgrid certification. It also includes a provision — added late in the process — requiring developers to disclose to the Department of Commerce how their proposed water use would affect nearby landowners. This was the only water-related protection enacted in 2026.

During floor debate, amendments offered by Delegates Hansen, Dillon, and Anders to require water impact assessments before certification and to limit groundwater use were both defeated by the Republican supermajority. Seven Republicans joined all nine House Democrats in voting against the final bill.

Local Control: What Communities Can and Cannot Do

Under the combined effect of HB 2014 and HB 4983, a community whose county is selected for a certified data center or microgrid project:

• Cannot use local zoning to restrict where the facility is located
• Cannot use local ordinances to regulate noise, lighting, or land use at the site
• Cannot review the developer's certification application, which is confidential by law
• Cannot determine how much water the facility plans to use before it begins operating
• Will have no confirmed mechanism for enforcing the water-disclosure provision in practice, since DEP officials testified in 2026 that the state has no permitting program for large water withdrawals

For comparison, Fairfax County, Virginia — home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world — adopted revised zoning rules in September 2024 creating new setback requirements and mandatory noise monitoring, after sustained community pressure. West Virginia communities have no equivalent legal tools.

The Projects

Power, Grid, and Ratepayer Impacts

What Data Centers Do to Electric Bills

In September 2025, the Union of Concerned Scientists published an analysis finding that customers in seven PJM states — including West Virginia — paid approximately $4.4 billion in additional transmission costs in 2024 attributable to data center grid connections. These costs arose from local transmission upgrades required to connect data centers to the high-voltage grid. Many individual connection projects cost between $25 million and $100 million. These costs are recovered through PJM-wide or utility-wide rates, meaning all ratepayers pay for them regardless of whether their community hosts a data center.

A March 2026 corrected report by the Maryland Office of People's Counsel confirmed that Maryland ratepayers are paying for transmission infrastructure driven primarily by data centers in Virginia and West Virginia. A separate IEEFA analysis found that West Virginia's own transmission infrastructure costs to power data centers are rising sharply.

Appalachian Power — West Virginia's largest regulated utility — testified during HB 2014's consideration that the bill "would not ensure against increased rates" for customers. No confirmed dollar-per-household impact figure for West Virginia residential electricity bills has been published as of this writing.

West Virginia Watch reported in early 2026 that West Virginians have "sold their valuables, missed paying other bills or skipped meals to afford their power bills" — establishing that electricity affordability is already a significant community issue independent of data center development.

Off-Grid vs. Grid-Connected

The Tucker County, Mingo County, and Mason County projects are designed as off-grid facilities — they build their own power plants. The Berkeley County campus has not disclosed its power arrangement. The Google Putnam County project connects to the existing grid.

Off-grid facilities potentially reduce direct load pressure on the transmission system. However, they introduce direct, localized air emissions from on-site power plants, they typically still require grid backup connections, and they concentrate both power generation and cooling water demand at the same site.

Water

Scale of Data Center Water Demand

Modern large data centers use evaporative cooling — water is consumed by evaporation during the cooling process and is permanently lost from the local watershed. It is not discharged to a stream; it simply leaves the water cycle locally.

Expert estimates cited in West Virginia press reporting indicate a large data center could consume 3–5 million gallons of water per day. For context, that range represents approximately 5–8% of the total water withdrawn for public water supply throughout all of West Virginia in 2023, according to DEP data — for a single facility.

To put this in river terms: the Blackwater River near the Tucker County site typically flows at 50–200 cubic feet per second (32–129 million gallons per day) under normal conditions. A large data center drawing from local sources at the high end of estimates would claim a meaningful fraction of that flow during low-water periods.

West Virginia's Existing Water Crisis

West Virginia has pre-existing, documented drinking water infrastructure failures that provide critical context:

• During a statewide drought emergency in summer 2025, the town of Thomas (Tucker County) experienced a water supply failure — the town water became unusable due to high iron levels, and the state Department of Transportation delivered a tanker truck of non-potable water for flushing.
• Davis Water Works (also Tucker County, adjacent to the Fundamental Data site) notified residents in 2025 of elevated lead levels in drinking water and committed to removing lead service lines.
• At the April 2026 Putnam County community meeting, some residents stated they do not have access to running water and haul water from community tanks.
• In 2026, the Legislature secured $76 million for water infrastructure statewide — less than one-quarter of what experts said was needed just for four of the most water-stressed southern coalfield counties. Lawmakers simultaneously blocked multiple attempts to secure additional targeted funding for those communities.

