Power Demand Is Rewriting the Land Map in Pinal County
For most of the last two decades, the buyer who set the clearing price for a large parcel in Pinal County was a homebuilder or a land banker positioning ahead of one. That is no longer reliably true.
On April 16, 2026, the Pinal County Planning and Zoning Commission voted 7 to 2 to recommend approval of a rezoning for the La Osa Energy Center, a project proposed by Vermaland on more than 3,300 acres off Picacho Highway near Eloy, roughly an hour south of Phoenix. The plan contemplates as many as 59 data center buildings, two gas-fired power plants and battery energy storage on the same site.
Read the components rather than the headline. The generation and storage are not amenities attached to a data center campus. They are the reason the site works. Grid interconnection has become the binding constraint on this asset class, and a project that brings its own generation is buying its way around a queue that can run for years.
That changes what “good land” means. A parcel that a homebuilder would pass over for being too remote, too dusty and too far from schools can be exactly right for this buyer if it has transmission proximity, gas access and a county willing to entertain the zoning.
The precedent, and the scale
The Pinal proposal did not appear from nowhere. In August 2024, Tract acquired 2,069 acres near Buckeye Airport for more than $136 million, with a projected total project cost of $20 billion and capacity of up to 1.8 gigawatts across roughly 40 buildings and 20 million square feet at full build-out. The seller was Cipriani Holdings, and the transaction followed a two-year effort involving the state, the City of Buckeye and the seller.
Two years is the detail to note. These are not quick escrows. They are long, technical, multi-party transactions where the diligence runs through power, water and zoning simultaneously, and where a seller without experienced representation can spend that time carrying an option that never closes.
The broader market underneath
The land story sits on top of a functioning industrial market rather than a speculative one. Kidder Mathews reported Phoenix industrial vacancy at 12.4 percent in the first quarter of 2026, down 120 basis points year over year, with 4.4 million square feet of direct net absorption and 7.5 million square feet of lease transactions. New deliveries fell to 1.2 million square feet, a decrease of 82 percent year over year, while direct asking rents rose 5 percent to $1.18 per square foot triple net.
Falling deliveries against positive absorption is the shape of a market working through supply rather than drowning in it. Arizona also ranks first nationally for semiconductor manufacturing, with more than 60 industry expansions since 2020.
The water question is not going away
Opposition at the Pinal hearing centered on water, as it will at every hearing of this kind. One commenter noted that agriculture accounts for roughly 72 percent of Arizona water consumption, which is accurate and also not a complete answer. Cooling demand varies enormously by design, and the relevant comparison for a specific site is against that site’s prior and permitted use, not against a statewide average.
Owners should expect the water analysis to be part of the diligence rather than an afterthought, and should expect it to affect timing.
What owners of large parcels should take from this
If you hold significant acreage in Pinal or the west valley, the buyer pool for that ground has widened, and the new entrants underwrite differently. They will pay for attributes that residential buyers discount entirely, and they will walk away over attributes residential buyers never ask about.
Knowing which category your parcel falls into, before you go to market, is the difference between one offer and a competitive process.
Sources: KTAR, April 20, 2026, on the Pinal County Planning and Zoning vote; Real Estate Daily News, August 30, 2024, on the Tract acquisition in Buckeye; Kidder Mathews Phoenix industrial report, first quarter 2026.
