Henry County VA Creates Data Center Zoning District Requiring Special Use Permit, 50 dBA Cap and Annual Noise Testing

The Henry County, Virginia Board of Supervisors amended the county zoning ordinance on August 25, 2026 to create a new Data Center (D-C) District with requirements covering setbacks, noise, water use, electrical infrastructure, cooling systems, screening, lighting, emergency response and decommissioning. A data center is permitted in the district only with a special use permit from the Board of Zoning Appeals. Operational noise is capped at 50 dBA at the exterior property line, and mechanical equipment may not produce a clearly audible pure tone or tonal component at or beyond the property line of residentially-zoned property. Applicants must submit a third-party acoustical impact analysis modeling worst-case operating conditions including peak cooling demand and routine generator testing; post-construction acoustical testing is required within 90 days of full operation, and noise testing annually for the life of the facility.

The design is the point. Most local data center responses in the 2026 wave are moratoria — time-limited pauses that buy a study window and then expire, as in Carlton County MN (2026-08-24–carlton-county-mn-unanimous-one-year-data-center-moratorium-google-hermantown) or Alamance County NC (2026-08-17–alamance-county-nc-enacts-one-year-10mw-data-center-moratorium). Henry County instead wrote a permanent regulatory regime with a continuing measurement obligation attached: annual third-party testing for the operating life converts a one-time permit condition into an ongoing compliance record that a county can act on, which is precisely what the enforcement gap in most host-community agreements lacks. No property in Henry County is currently zoned D-C — the ordinance establishes the classification and its rules without rezoning anything, meaning any future applicant must first win a rezoning and then a special use permit. Henry County said as of September 1 that no talks had occurred with any data center company. Virginia is also where the ratepayer cost-shift question was decided at the state level weeks earlier (2026-07-31–virginia-scc-orders-dominion-shift-transmission-costs-to-data-centers), and where Loudoun County found its own moratorium blocked by state law (2026-07-22–loudoun-county-va-moratorium-blocked-by-state-law) — a constraint Henry County’s zoning-based approach routes around.