JD Vance is eyeing a $9 million Virginia mansion owned by a businessman whose data center empire is booming under a policy championed by the vice president, the Daily Beast’s investigative Substack PunchUp can reveal.
The sprawling, historic horse-farming estate is up for rent in Middleburg—a town 45 miles from Washington, D.C., packed with multimillion-dollar homes and renowned as the country’s “horse and hunt capital.”
The residence in question is Wolver Hill, a historic estate on Middleburg’s northern edge, according to three Daily Beast sources. Its owner is Charles “Chuck” Kuhn, 60, one of northern Virginia’s biggest landowners and, lately, one of its most aggressive data-center developers—a sector that the Trump administration and Vance in particular have consistently backed.
County records show the estate’s centerpiece is a 1920 solid-masonry manor graded “luxury” by assessors. It boasts 8,532 square feet, six full bathrooms, and seven fireplaces. It is set on a 423-acre parcel owned by Wolver Hill LLC. Kuhn and his wife, Stacy, bought the property, which had been the home of the thoroughbred-breeding Iselin family for more than a century, for $8.5 million in December 2020.
PunchUp approached Vance’s office on Wednesday to ask about the VP’s plans to move into the mansion. Vance representatives asked for more time to respond, but did not provide a comment on the record. Fifteen hours after our last message to Vance’s office, a story appeared on NBC. It reported that the Secret Service was scoping additional security at an unidentified property in the area, which would be used by Vance, 41, his wife, Usha, 40, and their three children. The couple’s fourth child, a son, is due this month.
“The Second Family is considering leasing rural property in Virginia in order to give their growing family the opportunity to enjoy nature and the great outdoors, just as the Vice President and Second Lady experienced when they were growing up,” a source familiar with the arrangement told NBC.
A spokesman for Vance declined to answer how much the second family was paying the data center magnate for the privilege of using his property. “The Vice President’s office owes the Daily Beast nothing. Baseless speculation won’t change the fact that the Vice President has and will continue to follow all applicable legal and ethical guidelines,” he said.
The Middleburg estate would be an addition, not a move. The Vances have lived at Number One Observatory Circle—the vice president’s official residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in D.C.—since he took office in January 2025. They also keep a $2.3 million mansion in Cincinnati from his Senate days. PunchUp revealed in May that Vance had failed to include the company through which he owns that property in his financial declarations.
Kuhn made his first fortune in trucking. He founded JK Moving Services at 16 and built it into the largest independent moving company in North America. The firm bills itself as nonpartisan and has handled presidential households of both parties. Its trucks were filmed outside Mar-a-Lago as Donald Trump, 80, left the White House in January 2021, and again ahead of his return in 2025.
Through his other firm, JK Land Holdings, Kuhn plunged into data centers in 2021, buying 270 acres across Loudoun and Prince William counties with global developer Yondr Group. Their Loudoun campus has been live since late 2023 and is expanding fast. Last month, the Kuhn-Yondr venture borrowed $715 million from investors to build its next data center in Loudoun—money raised just days before PunchUp’s sources say Middleburg residents started noticing an increased security presence around Wolver Hill.
Few in the Trump administration have championed the AI data-center boom more loudly than Vance. The vice president, a former venture capitalist, headlined the launch of the White House’s “AI Action Plan” last July, which calls for more data centers across the country and more power to run them.
Trump signed an executive order that same month to fast-track federal permits for data centers. This January, the White House leaned on PJM, the electricity grid operator that powers Virginia’s data-center corridor—where Kuhn builds. It pushed PJM to hold an emergency auction to raise $15 billion-plus for new power generation and faster connections. The move came after the operator’s own market monitor had urged a moratorium on new data centers.
Federal ethics rules bar officials from accepting gifts from “prohibited sources” with business before the government. A below-market lease can count as a gift. Whether the Vances pay full market rent, and whether any deal is cleared by White House lawyers and disclosed in the vice president’s public filings, will determine how the arrangement sits within those rules.
Kuhn assembled much of his land empire before Trump returned to office. There is no suggestion that the lease talks are tied to his business interests.
PunchUp has contacted Kuhn, who did not reply to an earlier message, for a response to this story.
Tom Latchem exposes the secrets, scandals, and stories that powerful people and institutions want to keep under wraps. Follow all of his reporting at PunchUp on Substack.
