The Data Center Boom in North & South Carolina

What's already built, what's coming, and why it matters if you live, work, or invest in the Carolinas

If you've driven through parts of the Triangle, the Charlotte area, or even out toward Spartanburg lately, you may have noticed some massive new construction projects that aren't apartments or warehouses. There's a good chance you spotted a data center, or land being cleared for one. These windowless buildings are popping up across both Carolinas faster than almost anyone expected, and they're reshaping local economies, power grids, and conversations at county commission meetings from the mountains to the coast.

Here's a full rundown of what's already running, what's under construction, and what's been announced across North Carolina and South Carolina.

Why This Is Happening Now

The short answer is artificial intelligence. Training and running AI models takes an enormous amount of computing power, and that power has to live somewhere. Add in the steady growth of cloud storage, streaming, and everyday internet traffic, and you've got tech companies racing to lock down land, water, and electricity wherever a utility can deliver it fastest. Duke Energy has said data center power demand in North Carolina alone could roughly double over the next decade, climbing from about 3 gigawatts to nearly 6.

North Carolina: Existing and Operating

North Carolina has been in this game longer than people realize. Several hyperscale facilities, the kind of data centers built by a single massive tech company for its own use, have been running for years.

•        Maiden (Catawba County): An Apple campus, one of the state's earliest major hyperscale builds.

•        Forest City: A Meta (Facebook) data center campus.

•        Lenoir: Google's data center campus has operated here since 2007, when the company made its original $1.2 billion investment to build the site. Google has continued expanding ever since, including a $600 million expansion in 2024 and a fresh $1 billion expansion announced in 2026 to keep up with AI and cloud demand.

•        Kings Mountain (near Charlotte): Home to the T-5 Data Center, currently the largest operating data center in the state. It uses roughly as much electricity as every home in Durham County combined.

•        Raleigh: American Tower opened an Edge data center in 2026, the first of its kind in the Research Triangle, offering colocation and interconnection services with room to grow from 1 to 4 megawatts.

North Carolina: Under Construction or Newly Announced

This is where things get bigger and faster. Several megaprojects have either broken ground or cleared zoning hurdles in the past year.

•        Tarboro (Edgecombe County): Energy Storage Solutions is building a $19.2 billion, 900-megawatt data center and energy storage campus in the Kingsboro development, expected to break ground in early 2026. A twin project is also planned for Fayetteville.

•        Richmond County: Amazon broke ground in late 2025 on a $10 billion campus, nearly 800 acres, with up to 20 buildings each spanning 200,000 to 225,000 square feet at full build-out, located next to Duke Energy's 2.24 gigawatt Smith Energy Complex.

•        Person County: Microsoft purchased a 1,385-acre site near the Virginia border for roughly $27 million and has confirmed plans to begin permitting for a major data center campus there.

•        Charlotte: Digital Realty is investing $160 million in a 155-acre site for its fourth facility in the area.

•        Greensboro: ImpactData is building a 20-megawatt facility targeting completion in mid-2026.

•        Madison (Rockingham County): WhiteFiber's NC-1 campus sits on 96 acres and could scale from 24 megawatts up to 200 megawatts over time.

•        New Hill (Wake County, near Apex): Natelli Holdings has proposed a 300-megawatt Digital Campus aimed at cloud computing and AI.

Not every community is rolling out the welcome mat. In Stokes County and Rowan County, residents have packed commission meetings to protest new projects, citing concerns about water use, electricity costs, and the pace of construction. Chatham County went as far as approving a one-year moratorium on new data center construction while officials sort out the long-term impact. In Edgecombe County, opposition to the Kingsboro project has centered on the fact that the campus may run on-site natural gas generation and diesel backup power rather than drawing directly from the grid, which residents worry could affect local air quality.

South Carolina: Existing and Operating

South Carolina's data center industry is quieter but more established than most people assume. More than 30 data centers already operate across the state, many without much fanfare, spread across Charleston, Columbia, Greenville-Spartanburg, Aiken, Seneca, and York.

•        Horry County (Myrtle Beach): DC BLOX opened its cable landing station at the Myrtle Beach International Technology & Aerospace Park in October 2023, a $31.5 million, 125,000-square-foot facility that serves as the physical landing point for undersea fiber optic cables, including ones from Google and Meta. In October 2025, the company announced plans for a second facility next door that would bring the site's total capacity up to ten subsea cables, making it the largest facility of its kind on the Eastern Seaboard. This is internet backbone infrastructure rather than a typical server farm.

•        Greenville: DC BLOX runs the state's first Tier III-certified multi-tenant data center, alongside a separate facility from DartPoints.

•        Berkeley County: Google has operated a data center here since 2008, one of the longest-running facilities in the state.

South Carolina: Under Construction or Newly Announced

•        Aiken County: Meta is building its first South Carolina data center, an $800 million, 715,000-square-foot facility optimized for AI workloads, expected to open in spring 2027.

•        Dorchester County (Ridgeville and St. George): Google is investing $2 billion in two new campuses as part of a larger $3.3 billion expansion across the state.

•        Berkeley County: Google is also expanding its existing campus here as part of that same $3.3 billion investment.

•        York County: QTS Data Centers made a $1 billion entrance into the state with its first South Carolina facility near Hands Mill Highway.

•        Cherokee County: Cielo Digital Infrastructure has a 49-megawatt project in the pipeline.

•        Berkeley County: DC BLOX has a second, 13-megawatt facility expected online by 2027.

•        Greer (Greenville-Spartanburg area): Resilience GSP is building a roughly 100,000-square-foot Tier III facility designed specifically for high-density AI workloads.

What This Means If You Live or Invest Along the Coast

Most of the headline-grabbing megaprojects are landing inland, near major power infrastructure in the Triangle, Charlotte, the Upstate, and rural counties with cheap land and available transmission capacity. The coastal data center story is different, and it's actually picking up steam right now. DC BLOX's cable landing station in Horry County has been operating since 2023, and the company just announced plans in late 2025 to build a second facility next door, which would make Myrtle Beach home to the largest cable landing site of its kind on the entire Eastern Seaboard. That's a meaningful long-term signal for the Grand Strand's role as a digital connectivity hub, separate from the AI-driven server farms going up elsewhere in the state.

For buyers, sellers, and investors along the Grand Strand, the bigger ripple effect is indirect. As Duke Energy and other utilities pour billions into grid upgrades to support inland data centers, electricity costs and infrastructure planning across the broader region can shift over time. It's also worth watching how this affects the labor market. Data center construction creates thousands of short-term construction jobs and a smaller number of permanent technical roles, which can influence relocation patterns into nearby metro areas like Charlotte and Raleigh, two markets I work in regularly alongside the coast.

If you're weighing a move, a sale, or an investment property anywhere from the Triad and Triangle down through the Grand Strand to Murrells Inlet, I'm happy to talk through how these larger economic trends might touch your specific market. Reach out anytime.