Microsoft Boydton data center, Boydton, Virginia

Microsoft's data center campus at Boydton, in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, has been operating since 2010 and hosts the Azure US East 2 region; its taxes now pay for about a quarter of the county's budget. Dominion supplies the power, and the Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative's fiber network was described as a key reason Microsoft chose the county, which has taken about $2 billion of investment, the Richmond Times-Dispatch estimated.

The campus exists because of a tax break written for Mecklenburg County: in 2008 Delegate Tommy Wright introduced a bill exempting data center equipment from sales tax, aimed at a county where unemployment was 6 percent and had lately been nearly twice that, and it passed the House 97-2 and the Senate 40-0, with a fiscal note estimating the state would forgo $1.54 million. Microsoft arrived two years later.

Tax revenue from the complex now covers about a quarter of Mecklenburg's budget, has helped pay for a new high school and let the county cut its property tax rate; median household incomes, once slightly below neighboring Halifax County's, are now about 5 percent higher. Statewide, the exemption Wright's bill created now costs about $1.6 billion a year against $9.1 billion of annual economic activity from data centers, a figure the state comptroller's report put before the General Assembly in January 2026.

Microsoft said it had created 300 jobs in the county by 2019, when a sixth expansion was announced with another 100 expected, and in May 2018 it bought 315 megawatts from Virginia solar projects, at the time the largest single corporate solar purchase in the United States. On June 29, 2023 Constellation Energy agreed to supply up to 35 percent of the campus's power from nuclear plants, matched hour by hour against what the data center actually draws rather than against an annual total.