I was talking recently with former Roanoke Vice Mayor Bev Fitzpatrick Jr. — who had a long career in economic development before he went into politics — about the Google data center that’s headed to Botetourt County.
Fitzpatrick said he thought this could be “the biggest thing for the Roanoke Valley since the coming of the railroad” in 1882. Since the arrival of the headquarters of what was then the Norfolk & Western Railway turned the marsh patch of Big Lick into a boomtown named Roanoke, that’s a mighty big claim. The astronomer Carl Sagan is famous for saying that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and this seemed a proposition that I could put to the test.
While I can’t peer into the future, I can do the next best thing — and look to see what has happened to other places where Google has put data centers. Much of the excitement here is about the Google brand name. To be fair, not everyone is excited — some city officials worry that Google will use too much water and limit the city’s future development opportunities; I went over those numbers in a previous column. Still, the point is, if this were Fast Eddie’s Cut-Rate Data Center Emporium, the anxiety level might be just as high but the excitement level would not be. Here, though, is the seventh-biggest company in the world, one whose corporate name has become a verb, investing in the Roanoke Valley. That seems something that can be leveraged. However, before we get carried away by boosterism, let’s look at some actual facts.
Google has 20 data center sites across the United States. Five of those are listed as “in development,” so we can set them aside. (Botetourt, where the land has been purchased but no specific plan announced, isn’t yet on the list of 20.) Anyway, now we have 15 sites. However, some of those are just outside major cities — Atlanta, Dallas, Las Vegas, and, of course, Northern Virginia outside Washington. Those don’t seem good comparisons, either. The impact of anything — be it a Google data center or a new Gas N Go — is going to be different on the edge of a major metro than it is in the middle of Botetourt County.
In the end, I found only four sites that roughly (key word) match Botetourt, meaning a rural or small community that’s not an exurb of some much larger city. That means I’m not looking at the Google data centers outside Charleston, South Carolina (metro population 869,940), or Reno, Nevada (metro population, 575,831). Those just don’t seem like fair comparisons with Botetourt, which is part of the Roanoke metro (315,749) — and our comparisons do need to be by metro areas. Economies pay little heed to invisible political borders between cities and counties. If the Google data center is an economic win, it’s a win for the whole Roanoke Valley (just not necessarily evenly; Botetourt would get the tax revenue). If it’s a loss, the same principle applies.
So how do these four metro areas with Google data centers compare to us?
Of these four, two are in metro areas almost exactly the size of the Roanoke Valley (Lenoir, North Carolina, and Clarksville, Tennessee), while two are in places much smaller (Bridgeport, Alabama, and The Dalles, Oregon).
Google did not provide employment figures, so I’ve been forced to rely on what’s been reported in each community and sometimes that’s a little dated (three years old at most), but we can still get a rough sense of things. To make the comparisons clearer, I’m ranking these by the population of each metro area.
Lenoir, North Carolina
Metro population: 373,031
Of note: About 76 miles from Charlotte
Google opened: 2007
Opening employment: 210
Current employment: More than 250
Total investment: $1.2 billion
Clarksville, Tennessee
Metro population: 345,955
Google opened: 2019
Opening employment: 70
Current employment: Unclear, but no reports of major expansion since opening
Total investment: $600 million
Bridgeport, Alabama
Metro population: 52,597
Of note: About 35 miles from Chattanooga, Tennessee, but not part of the Chattanooga MSA
Google opened: 2018
Opening employment: 75-100
Current employment: About 100, as of 2023
Total investment: $600 million
The Dalles, Oregon
Metro population: 26,507
Google opened: 2006
Opening employment: 80 people
Current employment: 200 people, as of 2024
Total investment: $1.8 billion over 18 years
Of these, the biggest job growth has been in the smallest community: The Dalles. That’s also the one that’s been open the longest.
I found more job growth at other data centers, but they were in bigger communities. For instance, the Google data centers (plural) in South Carolina’s Lowcountry have grown from an initial 200 employees to 900 or so now — but those are also in rural counties that are part of the Charleston metro. We don’t have a job count yet for what Google in Botetourt will have, but we know that, generally speaking, data centers are not particularly large employers. IBIS World says the average employment at a hyperscale data center is 36.2, although I also notice that all these opening job count numbers above are twice that or more. In any case, data centers are valued — where they are valued — because the jobs they do provide pay very well (a study by the General Assembly’s research arm found that “on average, data center employees and contractors earn about $100,000 per year, varying based on job role and area of the state) and because data centers generate a lot of tax revenue.
My initial takeaway from these numbers is that data centers can create a lot of job growth (see those South Carolina numbers) but don’t automatically do so (see all the other numbers). Let’s err on the side of caution and take the lowest figure above: 70 jobs. What impact would a company with about 70 jobs, averaging six figures, have on the Roanoke Valley economy? Would that justify the claim that Google is the new railroad?
Before we answer that, let’s take another look at our comparison metros above. There’s something the Roanoke Valley has that other metros don’t — maybe several somethings. They don’t have a medical school with a medical research center in that metro. They also don’t have a major research university in the adjacent metro.
I am not immediately convinced by this data that a Google data center alone is transformative in the way that the railroad was. However, the alchemy (some would prefer the word “synergy”) of Google in conjunction with the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and Virginia Tech seems another matter entirely.
The only places outside Silicon Valley where Google has data centers that are near a major research university higher ranked than Virginia Tech are Columbus, Ohio, (Ohio State) and Atlanta (Georgia Tech). That makes the Google site in the Roanoke Valley a unicorn — nowhere else do we have the proximity of a Google data center with a research university and medical research complex in a relatively small community.
Of the five data center complexes that Google has in development, two are also in metro areas that have research universities that rank higher than Virginia Tech but they’re also in bigger communities. One is in a suburb of Phoenix, near Arizona State. The other is in Fort Wayne, Indiana, near Purdue. With a population of 463,000, Fort Wayne is 46.6% bigger than the Roanoke Valley but is the most comparable of any of the other communities where Google is developing data centers.
Ultimately, what’s notable to me is that how few of Google data centers line up with high-ranked research universities and medical schools. We, though, will have one.
Not long ago, not even that alignment of the tech stars would have sparked much, but the rapid rise of artificial intelligence could be the game-changer. We simply have no idea how these entities can or will work together — or what could or would happen if they do. Maybe nothing. Or maybe things we can begin to dream of. We do know that the National Institutes of Health has said the potential for AI in the development of new drugs “is immense.” We know that Harvard University has said that AI has “the potential to transform health care and disrupt the field of medicine in significant ways.” We also know that the European-based Scimago Institutions Rankings, which includes more than universities, ranks Google as the seventh-best research organization in the country — ahead of Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the National Institutes of Health and just about every place else you’ve heard of. This is what is now on a trajectory to land in the Roanoke Valley.
Will Google wind up being the most important thing to happen in the valley since the arrival of the railroad? I have no idea, but the answer might depend on what we make of this opportunity.
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