Regulatory Gaps

• West Virginia requires large water users to report usage annually but has no statutory caps on data center water consumption.
• DEP officials testified in 2026 that water users have no duty to report plans for large withdrawals and that the state has no permitting program for large water quantity consumption.
• The 2026 enacted rules require disclosure of how water use would affect nearby landowners, but not pre-certification public disclosure of withdrawal volumes or sources.
• The practical result: a data center can begin operations and start consuming millions of gallons per day without a public pre-operational review of where the water comes from or what the hydrological impact will be.

Governance and Transparency

The Public Cannot Review What Is Being Approved

Under the combined effect of HB 2014 and HB 4983, all data center certification applications are confidential by law. Any information a developer designates as confidential business information is FOIA-exempt. WVDEP has allowed air permit applications to be partially redacted. The Governor's office has cited these exemptions to deny FOIA requests for the Penzance, Google, and Fundamental Data applications.

At the Google announcement, the Morrisey administration confirmed that the Department of Commerce received the application on a Tuesday and that Morrisey announced approval 72 hours later. The Gazette-Mail's FOIA request for supporting documents was denied.

The House Speaker and His Clients

House Speaker Roger Hanshaw (R-Clay) is an energy regulatory attorney with the Charleston firm Bowles Rice. During the 2025 session, he played a key role in enacting HB 2014. During the 2026 session, he voted for HB 4983. Two days after the 2026 session ended, Hanshaw entered his appearance as counsel for Fundamental Data LLC in the Intermediate Court of Appeals, where the Tucker County air permit appeal is pending.

It was subsequently reported that Hanshaw had also filed a notice of appearance on February 12, 2026 — during the session — as counsel for MGS CNP 1 LLC (a Fidelis New Energy affiliate) in the Mason County air permit appeal. One week after entering that appearance, Hanshaw voted against amendments that would have imposed water-use reporting requirements on data center developers.

Craig Holman, a government ethics expert with Public Citizen, stated that Hanshaw's conduct is "unethical, though not illegal under West Virginia laws," adding that "Hanshaw's conflicting work for private interests while simultaneously shaping public policies that benefit those private interests as well as himself is unethical." Tucker United announced it is preparing to file a formal ethics complaint.

The Judge and the Speaker

The Fundamental Data permit appeal at the Intermediate Court of Appeals was assigned to Chief Judge Dan Greear. Greear served as Hanshaw's chief counsel in the House before his court appointment in 2022. Hanshaw has co-hosted fundraising events contributing approximately $60,000 to Greear's campaign. Greear's son worked as a summer associate at Bowles Rice in 2024 and 2025 and is employed in the firm's Morgantown office beginning fall 2026.

Greear disclosed these facts in a March 18 court notice and stated he saw "no basis for his disqualification." On April 21, 2026, Tucker United, the Highlands Conservancy, and the Sierra Club filed a formal motion seeking Greear's recusal. As of this writing, the motion is pending.

Public Comment Has Been Disregarded

• Despite 1,623 public comments on the Tucker County air permit — the majority opposing it — WVDEP approved the permit.
• A FOIA review by the Gazette-Mail of public comments on the state's long-term energy policy plan found that more than two-thirds of 80 comments opposed data center development in West Virginia.
• In Tucker, Berkeley, Mason, and Putnam counties, documented reports confirm that local officials and residents learned of major project approvals at the same time as or after the public announcement.

Administrative Error

The Morrisey administration acknowledged in April 2026 that it had misidentified a Tucker United letter opposing the Fundamental Data project as a certification application from Fundamental Data — a procedural error reported by the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

Employment: The Numbers in Context

Construction Jobs

Construction employment is the most immediate job benefit. Approximately 1,000 construction jobs are cited for the Berkeley County campus. Large data center construction is highly specialized — high-voltage electrical, precision cooling, server infrastructure — and industry experience nationally and in West Virginia suggests that a significant share of specialized workers are drawn from out-of-state contractors who follow large projects. No West Virginia-specific labor sourcing data for any announced project has been publicly confirmed.

