Why this county is on the list at all
Mecklenburg County sits on the North Carolina line, about two hundred miles southwest of Ashburn and ninety miles southwest of Richmond. It is rural. The county seat, Boydton, has a population in the hundreds. Nothing about it looks like a data center market until you look at what is actually in the ground.
Microsoft announced a campus here in 2010, brought it online in 2013, and has expanded it repeatedly since. Public reporting puts more than two billion dollars of investment into the site since 2010 and counts six expansions by 2019 alone. It is one of the company's larger United States campuses and is widely identified with the Azure region that serves the eastern United States. That is the whole market, and it belongs to one company.
The reasons it landed here are the ordinary ones. Land was cheap and available at campus scale. Dominion could reach the site. The Mid-Atlantic Broadband network put carrier-grade fibre into a part of the state that had none. And the tax treatment was better here than anywhere else in Virginia, which is the part worth reading closely because it was written for this county.
There is one more argument that matters to a buyer even though nothing here is for sale. Mecklenburg County is a genuinely different failure domain from Northern Virginia. It is two hundred miles away, on different transmission, outside the concentration that makes Loudoun a single point of correlated risk. For an organisation that already sits in Ashburn, that distance is the thing worth knowing about this county.
The exemption that built Virginia started in this county
Virginia's retail sales and use tax exemption for data center equipment is the policy usually credited with making the Commonwealth what it is. It was first adopted in 2008 for Mecklenburg County and other economically distressed communities, and only later became the statewide programme that Loudoun and Prince William were built on.
The thresholds still favour this end of the state. A data center qualifies statewide by investing at least $150 million and creating at least 50 jobs. In a locality classified as distressed, the same exemption is available at $70 million and 10 jobs. Either way each new job has to pay at least 150 percent of the prevailing local average wage, before fringe benefits. Since 1 July 2023 a distressed locality has been defined by data rather than by a list: one whose unemployment rate and poverty rate both exceed the statewide averages for the most recent year available.
Two things follow for anyone underwriting a project here. The classification is recalculated from published figures, so it is a status a locality can lose. And the exemption is a purchaser-side benefit, so if you are a tenant rather than an owner, the question is whether it reaches you at all or stops with the operator.
A new tax landed in July 2026 and it is not in older quotes
Virginia's 2026 budget kept the equipment exemption and added something new alongside it. Data centers now pay an electricity consumption tax of $0.011 per kilowatt hour, effective 1 July 2026. It is scheduled to sunset on 1 July 2028, it carries an annual revenue cap of $600 million with refunds above that, and it applies to qualifying self-generated electricity as well as to power bought from a utility.
That last clause is the one people miss. A campus running behind the meter is not outside this tax. And a rate that was modelled before July 2026 does not include it. If a proposal you are holding was priced earlier this year, ask directly whether the consumption tax is inside the number, who is liable for it, and what happens to your rate in July 2028 when it is scheduled to lapse. A two-year tax inside a ten-year lease is a term that has to be written down rather than assumed.
In a market with one occupant, the useful question is not about price. Ask whoever is proposing Southern Virginia to you to name the building, the operator and the address, and to say whether the space is multi-tenant or a lease of somebody's own campus. In this county that question usually ends the conversation, which is a fast and cheap outcome. Where it does not end the conversation, you have found something the public record does not show, and it is worth pursuing.
Two of the four, and this is the thinnest evidence base of any market page we publish. The permit layer is here: two Virginia DEQ air permits, both filed on 23 June 2026, both naming Microsoft, both linked below to the record they came from. The announced layer is here and is collected by hand. The other two are not. There is no building in Boydton, South Hill, Clarksville, Chase City or anywhere else in Southern Virginia registered in PeeringDB, so this page carries no interconnection section rather than a section full of zeros. Our verified facility inventory does not extend here either. We would rather say that plainly than publish an empty table. See how we verify capacity for what each collection proves.
