Washington County, West Virginia commissioners approved an NDA and a letter of intent, including a 100% 15-year tax abatement, to court a large data center developer near Waterford.
The project scale is being framed as the county’s biggest in 50 years, but officials can’t yet say how many jobs it brings or what the final site footprint and power profile look like.
Water use and cooling are flash points, with officials touting a “closed-loop” modern system while residents cite data showing medium-sized data centers can still consume up to ~110 million gallons of water a year.
Infrastructure build-out would likely lean on the Tri-County Rural Water and Sewer District, with the developer expected to help fund upgrades, signaling the usual rural edge-data-center trade of utility build for tax breaks.
Residents are pushing back hard on secrecy, NDAs, and large tax abatements for a “Silicon Valley money” company, arguing for more transparency and local benefit given long-term land, noise, and environmental impacts.
County legal counsel frames the NDA as standard to protect early-stage proprietary discussions, promising a later phase for public input once details are more concrete.
For AI infra watchers, this is another example of hyperscale-style data center incentives colliding with local water, land, and transparency concerns, and it is worth tracking as a bellwether for rural siting politics.
