Data Centers and Zoning in Louisa County, Virginia

Why Louisa specifically: North Anna Power Station

Louisa County is home to Dominion Energy's North Anna Power Station, a nuclear plant that generates roughly 15% of Virginia's electricity and more than 40% of the state's carbon-free power. That generation capacity, combined with the high-voltage transmission infrastructure already built to move it -- including a 500kV line running roughly 70 miles north to the Ashburn/Data Center Alley corridor -- makes Louisa a genuinely attractive site for the kind of power-hungry data center campuses that are increasingly being sited near generation and major transmission rather than purely near fiber or population. That is the underlying reason Louisa, a rural Central Virginia county between Richmond and Charlottesville, has become an active data-center growth market rather than a purely agricultural one.

The Technology Overlay District: created 2023, tightened 2024

In 2023, the Louisa County Board of Supervisors created a Technology Overlay District (TOD) -- a zoning overlay layered on top of base zoning in specific areas of the county judged to have the infrastructure a data center or tech campus needs: adequate fiber, water and transportation access, and proximity to high-voltage transmission lines, while explicitly trying to steer that development away from historically significant sites and existing residential or agricultural areas. As originally adopted, qualifying data center uses within the TOD were permitted by right, meaning a project meeting the district's standards could be approved administratively without a public hearing.

That changed in August 2024: amid resident concern that unchecked data-center growth would strain the public water supply and erode the county's rural character, the Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to shrink the TOD's boundaries and require a conditional use permit (CUP) for new data center and other tech-sector proposals going forward. A CUP is a legislative approval requiring a public hearing and an affirmative board vote -- a materially slower, more contestable process than the original by-right path, and one that gives neighbors a real chance to weigh in project by project.

Two campuses already under construction, a third withdrawn, and a fourth proposed

Because they were approved before the 2024 CUP requirement took effect, two AWS data center campuses -- the Lake Anna Technology Campus and the North Creek Technology Campus -- are currently under construction inside the TOD, representing a reported $11 billion of a stated $35 billion Amazon investment across Virginia through 2040. In July 2025, Amazon withdrew a proposed third Louisa County campus -- a 7.2-million-square-foot project -- after sustained resident opposition centered on noise, the loss of agricultural land, and the pace of development; that withdrawal happened before the project reached a CUP vote. Separately, in January 2026, AWS purchased roughly 1,920 acres of additional land in central Louisa County for about $72 million -- a private land transaction that did not require Board approval on its own, but that two district supervisors (representing Mineral and Green Springs districts) have publicly signaled opposition to seeing developed as a further data center campus. EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure has separately announced its own roughly 1.1-gigawatt data center campus in the county.

For a land buyer, the practical upshot is that Louisa now has a real, live population of data center projects in different stages -- some grandfathered under the old by-right rules, some subject to the new CUP process, and some still just land purchases without a filed application. A parcel's status inside or outside the TOD, and whether any pending application affects land near it, is worth confirming directly with the county's Community Development department rather than assumed from a neighboring project's history.

A still-unsettled boundary fight

As of planning-commission activity referenced in spring 2026 reporting, the county was actively considering a further rollback of the TOD's boundaries and use standards -- on top of the 2024 shrinkage -- reflecting continued resident pressure to limit how much of the county can qualify for data-center development at all. Whether that further rollback has since been adopted, modified, or set aside is worth confirming directly with the county rather than assumed from this page's September 2026 snapshot; this is genuinely a live, evolving zoning fight, not a settled rule, in exactly the way Loudoun County's data-center zoning fight to the north remains unsettled.

If you're evaluating land specifically because of its TOD status or its proximity to North Anna's transmission infrastructure -- either as a data-center-adjacent investment or as a rural buyer trying to gauge how much industrial development might arrive nearby -- treat the TOD's current boundary map, its buffering and noise standards, and whether a CUP application is pending near a specific parcel as items to confirm fresh with Louisa County's Community Development office, not facts to assume from this page's snapshot.