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Powered land in primary US markets traded at an average of $584,000 per megawatt in 2026 year to date — 35% above the five-year average (Cushman & Wakefield, 3 September 2026). Median data center land in Northern Virginia reached $2.8 million per acre. Landside Partners tells owners of industrial land which demand pool their parcel actually belongs to — data center, seaport or air cargo — and what that changes about the price.
No fee. One parcel. One page. Usually back within five business days.
The three bidders
A bulk-warehouse developer underwrites your parcel on clear height, trailer stalls and drive time to a population centroid. The three buyers now setting the top of the market do not. A data center developer underwrites interconnection voltage and queue position. A port-logistics developer underwrites berth capacity that opens in 2028. An air-cargo developer underwrites apron access and a ground lease. Same dirt, three different pricing engines, and a spread between them that is routinely measured in multiples rather than percentages.
Scroll to explore the map
Every site plotted here is tabulated in full on the data centre project atlas, the port capacity table and the cargo airport rankings.
Proximity is priced explicitly. Sites within half a mile of a substation trade at roughly 2x the per-acre price of sites two to five miles away, and land with 230kV or 500kV service commands about 2.4x the price of land served only at 138kV and below (Altus Group, August 2026). Parcel size cuts the other way: small infill under 25 acres averaged $3.3M per acre against $28,000 per acre for greenfield sites over 1,000 acres — a spread of roughly 120x.
Committed, funded, dated seaport capacity is landing between 2027 and 2030. The Port of Virginia reaches 5.8M TEU once the $650M NIT North Berth completes in mid-2027, on an already-finished 55-foot channel. Savannah's Ocean Terminal conversion adds 2.0M TEU by 2028 against a $1.54B budget. Mobile rises 50% to 1.4M TEU on a $131M berth. The $1.8B Louisiana International Terminal opens its first wharf in 2028. Land should be banked against the 2027 to 2029 openings, not the 2035 ones.
Air cargo capacity cannot grow this decade. Boeing's 777-8F has slipped to the early 2030s, 767F production ends in 2027, the A350F does not deliver until the second half of 2027, and the freighter conversion pipeline falls from roughly 90 units a year to four by 2034. Throughput per square foot of gateway warehouse becomes the constraint, which is why airport-adjacent rents at Dallas-Fort Worth grew 107% between 2019 and 2024 against 64% for the wider market (CompStak).
Why owners leave money on the table
Marketed to the wrong pool. A 40-acre site three-tenths of a mile from a 230kV substation is a data center site being sold as a warehouse site. The pricing difference is not a negotiation; it is a category error.
Power never documented. Buyers pay for certainty. An owner who can hand over a load-study response, a queue position and a written utility willingness letter is selling a different asset from the owner who can only say there are lines on the property.
Entitlement risk priced against the seller. In March 2026 Virginia courts invalidated the rezoning for the 2,100-acre Virginia Digital Gateway because the newspaper notices for the approval hearing were not separated by the six days state and local code require. QTS and Compass abandoned what would have been the world's largest data center campus on 2 July 2026. Procedure is now a first-order underwriting risk, and buyers discount for it.
No competitive tension across pools. The only reliable way to find the top of a range is to make two pricing engines compete. That requires knowing both.
“By the time a transaction appears as announced or permitted, typically 30 to 40 months of utility coordination, entitlement and tenant negotiation has already occurred.”
What we do
Landside Partners is built the way an institutional research desk is built and pointed at a problem private landowners actually have. We publish the market — project by project, megawatt by megawatt, berth by berth — because you cannot advise on a parcel without knowing who is building within 200 miles of it and what they paid.
A one-page diagnostic on a single parcel: demand pool, price logic, comparable set, and the specific conditions that would move it to the top of the range. No fee, no listing agreement.
Running the process: pool selection, power and entitlement documentation, buyer qualification, competitive structure, and negotiation through closing.
The same research, run in the other direction.
Network studies, gateway comparisons, powered-land pipelines, and diligence support for funds and lenders.
A quarterly brief on powered land, port capacity and air-cargo gateways, plus the Powered Land and Gateway Pricing Benchmarks data file — $/MW and $/acre by market, port capacity openings by year, and airport-adjacent rent premiums, with every figure sourced and dated.
A quarterly brief on powered land, port capacity and air-cargo gateways, plus the Powered Land and Gateway Pricing Benchmarks data file.
Every figure on this site carries its period and its source. Where the major brokerages disagree — and on data center capacity under construction they disagree by a factor of nine, because CBRE counts colocation in primary markets while JLL counts hyperscale self-build across all markets — we say which universe we mean. Methodology.
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