Universities are buying and selling property for data centers, prompting concerns about an AI brain drain

The AI boom is putting a new kind of pressure on American universities.

The topic of AI has long been a point of contention within higher education from educators, students, and university administrations discussing the presence and use cases of the technology.

But now it’s turned to a much more physical threat.

As data centers compete for large parcels with access to electricity, water, and fiber infrastructure, universities are finding themselves sitting on property that can be worth more as AI infrastructure—not classrooms, laboratories or research space.

The George Washington University’s sale of its Virginia campus to Amazon , for example, illustrates the encroachment of AI onto higher education’s doorstep.

The University of Michigan, meanwhile, is pursuing a $1.25 billion high-performance computing and research center in Ypsilanti Township.

One former GW professor who worked at the university’s Virginia Science and Technology Campus said the sale was symptomatic of a broader shift in higher ed, where financial pressures are colliding with the enormous appetite for data center real estate.

“Universities are large landholders, and there is a land grab going on with the data centers these days,” former professor Ellen Scully-Russ told Fortune .

GW’s $427 million campus sale In February, GW announced it had sold its roughly 120-acre Virginia Science and Technology Campus in Ashburn, Va.

The university initially declined to identify the buyer or disclose the sale price, citing confidentiality provisions.

“It just came as a sudden announcement one day that they had sold the property, and that they couldn’t disclose the buyer because there was some kind of a confidentiality agreement,” Scully-Russ explained.

“But of course, a student newspaper did their due diligence, and by the end of the day, they knew who it was, and they knew the price, and they communicated that to the community.” The buyer was later identified as Amazon Data Services, which paid $427 million for the property.

The campus sits in Loudoun County, at the center of Northern Virginia’s so- called “Data Center Alley,” one of the world’s largest concentrations of data centers.

GW said the sale was intended to strengthen its long-term financial position.