Charlotte just became the latest, and largest, North Carolina community to instate a temporary pause on the development of new data centers. Its city council unanimously approved a 150-day moratorium in front of a packed house Monday night, in a scene similar to ones which have played out in town halls and county commissioners chambers across the state.
Dozens of local governments have passed data center moratoriums in the last six months. Officials in some of these communities told Carolina Public Press that the policies were necessary to update planning ordinances that aren’t equipped to deal with modern data centers.
These facilities house the IT infrastructure necessary for modern computing tasks, but they also consume immense amounts of electricity and water to cool down hot machinery.
[Subscribe for FREE to Carolina Public Press’ Daily, Weekend and Election 2026 newsletters.]
Data centers themselves are nothing new — they’ve been around for as long as electronic computers have existed, going back to the 1940s. However, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence has driven demand for more data centers with enhanced computing power and data storage capacity.
At least 93 data centers are currently operating in North Carolina, some of them more than a decade old. But a recent surge in demand driven largely by the AI industry has led to the announcement of more than 20 new data center projects for North Carolina since the start of 2025.
Although some places have welcomed data centers as drivers of economic growth, others say they need more time to consider the potential downsides. Some projects that were already underway have encountered intense opposition from residents, prompting local leaders to rethink their current policies.
NC’s largest city puts a pause on data centers
Such was the case in Charlotte, where two planned data center projects in the eastern part of the city spurred a grassroots effort to pressure the City Council to act.
The Charlotte branch of the left-wing Party for Socialism and Liberation, or PSL Charlotte, organized a door-knocking campaign in the neighborhood where one of the data centers, owned by Boston-based American Tower Corporation, is being built.
PSL Charlotte member Dana Alhasan said many residents she spoke with weren’t aware of the project at all.
“Either people didn’t know about it, or they found out about it earlier from one of their neighbors, or they found out about it from the petition that we had launched,” Alhasan said.
“When we would talk to people about it and the potential impacts, the residents were overwhelmingly extremely concerned about the data center,” she added.
PSL Charlotte worked with other community groups to conduct press conferences and demonstrations opposing the data centers. Eventually, the City Council passed a five-month moratorium intended to give the city time to assess infrastructure capacity, noise impacts and “other environmental concerns,” according to the city’s website.
Charlotte officials did not respond to CPP’s request for an interview about the moratorium prior to the publication of this article.
Alhasan said the moratorium’s unanimous passage was a testament to the community organizing efforts.
“It really was the people that put enough pressure to bring forward the vote to consider a data center moratorium in the first place,” she said.
One thing the moratorium won’t do, however, is pause any projects that are currently in the development pipeline, including the two data centers in East Charlotte. That’s because state law prohibits localities from enacting moratoriums on active developments.
Locals question county, town officials over Rowan projects
A similar community debate is taking place in nearby Rowan County, where residents launched a petition and website and filled local meetings to express their displeasure with two proposed data centers.
One project is a planned 400-acre facility, owned by Edged Energy, which falls under the county’s jurisdiction. Edged Energy purchased the land for the data center from a private seller in November and has since begun work on the site.
Mark Ortiz, a community activist who helped organize opposition to the data center, told CPP that locals had a wide array of concerns about the data centers.
“The people that are right near where one is being built are most concerned about the environmental effects: the noise, heat island effect, water usage,” Ortiz said.
“There are a lot of other concerns just with AI and (cryptocurrency) also,” he added, “apart from the physical footprint of the hardware that it takes to make them happen.”
After hearing the residents’ complaints, Rowan County commissioners passed a one-year moratorium on new data centers, although like in Charlotte it does not apply to the project already under development.
Meanwhile, the city of Salisbury, which is the county seat of Rowan, is moving ahead with a separate data center project. That proposed facility will be smaller than the Edged facility and operated by Colorado-based company Flexential, which currently owns two data centers in Charlotte and one in Morrisville.
On June 2, the Salisbury Town Council passed a text amendment to its land development ordinance at the behest of the developer that will be building the Flexential data center. The text amendment allows developers to apply for data centers within city limits with restrictions related to maximum size, noise and water consumption.
Although the text amendment was requested by the developer, Salisbury community engagement director Anne Little told CPP that it wasn’t an “open door” policy.
“It’s a framework to establish what would or would not be appropriate for a data center project,” she said.
Little directed community members with concerns about the project to a city-maintained webpage which contains all public documents, frequently asked questions and informational videos about the proposed data center.
Towns get moratorium fever
Even places with seemingly no interest from data center developers have begun passing moratoriums.
Hillsborough Mayor Mark Bell called data centers one of the “hottest topics” in local government right now.
The town of just under 10,000 people in Orange County passed a two-month moratorium to allow for consideration of new planning ordinances that specifically define data centers. That’s despite Hillsborough not receiving any requests for new data centers or much community engagement around the issue. Nobody spoke at the public hearing for the moratorium, Bell said.
Hillsborough is, however, situated in a hotbed of data center activity because of its proximity to the tech-centric Research Triangle. Orange County’s government, which is based in Hillsborough, passed a similar moratorium earlier this year; so have other nearby jurisdictions including the city of Durham, Chatham County and the town of Apex in Wake County.
Bell said the resource consumption of data centers could pose a problem for small towns with limited infrastructure, which is partly why Hillsborough decided it was time to adjust their planning ordinances, which in their current state don’t cleanly address or put guardrails around such facilities.
“We have very constrained water and sewer capacity and could not support a hyperscale data center,” Bell said.
The coastal town of Boiling Spring Lakes in Brunswick County took a similar step on Monday with a year-long moratorium despite having no prior proposals from developers.
“The primary reason is that our development ordinances do not address data centers,” Boiling Spring Lakes town manager Gordon Hargrove told CPP.
Brunswick County is rapidly growing, and there is already concern about straining its water and sewer infrastructure, Hargrove said. Having updated regulations would protect Boiling Spring Lakes from further straining its resources with an unwieldy project.
“It wasn’t to say that we don’t want data centers, but it gives us the opportunity to say if and how we want them,” Hargrove said.
Unsurprisingly, the data center industry isn’t a fan of the wave of moratoriums.
Dan Diorio, who leads state policy initiatives for the Data Center Coalition, told CPP that data centers contribute to the state economy and delivered more than $1.3 billion in state and local taxes in 2024.
“Unfortunately, local moratoriums on data centers would send a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” Diorio said.
That sentiment hasn’t seemed to rub off on city leaders yet. Asheville and Fayetteville are among the municipalities considering a vote on moratoriums later this summer.
It remains to be seen whether those pauses will actually squash data center development statewide — or if they’re merely delaying the inevitable.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may republish our stories for free, online or in print. Simply copy and paste the article contents from the box below. Note, some images and interactive features may not be included here.