What has been announced in Boydton and Mecklenburg County
Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.
| Capacity | Operator | Project | What was announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 48 MW | Microsoft | Hillcrest campus, 210 Tunstall Road, north of South Hill | Microsoft filed a joint federal and state permit application with the US Army Corps of Engineers for three data center buildings, a substation, roads and stormwater works on a 132 acre site at 210 Tunstall Road, between North Mecklenburg Avenue and I-85. Two figures are in that reporting and they do not agree. It says the buildings will have a combined capacity of 48 MW, and it also says the three buildings match the design of a 48 MW specification, which would put the campus at 144 MW if each building carries that rating. The row takes the smaller of the two because it is the one stated as a combined figure. For scale on how much this project has moved, the original test fit was eight buildings and 336 MW, and five were dropped after the review found impacts to nearly every wetland and stream on the site. Combined capacity of the three buildings, as stated in the reporting on the joint permit application |
The largest thing in this county has no megawatt figure attached to it anywhere. Microsoft has been operating at Boydton since 2013, has taken the campus through six expansions, and has published dollars, jobs and solar contracts rather than capacity: more than $2 billion invested since 2010, and a 315 MW solar purchase in 2018 that is generation bought across Virginia and not capacity at this campus. Do not read that 315 MW as a building. The one row above is a different site twenty miles away and it is a permit application, not an offer. Both of the filings in our own permit record below, AVC09 to AVC13 and the Timber Data Center, carry no stated capacity at all, and we have not been able to tie either of them to a published figure. Everything named on this page is Microsoft building for Microsoft. None of it is colocation, and none of it is space a tenant can lease. Read the reporting.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.
What the public construction record shows
Two filings, one applicant, one day. That is the entire permit record for this county, and its value is not the count. It is that both records are dated, both name Microsoft rather than a shell company, and both link to a document you can open. Most of what our collectors return anywhere in the country manages one of those three.
Virginia air permits filed in Mecklenburg County, where Microsoft has been operating since 2013. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Filings we track | 2 | Deduplicated. One source, June 2026 to June 2026 |
| Filed in the last 12 months | 2 | The live rate of construction activity, which is the number that moves |
| Distinct addresses | 1 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Operators we can name | 1 | 2 of 2 filings name a recognizable operator. The rest name an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
Operators appearing by name: Microsoft (2).
The most recent filings on the record
| Filed | Named on the filing | What it says | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23 June 2026 | Microsoft | Microsoft Corp DCS - AVC09-AVC13 Datacenter | Power and cooling |
| 23 June 2026 | Microsoft | Microsoft Corporation - Timber Data Center | Power and cooling |
Collected from Virginia DEQ air permit records. A permit proves that construction is happening. It does not prove that space is available, and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.
Where the activity actually is
The Boydton campus
Microsoft's original site and the reason this county is on any map. Operating since 2013, expanded repeatedly, and self-built. No part of it is offered to tenants and no megawatt figure for it has ever been published. Read it as evidence that the power and fibre here work, not as inventory.
The Hillcrest site near South Hill
A separate 132 acre site at 210 Tunstall Road, north of South Hill between North Mecklenburg Avenue and I-85, where Microsoft has filed for permits covering three buildings. The announced table above carries its capacity and the disagreement inside the reporting on it. Also self-built.
The interconnection gap
Zero. Not a small number, an absence: no building in this county or anywhere near it appears in PeeringDB. A workload that needs carrier diversity, an exchange or low-latency reach to networks cannot be served here at all, and no amount of power changes that.
Richmond and Northern Virginia
Where a Virginia requirement that needs leasable space actually goes. Richmond is ninety miles north with a real multi-tenant market and its own interconnection. Both are on the same state incentive and the same new consumption tax, so the tax comparison between them and this county is a wash.
When Mecklenburg County is right, and when it is the wrong question
It is right in one situation, and it is a narrow one. If you are large enough to build your own campus, need three-figure megawatts, and want a Virginia address that is not inside the Northern Virginia concentration, this county has land, an incentive written for localities like it, and a hyperscaler who has already proved the site works. That is a site selection exercise rather than a colocation search, and it is a serious one.
For everything else it is the wrong question. There is no multi-tenant supply, no interconnection, and no operator here to take your call. A requirement measured in cabinets, cages or single-digit megawatts should be tested against Richmond first, and against Northern Virginia or Charlotte after that. If a proposal puts Southern Virginia in front of you for a colocation requirement, ask which building it means. The public record does not know of one.
Establish first whether there is a building at all, because on the public record there is not. If someone has found one, ask whether it is multi-tenant space or a sublease of a single-tenant campus, and get the distinction in writing: the two carry completely different rights when the anchor's needs change. Ask whether the site is inside a distressed locality for exemption purposes today and what happens to your economics if that classification lapses. Ask whether the $0.011 per kilowatt hour consumption tax is inside your rate and what happens in July 2028. And ask how your traffic leaves the county, in detail, because there is no interconnection ecosystem here to fall back on and transport is the cost line that will surprise you.