The money — Loudoun Data Center Watch

The two numbers

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Every figure here is rendered from data/finance.json so that no number can appear without the document it came from. That file is plain text and readable on its own, and the sources are listed at the foot of this page.

Two different taxes

The local one is a personal property tax. Loudoun County assesses the servers, switches, chillers and generators sitting inside a data center and taxes them every year at the county's general personal property rate. It is not a data center rate. It is the same rate charged to a restaurant on its ovens, and the Board of Supervisors sets it.

The state one is a sales and use tax exemption. Under Virginia Code § 58.1-609.3(18), a data center operator that signs a memorandum of understanding with the Virginia Economic Development Partnership — committing to a minimum capital investment and a number of jobs — buys that same equipment without paying sales tax. The General Assembly sets that, not the county, and Loudoun cannot alter it.

So the same rack of servers is taxed annually by the county and untaxed once by the Commonwealth at the point of sale. Both facts are true at the same time. Neither cancels the other out.

What Loudoun collects

This is the benefit side, and it is large and it is real. It is also budgeted rather than banked: the last two years below are the county's own forecasts.

What Virginia forgoes

This is the cost side, and it lands on the Commonwealth's budget rather than the county's. The figures come from what the operators themselves report; the state does not audit them.

The gap

What is not disclosed

There is no honest way to say what any individual data center's tax break is worth, and this site will not print one. Per-company and per-facility amounts are confidential taxpayer information under Virginia law. The agencies that hold the numbers are barred from releasing them, and they say so in the reports themselves.

That is not a footnote. It is the finding. The Commonwealth's largest economic development programme is concentrated in a handful of firms, and the public record is built so that no one outside government can say which.

If you see a figure elsewhere claiming to be one company's or one building's tax break, ask where it came from. Apportioning a statewide total across buildings by floor area or megawatts produces a number that looks precise and means nothing.

Estimates, not counts

Everything above this line is a figure some government published. Everything below it comes out of a model, and models answer questions nobody can observe — what would have happened if the data centers had never come. They are worth reading and they are not measurements.

How to weigh this

The county figure is a benefit and the state figure is a cost, and they do not fall on the same people. Loudoun residents get the local revenue. The forgone sales tax comes out of a state budget that funds schools, Medicaid and transportation in every Virginia locality, most of which have no data centers at all.

The state's own return-on-investment model concludes the exemption pays for itself. That conclusion rests almost entirely on one assumption — that roughly nine tenths of this investment would have gone to another state without the tax break. If that assumption is right, the exemption is cheap. If it is wrong, Virginia is paying for buildings it would have got anyway. JLARC has published estimates on both sides of it, and nobody can settle it by observation, because the counterfactual never happened.

Reasonable people read the same numbers and reach opposite conclusions. This page's job is to make sure they are at least reading the same numbers, with the right labels on them.

Sources

These are annual and biennial publications, not live feeds. Nothing on this page is fetched from a government server by your browser. scripts/refresh-finance.py checks each source page for changes and reports when one needs revisiting; it never writes a figure of its own. If you find an error here, tell us — corrections to this page take priority over everything else on the site.