Permanent Jobs

Modern hyperscale data centers employ relatively few people per dollar of capital investment. The Berkeley County campus, a $4 billion project, cites approximately 125 permanent full-time positions at full buildout — roughly $32 million in capital investment per permanent job.

For comparison: Toyota's engine assembly plant in Buffalo, Putnam County employs approximately 1,000 permanent workers and has anchored that community's economy for decades. The Google data center planned for the other end of Buffalo sits on more than 1,700 acres.

The Ohio River Valley Institute has noted that data centers are "enterprises that create few jobs and inject little money into host communities" and that the national pattern is for very limited local economic multiplier effects, given that procurement and operational spending flows primarily to national and regional vendors rather than local businesses.

Noise: The Neighbor's Experience

Of the impacts data centers impose on adjacent communities, noise is the one most consistently cited by residents who live near existing facilities — not only in West Virginia, but in Northern Virginia, Arizona, Texas, and every other region where large data center concentrations have developed near residential areas. It is qualitatively different from what most people expect, and West Virginia's HB 2014 removes every local tool that communities would ordinarily use to address it.

What the Noise Actually Is

Data centers produce continuous noise from multiple sources: the large fans that exhaust heat from cooling systems, HVAC chillers, transformers, and — during monthly testing or grid failures — backup diesel generators. These sounds operate simultaneously, around the clock, every day of the year. There is no quiet period. There is no weekend.

The character of the noise matters as much as its volume. Data center cooling systems produce a strong tonal component — a steady, single-frequency hum or high-pitched whine — that the human auditory system finds particularly difficult to ignore or habituate to. Broadband noise (like wind or traffic) tends to recede into the background. Tonal noise, by contrast, remains perceptible even at lower overall volume levels, and at sustained exposure it causes headaches, difficulty concentrating, and sleep disruption.

Residents near a Vantage Data Center in Sterling, Virginia described it to NBC Washington as "a constant buzzing in your head" and "a high-pitched sound that won't go away." One resident said the noise wakes her at night and that she and her neighbors no longer use their outdoor spaces. Neighbors of Amazon Web Services data centers in Prince William County described hearing the noise clearly from 700 feet away — inside their homes. Residents near a data center in Chandler, Arizona reported that noise-canceling headphones and earplugs provided no relief.

Most existing noise ordinances were not written with 24-hour industrial facilities in mind. Prince William County's ordinance permits residential areas a maximum of 60 decibels in the daytime and 55 at night — but does not measure tonal noise separately from overall loudness, so a penetrating high-frequency whine that does not exceed the aggregate decibel threshold is effectively unregulated. A noise researcher at Rutgers University's Noise Technical Assistance Center has noted that a bedroom should register close to 30 decibels for restful sleep. The gap between that and the permissible 55 decibels at the boundary of a nearby data center is not abstract: it represents the difference between sleep and chronic disruption.

Backup diesel generators — which must be tested monthly and which activate during grid outages — produce 85 to 100 decibels depending on size, levels at which hearing damage begins with sustained exposure. Data centers routinely run multiple generators simultaneously.

What the Evidence Shows

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI) reported in March 2026 that data center noise spans multiple frequency ranges, particularly the low-frequency range, making it difficult to measure accurately with standard decibel meters — and therefore difficult to enforce against, even where ordinances nominally apply. Most noise complaints from data center neighbors "go nowhere," leading to frustration and depressed property values.

Reported health effects from neighbors of existing large data centers include headaches, vertigo, nausea, sleep disturbance, ear pain, and elevated blood pressure. These effects are consistent with the peer-reviewed literature on chronic low-frequency and tonal noise exposure.

In Loudoun County, Virginia — the self-described "data center capital of the world" — a county supervisor stated in 2026: "Noise can be mitigated. I just don't believe that the noise problem cannot be solved." His caveat is important: the problem can be mitigated, but doing so requires regulatory pressure. Without it, companies are slow to spend.

