Eric Scharaga
Founder, Damen Capital Fund
Private lender and direct land note buyer serving land investors nationwide. Featured on REtipster, Legends of Land, and Land Investing Online. LinkedIn →
By Eric Scharaga, Founder, Damen Capital Fund · July 2026
Land brokers started using the phrase powered land around 2023, and it now moves real money. It means acreage with credible access to electric capacity: close to a substation with headroom, near high voltage transmission, or already holding a position in the interconnection queue. Data center developers, especially the hyperscalers building AI capacity, will pay multiples of farm value for it, because power availability, not land price, is the constraint that decides where the next campus goes.
A data center campus can draw 100 to 1,000 megawatts. Getting new capacity delivered means transmission studies, substation upgrades, and interconnection queues that run years in many regions. So a parcel that shortens that timeline carries real economic value to a developer. The market has responded with a rough hierarchy. At the bottom, ordinary rural acreage with no power story trades at agricultural value. Above it, land within a mile or two of a substation with available capacity trades at a premium. At the top, sites with an interconnection application on file, or a completed power study showing deliverable megawatts, trade at prices that look irrational next to county comps and rational next to a developer's timeline.
Developers and their land agents look at a checklist that has little to do with how farmers price ground: distance to transmission and substation capacity, fiber routes, water availability for cooling, zoning and the county's appetite for data centers, contiguous acreage of 50 plus acres for hyperscale, topography and geotech, and whether the seller can deliver clean title quickly. A parcel that checks power, fiber, and a friendly county can be worth 3 to 10 times agricultural value. A parcel one county over with a hostile board or a full queue is still just farmland.
Two things kill powered land premiums overnight. Counties pass data center moratoriums, and several have after resident pushback on noise, water, and tax deals. And interconnection queues reject or delay sites when studies show the grid cannot deliver. Anyone paying a powered premium is carrying that risk, which is exactly why lenders who finance this land value it at as is agricultural value and let the buyer keep the upside.
The common strategy is site control: tie up acreage near capacity with contracts or options, then sell the position to a developer or flip the assembled site. The problem is that banks will not lend on raw speculative acreage, and sellers in active corridors will not wait 60 days for a maybe. Investors in this niche use private data center land loans that close in about 7 days against the as is land value, keeping the powered upside entirely on the buyer's side of the table. If the exit is real, the carry cost is noise. If the county passes a moratorium, the loan was sized to plain acreage and the investor owns farmland at farmland prices, not a speculation priced for a boom.
The niche is professionalizing fast. Two years ago this was farmers fielding cold calls from land agents. Today there are brokerages that do nothing but powered land, subscription databases mapping substation capacity by county, and investors running direct mail campaigns to owners within a mile of transmission. That competition changes the game for individual investors in two ways. First, the obvious sites near famous corridors, Northern Virginia, Columbus, Atlanta, are largely picked over or priced to perfection. The opportunity has moved to secondary markets where utilities have announced capacity additions but the land market has not caught up. Second, speed matters more than ever, because you are rarely the only buyer who found the parcel.
The other shift is that utilities and grid operators keep changing the rules. Some regions have paused new large load interconnections entirely. Others introduced cluster studies that process queue requests in batches, which can add or subtract years from a site's timeline in a single policy change. This is why sophisticated buyers treat every powered land deal as two deals: the land deal, priced against agricultural comps they would be content to own, and the power deal, which is upside they refuse to pay full price for today. Structure your purchase so the first deal stands on its own and the second one cannot hurt you, and you can play this market without betting the farm on a queue position.
Tying up land near power? We close acquisition loans in 7 days at as is land value.
Get a Free Quote →Powered land is acreage with credible access to electric capacity: near a substation with headroom, close to high voltage transmission, or holding an interconnection queue position. Data center developers pay premiums for it because power availability decides where new campuses can be built.
In active data center corridors, parcels with real power access can trade at 3 to 10 times agricultural value. The premium depends on deliverable capacity, fiber, water, county zoning posture, and contiguous acreage, not distance alone.
County moratoriums and interconnection queue rejections are the two big ones. Either can collapse the premium back to farm value overnight, which is why careful buyers and their lenders underwrite the as is agricultural value as the downside case.
Banks generally decline raw speculative acreage. Private lenders like Damen Capital Fund finance the land at up to 65% of its as is value with 7 day closings, letting the investor keep all of the powered upside.
Private lender and direct land note buyer serving land investors nationwide. Featured on REtipster, Legends of Land, and Land Investing Online. LinkedIn →