From Dirt to Datacenter: Why the Unit of Value Moved
For a century, land was priced by what you could grow or build on it. That logic broke the moment a single computing campus started drawing more electricity than a mid-sized city. The dirt is still cheap in most of America. What is not cheap, and what almost nobody can manufacture on demand, is a parcel with a firm path to hundreds of megawatts. The practitioner's job is to stop pricing acreage and start pricing the power that the acreage can command. Everything else in this course follows from that single move.
Knowledge check
Why has the traditional dollars-per-acre framework become misleading when valuing land intended for large computing campuses?
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Because the value of such land is dominated by its access to firm electrical capacity, not by the surface area itself. Two adjacent parcels of identical acreage can differ in worth by an order of magnitude depending on whether one has a funded interconnection and the other has none, so per-acre pricing hides the variable that actually matters.