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Servers Over Shelter: How AI Data Centers Are Outbidding Home Builders for America’s Land

https://www.nahb.org/advocacy/industry-issues/land-use-101/data-centers-outbidding-home-developers

Excerpt:

In November 2025, two of Northern Virginia’s biggest land deals closed within days of each other, and neither one was for housing. Amazon paid $700 million for about 189 acres in Prince William County. A few days later, SDC Capital Partners paid $615 million for 97 acres in Loudoun County.

The deals were made by a data center company and digital infrastructure investor intent on building facilities to support artificial intelligence.

.....As AI use has grown, so has demand for the facilities that make it possible. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta were expected to spend more than $300 billion in capital expenditures in 2025, with much of that spending tied to AI infrastructure, cloud capacity, and data center buildouts.

That demand is being met with land, and much of it is land that would otherwise have become housing.

Home builders cannot bid in that market, because a builder’s land budget is capped by what home buyers can afford. Every dollar spent on land gets passed through to the price of the finished home, and buyers have no room to absorb it. NAHB’s 2026 priced-out analysis estimated that 65% of U.S. households could not afford a median-priced new home of $413,595 at a 6 % mortgage rate, and that every $1,000 increase in the price of a new home would price out another 156,405 households.

A data center operator faces no such constraint. So, when a landowner gets an offer of several million dollars per acre from a data center company, and a fraction of that from a home builder, there is no real decision to make. The result is not more expensive homes on that parcel. It is no homes at all. The data center wins, the land is gone, and the houses that might have been built there are never built.

This problem is not limited to Virginia. In Illinois, Stream Data Centers bought and razed 55 homes in Elk Grove Village to make way for a three-building data center campus of about 2 million sq. ft. In Texas, data center demand is pushing up land prices in growth corridors near Dallas. HousingWire reported that land along U.S. Route 67 that had sold for $20,000 to $40,000 per acre a few years ago was selling for more than $350,000 per acre in some locations by 2026. One local residential land developer put it plainly: “There’s no possible way you can make those numbers work.” In North Las Vegas, VanTrust Real Estate sold nearly 205 acres in Apex Industrial Park to Novva Data Centers for $181 million in 2025, or more than $880,000 per acre.

.....NAHB estimates that the country needs about 1.5 million more homes. Mortgage rates remain elevated, construction costs remain high, and entry-level and workforce housing are getting harder to build. Land is the foundation of every home. Land that goes into a data center pipeline at $4 million or $6 million per acre does not come back to the housing market. When a parcel sells for $6.3 million per acre, it is going to hold servers, not families. In markets already short on housing, every acre lost to data center development means fewer homes built, higher prices for the homes that are built, and more households shut out of ownership entirely.

The numbers explain why home builders and developers are losing. In Northern Virginia alone, some of the deals that have closed since 2024 include:

In Loudoun County, the SDC deal came out to about $6.3 million per acre.

In Prince William County, Microsoft paid $465.5 million for about 124 acres in 2024, or about $3.75 million per acre.

In Fairfax County, Starwood Capital Group agreed in 2026 to buy about 42 acres of county-owned land in Chantilly for $166.8 million, or about $4 million per acre, for potential data center development.

In Ashburn, Amazon agreed to buy George Washington University’s roughly 120-acre Virginia Science and Technology Campus for $427 million, with the deed reportedly allowing a data or information technology center on the site ($3.5 million per acre).

In March 2026, a data center developer reportedly began offering homeowners in Ashburn’s Regency neighborhood about $4.4 million per acre to assemble a roughly 130-acre site.

Median land prices in Northern Virginia are nowhere close to those figures. A 2025 land price analysis reported median land prices of about $125,000 per acre in Loudoun County and $93,750 per acre in Prince William County. Those medians are broad countywide estimates, not perfect comparisons to fully entitled development sites. But once land can be used for data centers, especially where power, water, and zoning are available, it becomes a different kind of land market where data center bidders are willing to pay 30-50 times what developers are used to paying.

In light of the recent (and constant) black-on-white violence, I decided to create an updated homicide offender chart. What I found will shock you.

You are 42 times more likely to be murdered by a black male aged 15–24 than by a White male of ANY age.

• A black male CHILD aged 5–14 is statistically more likely to kill you than a White MAN aged 35–64.

• Black males of ANY age are about 14 times more likely to be a murderer than White males of any age.

• The single highest rate in the entire table is black males 15–24 at 110.36 per 100,000. That is higher than the rate for Hispanic males of ANY age and dramatically higher than EVERY White AND female category.

• Even black males 65+ (2.51) still exceed the all-ages White male rate (2.63 is close, but the younger Black male groups crush it).

• Hispanic males overall rate (9.45) is about 3.6× the White male rate, but STILL only about one-quarter of the black male rate.

• Black females (2.65) are roughly equal to White males overall, while White females are the lowest at 0.66. Head on a swivel, ALWAYS.

https://x.com/AmiriKing/status/2086138382594256984?s=20