It wasn’t so long ago that high-tech data centers were the darlings of economic development.
Now, with the rise of A.I. supercharging the demand for these behemoth facilities, the proliferation of data centers has begun to set off alarm bells for officials across North Carolina – including at least one member of Alamance County’s governing board.
County commissioner Pam Thompson has called on her colleagues to have a serious discussion about the potential regulation of data centers – and perhaps even a moratorium on their construction while a new set of rules is banged into shape.
Although Alamance County isn’t currently home to any data centers, Thompson insists that it may be just a matter of time before one of these facilities takes advantage of the relatively lenient development rules that exist in the county’s rural reaches.
“There’s 93 [data centers] already built or proposed in North Carolina. I’m just real concerned about their water consumption, the power, and the noise – they’ve popped up in places where folks had already built their homes. . . and we’re kind of a sitting duck for this without zoning in our rural communities.”
– County commissioner Pam Thompson
“There’s 93 already built or proposed in North Carolina,” Thompson went on to recall in an interview Tuesday. “I’m just real concerned about their water consumption, the power, and the noise – they’ve popped up in places where folks had already built their homes…and we’re kind of a sitting duck for this without zoning in our rural communities.”
Thompson isn’t exactly alone in her misgivings about data centers.
Since the fall of 2025, eight counties and 14 municipalities in North Carolina have imposed moratoriums on these facilities. Meanwhile, two other counties have implemented data-center specific development rules without any pause in development, and a whole host of other jurisdictions have begun to discuss their prospective regulation without taking action.
Among the places where data centers are presently unwelcome are Chatham and Orange counties, which enacted moratoriums in April and February of this year. Meanwhile, the town of Apex has a one-year moratorium currently in effect while the city of Durham took a 60-day breather from new data centers in May. That same month, the city of Charlotte became the largest jurisdiction to join the club of data center skeptics, with a moratorium that’s scheduled to last 150 days.
This sudden scramble to halt, or at least to rein in, the development of data centers comes in sharp contrast to the cachet that these facilities had once enjoyed across North Carolina.
About 10 or 15 years ago, cities and counties were practically tripping over each other to attract data centers in order to reap the property tax benefits from their high-tech trappings and the utility fees from their voracious demand for water to cool their equipment. Alamance County even got into the act in 2009 when it competed for an Apple data center that ultimately landed in Catawba County.
The fever for data centers was still running high in 2014 when a consultant in Guilford County’s employ proposed data-oriented corporate park on the grounds of a prison farm that Guilford’s sheriff then operated along the Alamance County border. Codenamed Project Haystack, this venture was eventually presented to Alamance County’s commissioners before real world concerns intervened, and its one-time supporters found they were grasping at straws.
These previous flirtations with data center development concerned sites that were within Burlington’s sphere of influence. In both Project Haystack and the bid to recruit Apple, the city’s reserves of fresh water were deemed crucial to each venture’s potential success. This need for ready access to water also ruled out areas under the county’s own planning authority as prospective locations for new data centers.
Lately, the provision of public utilities has become less of an obstacle for large-scale residential developments that have traditionally gravitated toward Burlington and other municipalities in the water and sewer business.
Earlier this year, the county’s planning department received a subdivision request for 541 homes in the unincorporated community of Saxapahaw that proposes to use communal wells and septic systems as an alternative to public water and sewer. In the meantime, another project in the same general area has envisioned more than 400 homes sustained by the same sort of communal utilities.
The residents who live near the sites of these two subdivisions have called on the county to impose a moratorium on any additional residential development that would further strain the community’s ground water reserves. The commissioners, for their part, have bucked this suggestion on the advice of the county’s legal department.
But the prospect of a purely industrial project with the same thirst for the local water supply has proven one step too far for Thompson, who recently shared her concerns with her board’s leadership.
Late last month, Thompson notified Kelly Allen, the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, and the board’s vice chairman Steve Carter that she’d like to discuss the issue of data center proliferation at one of the board’s upcoming meetings.
Thompson’s proposal seems to have found a receptive audience in Allen, who told The Alamance News that the wheels are already in motion for data centers to appear on a future meeting agenda.
“I think they ruin a lot of property; they take a lot of water and a lot of resources; and I hate to think that we’d lose more farmland to them. So, we do have our planner and our county attorney looking into that…and if they can get that information ready in time they will be bringing it to us at the July 20 meeting.”
– County commissioner chairman Kelly Allen
“I think they ruin a lot of property; they take a lot of water and a lot of resources; and I hate to think that we’d lose more farmland to them,” the board’s chairman said in an interview on Tuesday. “So, we do have our planner and our county attorney looking into that…and if they can get that information ready in time they will be bringing it to us at the July 20 meeting.”
The board’s reduced meeting schedule this summer means that July 20 is the earliest opportunity that the commissioners will have to hold this rather timely debate. Meanwhile, Thompson is hopeful that, whatever ultimately comes out of this dialogue, she and her colleagues will take action in time to prevent a new data center from getting a toehold in some outlying part of the county.
“I would like to get ahead of that,” she insisted. “I want to have a public conversation about it before the public shows up with pitchforks and shovels and asks us ‘how did you let this happen?’”
