Mountain Road Technology Park (Tract) data center, Hanover County, Virginia

The Hanover County Board of Supervisors voted 4-3 on May 27, 2026 to deny Tract's rezoning request for the Mountain Road Technology Park, a 900 megawatt data center campus proposed on nearly 430 acres at 13074 Mountain Road and 12517 Winns Church Road in western Hanover County, Virginia. Tract, a Denver-based data center developer, had won a recommendation of approval from the county planning commission the month before.

The site is a seven-parcel, mostly undeveloped and wooded assemblage. Tract asked to rezone it from agricultural to limited industrial, with a permit for substations. It lies near the former Tyson Foods processing plant and the Henrico County line. Most of it is owned by Henrico-based Marchetti Properties, with Tyson Foods and G. M. and Brenda Tribble owning other parcels. Tract planned five buildings and committed to air cooling or recirculating evaporative cooling. The campus would have drawn an average of 600,000 gallons of water a day from the county system, with a peak of 2 million gallons. A Dominion Energy spokesperson said the first phase would be energized toward the end of 2029. Tract projected $901 million in tax revenue for the county between 2025 and 2044, up to 350 direct jobs and 1,100 construction jobs, though a full build-out was not expected before 2036. To win votes it offered $15 million for a booster pump station and water storage tanks, $6 million for land conservation and parks, limits on commercial vehicle traffic, payment for sheriff's traffic control during construction, and yearly noise studies at its own expense if the planning director asked.

More than 30 people spoke against the project during a two-hour hearing and eight spoke for it, the opponents citing the water supply and the environment and the supporters tax revenue and jobs. The opposition was organized by Friends of Hanover, a coalition formed in response to industrial development in the county. "A 'Yes' vote will put us squarely on the irreversible path to lose our rural county", resident Jane Kirchner, who moved to Hanover from Loudoun County, told the board. At the planning commission in April, the vote was 6-1, with Ashland Commissioner Alan Abbott saying: "I think having too many data centers when we don't know the impact of it is problematic". Beaverdam construction worker Simon Strong spoke for the project there: "They're a good thing for the tax revenue of the county."

Board chair Sean Davis of the Henry district cast the deciding vote, joined by Faye Prichard of Ashland, Danielle Floyd of Chickahominy and Jeff Stoneman of Beaverdam. Sue Dibble of South Anna, where the site is, Ryan Hudson of Mechanicsville and Michael Herzberg of Cold Harbor voted in favor. "Good revenue doesn't make a bad project good, and bad revenue doesn't make a good project bad," Davis said. Stoneman said: "I do think the water concern is a valid issue here," and that Tract's water offer was welcome, "However, I don't know if it goes far enough to meet the needs." Prichard acknowledged that the residents' campaign played a role in the decision that blocked the project: "I don't think this many citizens coming forward to say, 'This is really something we don't want,' is something I have the ability to ignore". Dibble said the revised plan answered residents' concerns and would be "our first step in the implementation of the vision for the Route 33 corridor".

It was the second large data center plan turned back in Hanover in 2026: a 400-acre HHHunt proposal near the Wyndham community was rejected by the planning commission in January and then withdrawn. By late June LS Power had withdrawn its zoning request for a 200-acre data center site at 10165 Old Ridge Road, near Kings Dominion, and the supervisors had unanimously restored the county's data center equipment tax at 45 cents per $100 of assessed value. Tract itself is under construction on a 1,200-acre campus near Ashland that won zoning approval in 2024. The next case is Iron Horse, a data center campus on about 78 acres off East Patrick Henry Road in the Beaverdam district, which the planning commission recommended for approval 5-2 in August 2026 over objections from Friends of Hanover. "It's turning it into a corridor right there, just like a small data center corridor a mile long with residential neighbors sandwiched in the middle," Friends of Hanover's Jennifer Corpus said in June of Iron Horse and the approved Hickory Hill Road tech park nearby.

Corpus told VPM News on June 1, 2026 that she wants firmer rules: "We really would love to stop playing whack-a-mole with data centers and instead get a data center ordinance, policy and guardrails passed in Virginia". The final decision on Iron Horse, as on Mountain Road, rests with the Hanover County Board of Supervisors.