Last year, Wythe County announced that a company called Solis Arx will build a new data center at the county’s industrial park.
“It makes me feel good about where our community’s going, as far as the economy,” said David Manley, executive director of the Joint Industrial Development Authority of Wythe County. He said the project will bring a boost in tax revenue, which could be used for public safety and schools.
In neighboring Pulaski County, local leaders are quietly working with a developer to prepare a site for a data center. Jonathan Sweet is Pulaski County’s Administrator. “Pulaski County, and the New River Valley, the way we look at this is we think that data centers are perfectly engineered for our local economy,” Sweet said.
Sweet said they’ve identified Commerce Park as the ideal location, because it’s already zoned for industrial use, and isn’t located near residential neighborhoods. 11 counties and cities in this region share ownership of the property. Together, they received $7.5 million last year from the General Assembly to develop the site.
Sweet said they have a contract with a developer, but there is no end user yet. He’s hoping to entice a company to come to Pulaski.
“Data centers, I think inarguably, are pretty substantial revenue source,” Sweet said.
Meanwhile, in far Southwest Virginia, there’s another project underway to build a data center campus in Wise County.
This expansion into rural parts of Virginia comes as this industry is booming, said Bill Shobe, an economics professor emeritus at the University of Virginia.
“It’s accelerating. It’s getting faster and faster,” Shobe said. “And we don’t know when it will stop.”
Finding and generating enough electricity to power data centers is one challenge for some rural areas. That’s one of the things Sweet said they’re working on improving for the Pulaski County site.
But the Wythe County site is near an Appalachian Power substation, one reason Solis Arx choose this location, the company’s CEO Robert Noll said in an email.
“The area has appropriate industrial land, [and] access to power and fiber corridors,” Noll said.
Southwest Virginia suffered economically decades ago, when much of the manufacturing industry left. The area has begun to see more manufacturing jobs return in recent years.
Wythe’s IDA director, David Manley, said he believes data centers will help the area rebound. “The type of jobs that will be offered at this site in Progress Park means that young people won’t necessarily have to leave to Raleigh or Charlotte or Northern Virginia to have a tech job,” Manley said.
Noll said Solis Arx will initially hire several hundred trade workers during the construction phase. "For a data center campus of this scale, the permanent on site employment estimate is typically more than 50 skilled, well-paid jobs," Noll said. "And that core workforce also supports a broader local ecosystem of contractors, service providers, equipment vendors, and maintenance firms that create additional ongoing local economic activity beyond the data center itself."
Sweet said, compared with other manufacturing companies in Pulaski County, like Volvo, data centers don’t require a large workforce.
“There aren’t a lot of jobs that come with data centers, which is both a good and a bad,” Sweet said. “When you say, ‘how’s not a lot of jobs good?’ Well it’s not competing with our existing industries, the Volvo’s and the Camrett Logistics, etc., who are already looking for employees to fill their employment needs. So we’re not looking to bring something in that would step on them and create further competition for limited employees.”
Andy Kegley is a farmer in Wythe County. He questions how much long-term economic benefit these data centers will bring.
“NAFTA really hurt places like Southwest Virginia and central Appalachia, in terms of what it meant to manufacturing jobs,” Kegley said. “So there is a strong distaste for bureaucrats to say ‘This is the next great, big thing that’s gonna make the economy flow better.’”
Kegley agrees that the millions of dollars in tax revenue from data centers can be used to jump-start the economy, if local leaders invest in things like education and retraining, to help more residents get good jobs in a changing economy.
