Case Study: Botetourt County — Project Raspberry, the Water Authority, and the Wave That Crossed the Blue Ridge
On June 24, 2025, Botetourt County announced that Google had bought 312.55 acres of the county's flagship business park at Greenfield for $14,055,406.37, plus $4 million for county initiatives.
On June 24, 2025, Botetourt County announced that Google had bought 312.55 acres of the county's flagship business park at Greenfield for $14,055,406.37, plus $4 million for county initiatives. The option agreement underlying that sale had been signed on October 1, 2024. Eight weeks after the option was signed, at a joint planning commission and Board of Supervisors session on November 26, 2024, the county added "data center" to the permitted uses of the one zoning district that would thereafter be allowed to host one, describing the change to the public as housekeeping with no project attached. The staff report for the accompanying rezoning said, in writing: "As this is a speculative request, no use or concept is identified at this time." The county had been hosting Google site visits since January 2024 under the code name Project Raspberry.
This case study documents the deal those seventeen months produced, and the reckoning that began when the terms became public. The performance agreement commits Google's shell entity, Helio Capital LLC, to at least $1 billion in investment and 50 jobs for each data center it builds, though the agreement contemplates "one or more" and names no number; caps the company's effective equipment tax rate at $2.40 per $100 for twenty years per building; binds the county and its development authority, on a records request reaching the company's confidential information, to notify the company, consult it on narrowing or resisting the disclosure, and cooperate in asserting the statute's exemptions; and has Google "manage all media and press relation services" concerning its involvement with the county and the authority. The funding agreement reserves up to 2 million gallons a day for the campus, on conditions that include a development agreement nobody had signed, and the two water agreements between them set 8 million as the figure the region's next water source must be studied against. That larger capacity the authority is under no obligation to deliver. The county, which holds one of eight seats on that authority's board, is bound for the first $100 million of the new source on a four-tier ladder running to $300 million, and the recitals it signed concede that providing the eventual expansion "will limit the water supply available to the Authority's member localities" and impair their development. Those water figures stayed secret until February 2026, when the Western Virginia Water Authority released them eight days before a contempt hearing, after a one-person newsroom won what was reported as the first ruling in Virginia that a data center's water use cannot be withheld as a trade secret.
Botetourt is the series' formative-stage case, and that stage is closing as this version goes out. The entitlement was complete and grading had not begun when the evidence snapshot closed on June 12, 2026. On August 26, 2026 the county announced that Google had received a land disturbance permit for the first mass grading package, and the county administrator later said contractors would begin after Labor Day; the state wetlands and air permits both remained under review as of September 7, 2026. The opposition organized after the use was already by-right, which makes its position structurally weaker than Hanover's and closer to Varina's in Henrico. The county is the first in the series served by Appalachian Power rather than Dominion, the first west of the Blue Ridge, and proportionally the most committed: at least $3 billion in promised investment if all three buildings rise, in a county of 34,129 people, roughly $88,000 per resident. Every other Google case in this series is reconstructed after outcomes foreclosed the questions. Here the choices were still legible as choices, and the next five years in the Roanoke Valley will be measured against what this document records.
Version 1.1 (September 2026). The June 12, 2026 evidence snapshot stands as the primary bound, with a post-snapshot record carried to September 7, 2026 in dated passages. Eleven primary sources that version 1.0 had cited through reporting or summaries, or could not have had at all, were obtained and read: the executed performance agreement, both Western Virginia Water Authority agreements, the Minor New Source Review air permit application and its emissions tables, DEQ's project page and its correspondence in water permit file 25-1919, the Army Corps public notice, and the county's and authority's own pages. Where this version corrects version 1.0, the correction is made in the passage itself and its source given at the endnote. Version 1.0 remains available at 10.5281/zenodo.20673513 and is unaltered.