Google Putnam County Data Center

Timeline from the record

Newest first. Record entries come from the filings and reports the registry cites. Coverage entries are headlines from publisher feeds we monitor daily, linked to the outlet; last checked September 14, 2026.

1. March 27, 2026

   Proposed
   1,700 acres on both sides of Route 62, north end of Buffalo near the Kanawha River; approved as a High Impact Development Project but still in due diligence/early stage. Source: WV MetroNews

Opposition and litigation at this site

Partly. Both documented support and documented opposition to Google Putnam County Data Center in Buffalo, Putnam County, West Virginia appear in the record, with no clear majority position. Named residents cited cancer/health fears and anger over the March 27, 2026 announcement, while the Buffalo mayor and a state delegate voiced enthusiastic support; no formal hearing or vote has occurred yet.

How the community has taken it

Reception is a sourced signal, not an editorial judgment: mixed reception means documented support and documented opposition both exist with no clear majority position on record.

Named residents cited cancer/health fears and anger over the March 27, 2026 announcement, while the Buffalo mayor and a state delegate voiced enthusiastic support; no formal hearing or vote has occurred yet.

Source: WSAZ

Notes on the record

1,700 acres both sides of Route 62, north end of Buffalo near the Kanawha River (address disclosed as 22272 Charleston Road). Announced March 2026; multibillion-dollar investment unspecified; still in early due diligence. Re-checked 2026-09-10: status unchanged (proposed). Most recent coverage found (wvgazettemail update dated 2026-09-03) still describes the site as an application under review, not a permitted or under-construction project. capacityMw and water/coolingType remain unconfirmed: Google's own spokesperson has not disclosed power or water figures for this site as of the 2026-09-03 update. jobs remains unfilled: officials cite only non-numeric 'thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent roles,' no source gives integer counts. aiClassification declined: sources describe this as a general Google data center / cloud campus; none of the fetched sources specifically frame THIS site as AI-dedicated (vs. general cloud), so filling the enum would be a guess. subsidies: no facility-specific incentive/abatement program was found in any source fetched this session; HB 2014's tax-revenue split (majority to state, county keeps roughly 30%) is a distribution of taxes the facility generates, not a subsidy granted to the facility, so it is not recorded as a subsidy. Could not obtain a fetchable primary source (wvpress.org returned 403) that states explicitly whether Google applied for the Economic Development Project Fund, so no subsidies finding is asserted either way.

Other sites within 30 miles

Distances are between recorded coordinates, many of which are a city or county centroid, so treat them as approximate. Cumulative load on one utility and one aquifer is the question a planning commission rarely asks.

• Monarch Compute Campus · Point Pleasant · Nscale17 mi · Under construction · 2 GW · Contested
• Project Tamarack · West Columbia · Starwood Digital Ventures24 mi · Proposed · 2.2 GW · Mixed reception
• Alpha Technologies South Charleston DC01 · South Charleston · Alpha Technologies25 mi · Operating

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