Land purchases across the United States for future data centers reached approximately $6 billion in the first half of 2026 — a 79% increase from the same period last year — as the commercial real estate buildout driven by artificial intelligence reshapes rural land markets and ignites growing opposition from farmers and local residents.
According to commercial real estate firm Avison Young, data centers now account for 27% of all development sites in the U.S. this year, making them the second-highest land-use category after apartment buildings and outpacing industrial buildings, office buildings, retail spaces, and mixed-use developments.
The scale of investment is visible in property valuations. Site costs in Northern Virginia and the Northeast surpassed $8 million per acre last year, according to real estate firm CBRE. In Loudoun County, Virginia, one data center developer reportedly offered $4.4 million per acre — a figure that dwarfs the county's 2025 median land price of $125,000 per acre, per data cited by the National Association of Home Builders.
The NAHB has argued the distortion eliminates affordable housing options entirely. "Home builders cannot bid in that market, because a builder's land budget is capped by what home buyers can afford," the association said in a July brief. "A data center operator faces no such constraint. The result is not more expensive homes on that parcel. It is no homes at all."
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller voiced similar concerns at a July protest against data center development in Lubbock. "When [data centers] first started popping up, nobody really knew much about them," Miller said. "I found out real quick that they were taking up our very best farmland. ... And [developers] give sometimes 10 times the value, so it's hard for farmers to turn that down."
In Lancaster, Pennsylvania, cloud computing company CoreWeave is building a data center less than 20 miles from the farm of Bobbi Thompson in Mount Joy Township. Thompson cited pressure on regional water supplies. "Where is all the water coming from?" she said. "What does that mean for us as a community?"
Concerns about electricity costs carry independent support. Data center load growth is "the primary reason" for "high prices" within electricity capacity markets, according to a May report from Monitoring Analytics, the independent monitor of the PJM wholesale electricity transmission region, which covers all or parts of 13 states in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest. The report found that "data center load growth resulted in a combined total increase in capacity market revenues" of $23.1 billion from auctions through 2028.
Thompson and her sister, Michelle Kennedy, said they have received dozens of acquisition offers over the past year for their 45-acre family farm. Their immediate neighbors have filed to rezone adjacent farmland into an industrial complex accommodating more than one million square feet of manufacturing and warehousing space.
Lindsey Dodge, a resident of Boise, Idaho, described the psychological toll of the transformation. "It's a little depressing, as far as the outlook, to physically see the farmland go away," she said.
The tension reflects a structural mismatch: data center operators, backed by Wall Street capital and urgent AI infrastructure timelines, face no ceiling on land bids, while farmers, homebuilders, and municipalities are constrained by agricultural commodity prices, residential affordability limits, and existing zoning frameworks.
Investors are increasingly factoring political resistance into their calculus, as organized community groups in multiple states work to block or delay project approvals. The concentration of data center construction in specific regions — driven by proximity to reliable power grids — means the economic and social disruption is not evenly distributed, making localized opposition both intense and strategically significant for developers who need to move quickly to meet surging AI compute demand.
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