Google Buffalo Data Center, Buffalo, West Virginia

Google has bought about 1,700 acres for a data center campus at 22272 Charleston Road, at the north end of the town of Buffalo near the Kanawha River, in Putnam County, West Virginia. Governor Patrick Morrisey's office announced the purchase on Friday, March 27, 2026, three days after the Department of Commerce received Google's application for certification as a high-impact data center. Google would not say what it paid or who sold the land, and the announcement gave no figure for the investment, the number of jobs, the emissions or the timing. Morrisey called it "a strong signal that our state is competing and winning for the jobs and industries of the future."

A Google affiliate, Cumulus Group LLC, has applied to the Army Corps of Engineers for a permit for what it calls Project Avalon. The filing describes eight data center buildings on the 1,699 acre site, more than 2.2 million square feet, with construction disturbing about 1,254 acres and more than 14 miles of internal road. It would affect over 34 acres across 17 wetlands and more than 45,000 feet of 34 streams, and put 184 acres of spoil in the Kanawha River floodplain. Two 30 inch intake pipes would be installed by horizontal directional drilling for the project's water treatment plant, with 850 feet of permanent impact along the Kanawha shoreline. Nine federally protected species live in the range of the work, among them the Indiana bat, the northern long-eared bat, the tricolored bat, five freshwater mussels and the monarch butterfly. The Army Corps application went through a 30-day public comment period, and formal Endangered Species Act consultation will start once further bat and mussel surveys are received. The state Department of Environmental Protection estimates West Virginia has already lost 80 to 90 percent of its wetlands.

Chad Minamyer, who had brain cancer in 2012, said he wants out: "We don't know the long-term health effects of living near something like that. Who knows what might happen to some of these people 20, 30 years from now if they don't move away." Mayor Conrad Cain said he was "tickled to death" and was waiting for more detail, while pointing out that the town now has Google to the north and Toyota to the south, the river on one side and a hillside on the other, and nowhere left to expand. Delegate Kathie Hess Crouse said that if the project goes ahead it will be at least a year before construction begins.

Besides the Army Corps permit, Google's engineers filed applications dated June 15, 2026 with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection for a State Waters Permit and a Water Quality Certification, and those agencies decide whether the site work can go ahead.