Priced facility with power today, or land in a power-available market and wait five years

Not an investor answer, more an observation from talking to people who work around these sites. The land bet isn't only about whether power arrives. It's about whether the specific parcel has water, fiber routes within reach, and a county that will actually approve the use. I've watched a county turn hostile between one project's approval and the next one's application, and that happened over about eighteen months. The dirt was fine. The politics changed. So if you go land, I'd want to know who else in that county has already been told no.

Both options in your post are real strategies and they carry different kinds of exposure, so it's worth naming the mechanisms plainly for anyone reading who hasn't seen this framing before.

An operating facility with contracted power is an income asset. Your return comes from the lease payments and whatever the property is worth when you sell. The scarcity argument is that new supply is limited by how long it takes utilities to deliver power and by grid capacity, which supports existing well-located facilities. The price you pay already reflects some of that, which is what makes the entry yield thin.

Raw land in a power-available market is a speculative position. There's no income while you hold, you're paying property taxes and any carrying costs, and the value depends on events you don't control. Those include the utility's interconnection studies, county entitlement decisions, and whether developers still want that geography when you're ready to sell. Development is pushing toward markets with available power and lighter electricity regulation, which is the basis for the bet, but that trend arriving in a region doesn't mean it arrives on a particular parcel.

The question that decides it for most people is how long they can hold with no income and no certainty. @plumb is right that county-level approval risk is separate from power risk and can move faster. Entitlement and land use rules differ by state and by county, so anything specific there needs a local land use attorney rather than a forum answer.

I'd take the operating facility, and my reason is boring. With the land, I'd have to be right about the utility, the county, and the market all at once, and I'd be paying taxes the whole time I waited to find out. With the facility I'm mostly wrong about price, and being wrong about price hurts less than being wrong about whether the thing ever happens. @orchard, you've held land for two decades so your tolerance for that is genuinely different from mine.