Columbus County is the latest North Carolina community to consider a data center moratorium.
The Columbus County Board of Commissioners will hold a public hearing on October 5 to discuss whether to pause the development of data centers. County Attorney Amanda Prince has proposed a 90-day moratorium to give staff time “to investigate matters dealing with data centers.” Commissioner Lavern Coleman proposed a 120-day moratorium.
As more data centers are proposed in North Carolina and across the country, environmental advocates are raising concerns about the facilities’ water and energy use, and also noise pollution.
If approved, Columbus County would become the 54th community in the state to pause data centers, according to research by Frank Muraca, a senior analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based policy research analysis company Power Brief. Muraca has tracked local decisions on data centers over the last year.
The town of Newport in Carteret County approved the state’s most recent data center moratorium on September 10, according to Muraca, halting any development for the next year.
Last month, Whiteville approved a one-year moratorium on data centers or data processing facilities built for artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency mining, and cloud storage. The ordinance states that the moratorium is necessary to give the city’s planning department time to develop zoning standards and mitigation methods to prevent environmental harm, and for the city council to approve them.
Prince told The News Reporter last week that Columbus County hasn’t received any proposals from companies looking to build a data center within its boundaries. However, she said, county staff are cognizant that a company might want to build one eventually.
More than 1,500 new data centers are being developed across the United States, according to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of Data Center Map, which has tracked data centers since 2007. Most new projects are in rural areas in the South and Midwest.
Four of the 28 data centers proposed, under construction, or operating in North Carolina are in rural areas, according to The Daily Yonder’s June analysis of FracTracker Alliance’s data center dashboard. FracTracker Alliance is a nonprofit that crowdsources data on the oil and gas industry.
Local officials in the rural Richmond County city of Hamlet crafted a deal with Amazon last year for a 4.2-million-square-foot facility, despite residents’ opposition. Meanwhile, Virginia-based PointOne Data Centers wants to build a facility in Sanford in Lee County.
The total number of data centers in North Carolina is debated, as it’s hard to find public information about them, Muraca said. Data Center Map says there are 97, while FracTracker Alliance says there are 32. UNC-Chapel Hill’s Data Driven EnviroLab’s U.S. Data Center Policy Explorer says there are 36.
Muraca said local governments should develop rules governing data centers. North Carolina’s new and proposed data centers, including those in Hamlet and Sanford, are being built along high-voltage power lines that deliver at least 220 kilovolts, according to Muraca’s research.
“There is a feeling out there that these facilities are going everywhere all at once,” he said. “That is just not really the case. Data centers have such extreme site requirements.”
The type of high-voltage power lines Muraca said data centers require pass through Whiteville, Chadbourn, and other Columbus County towns.
An August poll from Elon University found 53% of North Carolinians opposed data centers in their communities.
In 2023, data centers in the U.S. consumed 66 billion liters of water to cool computers, according to research by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By 2028, they are expected to use at least 148 billion liters. The average American uses about 113,300 liters of water per year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The cooling systems and fire suppressants used in data centers could emit PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, a bipartisan nonprofit founded by Congress. Exposure to the class of forever chemicals is linked to an increased risk of cancer, thyroid disease, reproductive problems, and developmental delays in children, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Columbus County was among the 10 local governments that recently settled lawsuits with Chemours for the company’s alleged PFAS contamination in eastern North Carolina.
Data centers’ electricity consumption is growing at an accelerating rate, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s research shows. In 2023, data centers represented 4.4% of electricity consumption in the U.S., up from 1.9% in 2017.
Hyperscale data centers, the kind required to run AI programs and cryptocurrency mining operations, consume the most water and electricity. Amazon’s planned data center in Hamlet is one of them, according to FracTracker Alliance.
The Data Center Coalition touts the economic benefits of data centers. In Durham County, one of the state’s data center hubs, local leaders set aside exemptions for projects at Research Triangle Park in the nine-month moratorium commissioners passed in August. The park houses science and technology firms and is a major economic driver for the county and the state.
Data centers supported 159,710 jobs in North Carolina in 2024, according to a study commissioned by the Data Center Coalition. That year, they contributed $6 billion in value to the state’s economy, according to the study.
“Local governments should pursue whatever path makes the most sense to them,” Muraca said. “In some cases, that’s a moratorium. In some cases, that might be recruiting data centers.”