Data Centers in NC and SC: What's Built, What's Coming

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.

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 has been in this game longer than people realize. Several hyperscale facilities, the kind of data center built by a single massive tech company for its own use, have been running for years: Apple's Maiden campus in Catawba County, a Meta campus in Forest City, Google's Lenoir campus (running since 2007, with a fresh $1 billion expansion announced in 2026), the T-5 Data Center in Kings Mountain near Charlotte (currently the state's largest, using roughly as much electricity as every home in Durham County combined), and American Tower's new Edge data center in Raleigh, the first of its kind in the Research Triangle.

• Tarboro (Edgecombe County): a $19.2 billion, 900-megawatt data center and energy storage campus, expected to break ground in early 2026, with a twin project planned for Fayetteville
• Richmond County: Amazon broke ground in late 2025 on a $10 billion, nearly 800-acre campus next to Duke Energy's Smith Energy Complex
• Person County: Microsoft purchased a 1,385-acre site near the Virginia border and has confirmed plans to begin permitting
• 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 could scale from 24 up to 200 megawatts over time
• New Hill (Wake County, near Apex): a proposed 300-megawatt Digital Campus aimed at cloud computing and AI

Not every community is rolling out the welcome mat. Stokes and Rowan counties have seen packed commission meetings protesting new projects over water use, electricity costs, and the pace of construction. Chatham County approved a one-year moratorium on new data center construction while officials sort out the long-term impact.

South Carolina's data center industry is quieter but more established than most people assume, with more than 30 already operating across the state, spread across Charleston, Columbia, Greenville-Spartanburg, Aiken, Seneca, and York. Right here in Horry County, DC BLOX opened a $31.5 million cable landing station at the Myrtle Beach International Technology & Aerospace Park in October 2023, 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 make this the largest site of its kind on the Eastern Seaboard.

• Aiken County: Meta's 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, part of a larger $3.3 billion statewide expansion
• Berkeley County: Google is expanding its existing campus (running since 2008) as part of that same investment, and DC BLOX has a second, 13-megawatt facility expected online by 2027
• York County: QTS Data Centers made a $1 billion entrance into the state near Hands Mill Highway
• Cherokee County: Cielo Digital Infrastructure has a 49-megawatt project in the pipeline
• Greer (Greenville-Spartanburg area): Resilience GSP is building a roughly 100,000-square-foot Tier III facility for high-density AI workloads

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 story is different and picking up steam right now: DC BLOX's cable landing station has been operating since 2023, and the company's planned second facility would make Myrtle Beach home to the largest cable landing site of its kind on the entire Eastern Seaboard, a meaningful long-term signal for the Grand Strand's role as a digital connectivity hub.

For buyers, sellers, and investors along the Grand Strand, the bigger ripple effect is indirect. As utilities pour billions into grid upgrades to support inland data centers, electricity costs and infrastructure planning across the broader region can shift over time, and the construction and technical jobs these projects create 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, get in touch and I'm happy to talk through how these larger economic trends might touch your specific market.