Abandoned Land? Build a Data Center

I've been working the darkside of a coal mine since I was three feet tall. I like being a data center owner better. I'm about to buy my first 911 and with luck a Cessna Citation.

Abandoned Land? Build a Data Center

Alabama is doing it with closed coal plants, the Virginias with old strip mines.

By Jay Reed, WSJ

Oct. 1, 2026 4:58 pm ET

A data center under construction in Abilene, Texas, Sept. 23, 2025. Shelby Tauber/Reuters

Most Americans don’t want a data center next door. A Gallup survey in March found that 71% of adults oppose building one in their area, even as the U.S. needs more digital infrastructure to compete against China.

I work alongside the people on the ground building these facilities. We watch this distrust play out in city council meetings and permit hearings. Residents deserve transparency about data centers’ effects on their power bills, water use and property values. But some sites will be less controversial than others, and the industry needs options that create less friction.

Abandoned mine lands, closed power plants and vacant industrial sites already possess what developers pay a premium for: existing transmission infrastructure, water rights and large, contiguous tracts of land. Building a data center on these sites wouldn’t displace farm land, forests or a neighborhood. This land often sits in communities that have spent decades seeking new investment, not fighting to keep it out.

Alabama shows this strategy can work. In 2019 Google opened a data center on the retired Widows Creek coal plant site in Jackson County by repurposing unused switchyards and transmission lines. Now the company is investing $1.5 billion to expand the campus and contracting new electrical-generation capacity rather than existing power. A site that once burned coal now powers the cloud.

But there is work to be done. An hour south, in Childersburg, Ala., a World War II-era plant that once manufactured explosives—and heavy water for the Manhattan Project—sits dormant. Deed restrictions confine the land to commercial and industrial use, and the groundwater remains under investigation. The bottom line: It won’t be converted into housing or farmland soon. Why not a data center?

In Virginia and West Virginia, strip-mined land is being repurposed for the data center build-out, turning coal country into cloud country.

For generations, these communities powered America’s growth but kept few benefits. With data centers, the infrastructure stays, the tax base expands, and electricians, pipe fitters, ironworkers and laborers can spend years on a single project.

The tools already exist. The Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization program provides federal money for returning legacy mining sites to productive use. Alabama drew $11 million from it last year. The state’s 2023 brownfield law offers liability protections to developers once an approved cleanup site is restored. This approach could give the nation’s more than 450,000 brownfield sites a second life.

A new perspective is required. We must stop treating discarded land as a problem and begin seeing it as the solution to building America’s digital infrastructure.