Myths vs. facts

Data center construction employs large crews for a period of years, and those jobs are real. But once a facility is operating, day-to-day staffing is small: industry figures put typical operations between 15 and 100 employees depending on size, and a 250,000 square foot facility may support around 25 direct jobs. The permanent employment a locality actually receives is a fraction of what the construction phase suggests.

The distinction matters because the trade is permanent. The land use, the water draw, the noise, and the grid demand all persist for the life of the facility. The construction payroll does not.

Residents at the July hearing also raised who gets hired. That concern has a straightforward remedy available to the county: a local-contractor preference written into the ordinance, rather than a promise made during an approval process.

A 2026 state study found Virginia's data center sales tax exemption returned $6.10 in labor income for every $1 exempted, rating it the state's second-best incentive. That finding is real and we do not dispute it. What it does not tell you is what Henry County specifically would receive. Virginia's exemption normally requires a $150 million investment and 50 new jobs, but in a locality designated as distressed those thresholds drop to $70 million and ten jobs. The reduced tier is the one most likely to apply here.

We include the $6.10 finding deliberately. It is the strongest published argument for data centers in Virginia, and you should hear it from us rather than discover we left it out.

The honest response is not to deny it but to localize it. A statewide average tells a county very little about its own deal, and the state incentive is structured so that the least prosperous localities can be asked for the least in return.

There is also a cost side that rarely appears in the revenue projection: road repair from construction traffic, water and sewer capacity, and emergency services. Those are county expenses, and they are why we ask for them to be funded by the developer rather than absorbed.

Cooling designs vary enormously, and so does what "closed-loop" means in practice. Many facilities use evaporative cooling, which consumes water continuously — large sites can draw up to five million gallons per day, much of it lost to evaporation rather than returned. A statement about cooling design made during an approval process is not binding on how the facility operates in year ten.

This is the easiest disagreement in the entire debate to resolve. If a developer genuinely intends closed-loop cooling with no public water access, they lose nothing by having that written into the zoning ordinance as a condition.

If they object to writing it down, that tells the county something important about how firm the commitment was.

The same logic applies to private wells. Groundwater effects are documented, and a county with many households on well water should require independent testing before, during, and after construction — not accept assurances.

Virginia already hosts roughly 340 data center buildings, more than any other state. Nothing about national competitiveness depends on Henry County in particular. Siting decisions are driven by the price of power, the availability of water, and the size of local tax incentives — not by which locality is most essential to the country. A county that sets strict conditions does not remove capacity from the nation; it changes where that capacity goes and on what terms.

There is a related risk the county should price in rather than dismiss: what happens if a facility is decommissioned. Hardware and cooling requirements change quickly, and a locality that has rezoned land, expanded substations, and upgraded roads for a specific facility carries those commitments whether or not the facility remains valuable to its owner.

We are not predicting that data centers will become obsolete — we cannot evidence that, and we will not claim it. We are saying that a 30-year land use decision should include a written decommissioning and site restoration requirement, funded up front. That is ordinary practice for other heavy industrial uses.

On July 29, 2026, more than 100 Henry County residents attended the Board of Supervisors public hearing on data center zoning. The Board voted unanimously to remove data centers from the proposed zoning amendments and send them back to the Planning Commission. Chairman Jim Adams said the Board was "going back to the drawing board after listening to everything tonight." Public comment changed the outcome in a single evening.

It is also worth being precise about the current situation: no data center has been proposed in Henry County. There is no project to be inevitable.

What exists is a rule-writing process with no announced deadline, which means there will be no obvious moment that tells residents it is time to pay attention. That is the strongest argument for engaging now rather than waiting.