Chesterfield County Cuts Data Center Tax Rate to Lowest In Virginia

Chesterfield County Looks to Become Major Digital Hub by Reducing Tax Rate for Data Centers by 86.6%

The Chesterfield County Board of Supervisors is reducing the tax rate on data centers operating in the county. The new rate will be the lowest in Virginia.

Data center operations are a target market sector for Chesterfield County Economic Development. The county has the right mix of population, energy, fiber, water, and land costs to attract multi-megawatt data centers. This tax rate cut emphasizes a favorable tax policy that is very important to the data center market.

This rate reduction also adds to the attractiveness of building a data center in Chesterfield. A tech-savvy regional workforce is ready to meet data center personnel requirements. The water supply infrastructure needed for cooling operations is available at multiple data center sites. And Chesterfield has a proven partnership with Dominion Energy in supplying the power required for data center operations.

Currently, data centers pay an effective business property tax rate of $1.80 per $100 of assessed value for equipment put into service during the first year of operation. That effective rate is reduced every year for the following five years by a decreasing assessment ratio schedule.

The new effective rate for data center equipment will be $0.24 per $100 of assessed value. That new rate will go into effect in July 2019 and represents an 86.6% reduction from the current effective rate.

Currently, the epicenter of the North American data center market is in northern Virginia. The world’s fastest subsea data cables connecting the United States to Europe, South America and Africa come ashore in Virginia Beach. The fiber connecting these undersea cables with the digital hub in northern Virginia runs right through Chesterfield County.

With its complete set of attributes, Chesterfield is ideally positioned to become a major digital hub for data center operations. This reduction in the business property tax rate for data centers to the lowest in Virginia represents a significant commitment to fulfilling that vision.

Contact:

Chesterfield Economic Development
Matt McLaren, Senior Project Manager
Email: McLarenM@chesterfield.gov
Phone: 804-318-8550

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