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Prince Edward County’s HIT Park is in the process of being sold. County staff announced the potential buyer for the Heartland Innovative Technology (HIT) Park and then asked supervisors to take a vote Monday, Jan. 27, during a special called meeting. The vote to sell by supervisors was then unanimous. The prospective buyer in this case is AVAIO Digital, the same group currently working to build a data center in Appomattox. 

Prince Edward Administrator Doug Stanley explained that the county still has some work to do, when it comes to getting things ready. The tentative deal for the 280 acre site off Persimmon Tree Fork Road comes with a few needs. First, the county will be required to build infrastructure to serve the site.

That includes finishing up water lines and the water tank, sewer access and a connection to the Town of Farmville’s system. Second, the county is required to do some road work to Persimmon Tree Fork Road, widening it and repaving. Current price estimates for that work comes to around $25 million. That price tag can change, increase or decrease, depending on what the market rate is for the supplies involved when it comes time for the work to be done. To be clear, that doesn’t mean the county will pay $25 million out of pocket. 

At first, Prince Edward will try to get grant funding to cover costs of the project. If that doesn’t work, then county staff will go to the buyers. AVAIO has agreed to serve as an emergency ‘bank’ of sorts, if need be. They would cover the cost of the process and then Prince Edward would pay them back. 

“The company has agreed to backstop the funding if we’re unsuccessful (in getting grants) or to the extent we’re unsuccessful in the grant funding,” Stanley said in Monday’s meeting. 

The big question 

The big question, in this or any business deal, is how much did it sell for? The answer is $12.2 million. A deposit of $250,000 will be paid within 10 days, with the rest paid after the sale officially closes. The argument in the official joint statement made is that there will be $5 billion in investment over the course of the data center’s existence. We’ll look at the contract in more detail in Friday’s edition. 

Beyond HIT Park, more on AVAIO 

As mentioned, AVAIO is the same group working to develop a data center in Appomattox. These projects are two of four being currently worked on by the group in Virginia, along with two proposed in Caroline County. All total, the organization has 12 other projects currently in different stages of development throughout the U.S., Spain and Ireland. 

To be clear, AVAIO Digital is a developer. They describe themselves as a “developer and operator delivering build-to-suit, wholesale, powered-shell and turnkey solutions to hyperscalers and other large data center users.” 

That’s a long way of saying the company buys property in a number of different locations, then works with the county involved to develop what they call sustainable or green data centers. They secure the permits, make sure the facility has power, fiber and other utility infrastructure and then go shopping for a customer to purchase the building once it’s ready. 

The Prince Edward site stands at 280 acres. The Appomattox project is a bit bigger at 452 acres, with plans to build a $3 billion data center campus with what AVAIO describes as “substantial onsite green power.” That Appomattox facility will require 300 megawatts of power from a combination of Central Virginia Electric Cooperative and Dominion Energy.  

The appeal of the HIT Park partially comes from the middle-mile high-speed fiber internet infrastructure. The “middle-mile” term refers to the network infrastructure of high-capacity fiber optic cables that connect internet service providers (ISPs) to larger data centers and internet exchange points, facilitating efficient and fast data transfer between different regions and ISPs. It acts as the backbone of the internet, enabling ISPs to offer reliable and high-speed internet connections to their customers.

More fiber enables more robust data centers that can scale as user demands and emerging technologies, like artificial intelligence, scale. Those demands basically require more and higher-capacity broadband “pipes” (the fiber paths) in which the data flows to and from a data center.