It is crazy how you see so many datacenters getting built in places of high land value such as say northern virginia. Why not just build them in west virginia and build twice as many for the same spend? They'd probably even let you burn coal to power them.

I'm guessing it's to do with regulation. There's probably some policy document that says a certain org needs to be able to access the physical servers within a certain amount of time, and so they need to be nearby, even though nobody ever does the accessing.

DC would be the kind of place with a lot of government contractors that would have this kind of stipulation, is my guess.

I suspect it's driven by availability of existing grid infrastructure (so they don't have to wait for upgrades) and ease of permitting; the contents of the building and indeed running costs are so high that the land value is much less relevant.

Nearby skilled labor, police/fire infrastructure willing to handle it, and ease of demo/tours/sales for clients to install their racks. Also much more stable power.

There is a lot of electrical supply and demand is high plus incentives from Virginia itself and proximity to DC. It’s already a data center dense market