Mitigation: What Exists and What It Costs

Noise mitigation for data centers is technically feasible. The solutions are well understood. Whether they are deployed depends almost entirely on whether regulators require them.

Acoustic barrier walls. Engineered barrier systems placed around cooling equipment, generators, and exhaust vents can reduce perimeter noise by 10 to 20 decibels depending on height, placement, and materials. Solid concrete walls are highly effective at blocking sound; absorptive panels prevent noise from reflecting back. Barrier systems must be designed by acoustical engineers — poorly sited barriers can worsen conditions by redirecting sound. Costs for large-scale installations typically run into the millions of dollars.

Acoustic louvers and fan silencers. Cooling systems require airflow, so solid enclosures cannot be used around them. Purpose-designed acoustic louvers — panels that allow air to pass while attenuating sound — can be fitted around HVAC intakes and exhausts. Fan silencers mounted directly on exhaust units reduce noise at the source. These solutions address the tonal hum that is the most common neighbor complaint.

Site setbacks and siting requirements. The most effective mitigation is distance. Fairfax County, Virginia — after years of community pressure — now requires data centers to be at least 200 feet from any residential property, mandates independent noise studies before and after construction, and requires all equipment to be set behind noise-reducing barriers. These rules were adopted in September 2024; communities that regulate before construction have far more leverage than those trying to mitigate after the fact.

Earthen berms and vegetative buffers. Dense earthen mounds planted with mature vegetation provide both sound absorption and visual screening. They are less effective than engineered barriers at blocking tonal noise but contribute to overall noise reduction and address community character concerns simultaneously.

Liquid immersion cooling. Some operators are transitioning from air-cooled to liquid-cooled server equipment. Immersion cooling — submerging servers in thermally conductive fluid — eliminates or dramatically reduces the large fans that are the primary source of community noise. Marathon Digital Holdings replaced 20% of a Bitcoin mining facility's cooling system with immersion cooling following community complaints and legal action in Texas. Immersion cooling adds significant upfront capital cost and is not yet standard for hyperscale AI facilities, but it is a direction the industry is moving.

What This Means for West Virginia

Under HB 2014, certified data centers in West Virginia are exempt from local noise ordinances. A community in Tucker County, Mason County, or Putnam County cannot set a maximum decibel level, require a noise study, mandate setback distances, or require acoustic barriers as a condition of siting. These are precisely the tools that Northern Virginia communities — even in a state with far more experience regulating data centers — have found inadequate and have been working to strengthen.

West Virginia communities will not have inadequate tools. They will have none.

The practical consequence: whether a West Virginia data center is built with noise mitigation is entirely at the developer's discretion. Nothing in HB 2014 or HB 4983 requires it, and no local government can demand it. A resident of Thomas or Davis or Buffalo who finds that a data center's constant tonal hum is audible in their bedroom at night has no legal avenue to compel the company to act — and no local ordinance under which to file a complaint.

Winners and Losers

The distribution of benefits and costs from West Virginia's data center program is not random. It follows a pattern that West Virginians with knowledge of the state's resource extraction history will recognize.

The residents of Thomas and Davis, Tucker County — who experienced water supply failures during the 2025 drought and found lead in their drinking water — may face additional water stress from a 1,656-megawatt power plant and its associated data center complex on the hill above their towns, built by a company whose financial backing remains undisclosed, represented in court by the Speaker of the West Virginia House.

What Remains Unresolved

The following material questions are unanswered as of April 2026, in many cases because state law prevents the public from asking them:

1. The power source and fuel type for the Berkeley County campus
2. The specific water withdrawal volume and source for any announced project
3. The identity of Fundamental Data LLC's financial backers
4. The outcome of the Tucker County air permit appeal at the Intermediate Court of Appeals
5. The status of the $62.5 million in state forgivable loans to the Mason County project following Nscale's acquisition
6. Whether the Tucker United ethics complaint against Speaker Hanshaw will be filed and adjudicated
7. Whether Google's Putnam County project will proceed past due diligence to construction
8. The net fiscal impact on host-county school districts and local governments — no county-specific modeling has been publicly released