Sites / VA / Botetourt

Google Data Center at Botetourt Center at Greenfield

Status: announced · Confidence: medium · Announced: 2026

Facts

Signal notes

Proposed Google campus at the Botetourt Center at Greenfield business park, served by Western Virginia Water Authority (WVWA) municipal water and sewer. Developer of record is Helio Capital LLC, an entity representing Google; utility-services funding and county performance agreements ($3B, ~150 jobs by 2030) are signed, but no land-use construction permit is confirmed here, so status stays "announced". Water figures conflict by basis and phase, and are resolved conservatively to the highest-confidence primary figure. water_usage_gpd is set to the 2,000,000 gal/day WVWA reserved-capacity ceiling (permitted-max) from the county; the county explicitly states Google's reported actual use is lower than this planning number, so this is a ceiling, not a measured average. Cardinal News (citing Google's 2026 environmental report) frames 2M gal/day as the contracted initial figure rising to as much as ~8M gal/day at full buildout (estimated) — carried as a separate signal, not averaged in. Records released under FOIA and reporting on the water-use disclosure dispute (e.g. the Roanoke Rambler) have surfaced higher potential figures; the gap between reserved capacity, Google-reported actual use, and full-expansion estimates is unresolved and deliberately left in these notes rather than collapsed into a single number. Botetourt is outside the Greater Richmond Metro focus area but within Virginia's deep-coverage scope. Added as the first end-to-end water_source / water_usage_gpd / water_usage_basis record (kdc#165) because it is the best primary-sourced water figure available in VA right now; Henrico/Chesterfield sources so far give only county-aggregate water use, not per-site figures.

Sources

• Google Data Center - Water — Botetourt County government, 2026
  Water source (WVWA) and the 2,000,000 gal/day reserved-capacity ceiling; county notes actual use runs lower.
• By water use, Google's Botetourt site would be its 8th largest data center complex in the world — Cardinal News, 2026-07-09
  ~2M gal/day initial, up to ~8M gal/day at full expansion; from Google's 2026 environmental report.
• Documents reveal key details of proposed Google Data Center Project in Botetourt County — WSLS, 2026-03-12
  $3B / ~150 jobs by 2030 performance agreement; developer Helio Capital LLC; WVWA utility agreement.
• Google Data Center in Botetourt Center at Greenfield — Western Virginia Water Authority, 2026
  Location and utility-services scope.

Signals

Raw observations behind this record (6): sig-20260714-google-botetourt-water-reserve, sig-20260714-google-botetourt-water-source, sig-20260714-google-botetourt-water-expansion, sig-20260714-google-botetourt-location, sig-20260714-google-botetourt-investment, sig-20260714-google-botetourt-status

Record file · dataset licensed CC BY 4.0 — see provenance.