This spring, teachers in a rural Louisiana parish opened end-of-year bonus checks worth more than fifty thousand dollars. For many of them, that one check matched or beat a full year’s pay. The money traced to a single source. Meta is building a massive data center nearby, and the activity set off a surge in local sales tax revenue. The parish’s first tax payment from the site came to about twenty-two million dollars, larger than its typical sales tax haul for an entire year. Roughly half went to the school board.
That is what a data center can do for a community. It is also not what most people expect to hear right now, because the headlines have been running the other way.
Across North Carolina and South Carolina, more than two dozen communities have paused or restricted new data centers in recent months. That wave is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But a pause is not a verdict on the technology. It is a demand that the next wave be built better than the last one. And built right, a data center can deliver more to a community, a state, and the country than almost any other single investment a rural county will ever see.
The benefits are real, and larger than the critics allow
Start with the scale. According to the Data Center Coalition, the industry’s trade group, data centers contributed roughly $18.5 billion to North Carolina’s economy in 2024, supported more than 117,000 jobs, and generated about $1.4 billion in state and local tax revenue. The group’s own framing is worth noting, because it points to where the impact lands. These investments tend to flow to rural and industrial communities that are competing hard for jobs and tax base.
North Carolina has already lived this story once. Google opened its Lenoir campus in Caldwell County in 2007 with a roughly $1.2 billion investment. It is now the largest taxpayer in the county, and this March the company committed another $1 billion over two years. Apple’s pledge in Maiden grew from $1 billion to more than $3 billion. Meta built its campus in Forest City. These projects landed in counties like Caldwell, Catawba, and Rutherford, regions hollowed out by the decline of textiles and furniture, and they put the area’s existing water and power infrastructure back to work. That is a two-decade track record, not a brochure promise.
The skeptics are not wrong about the standard model
Here is the part the industry sometimes glosses over. The conventional data center deal delivers a burst of construction jobs, then a much thinner stream of permanent ones, plus tax revenue that residents rarely see or feel. Research from the Brookings Institution describes the pattern plainly. Built the standard way, fast and quiet and on the first offer, a data center produces modest lasting upside beyond the build itself.
So the difference between a windfall and a disappointment is not the size of the building. It is how the deal is structured. That is the whole argument. Done right is a design choice, not a happy accident.
What “done right” actually looks like
Four commitments separate the projects that enrich a community from the ones that divide it.
The first is to pay your own way. Microsoft has pledged in Person County to cover its own costs so it does not raise electricity prices, and to replenish more water than it uses. Amazon says its $10 billion Richmond County campus will draw on the county’s existing surplus water capacity, with no added cost to local ratepayers. North Carolina’s Senate Bill 730, which has passed the House, would make this the rule. Large data centers would have to cover their own infrastructure and energy costs rather than shift them onto households.
The second is to protect the water. The concern is legitimate, but the engineering is improving fast. Amazon says its Richmond County site will cool with outside air about 93 percent of the year and use water less than 7 percent of the time, an approach that also cuts peak-summer power demand by a quarter to a third. Microsoft’s Person County design recirculates water in a closed loop rather than drawing new supplies. Both companies have committed to be water positive by 2030, and Amazon’s North Carolina work includes restoring 20,000 acres of longleaf pine in the Pee Dee basin, projected to return about 1.6 billion liters of water a year. Communities should still read the fine print, since replenishment only counts when it happens in the same watershed. But the tools to build responsibly now exist.
The third is to build the benefits in at the start, as core terms rather than sweeteners added at the end to quiet a crowd. In Caldwell County, Google paired its latest expansion with a $2 million fund for weatherization and energy efficiency in low-income homes and schools, a multiyear grant to keep kids in school, and money to restore a historic high school. In South Carolina, York County’s QTS campus is structured to send roughly $5 million a year to one school district for every billion dollars invested.
The fourth is to invest in people. The most forward-looking operators fund workforce pipelines and university research tied to a region’s own strengths. Microsoft helped launch a data center training academy in Wisconsin built to prepare more than a thousand students for high-demand roles. A campus that trains local workers and partners with local colleges leaves something behind that outlasts the construction crews.
The leverage has shifted, and the smart move is to give more
For years, communities competed against one another to land these projects, which handed developers the leverage. That has changed. Now the developers compete against each other for a limited number of viable sites with deliverable power. That gives communities a measure of leverage they did not have five years ago. The shortsighted response is to run the old playbook and chase the cheapest deal. The smart response, for any company that intends to operate for decades, is to lead with the benefits that make a project welcome. Done right is now also the faster path, because a project with community trust behind it does not spend a year fighting a moratorium.
The upside is decided upstream
This is the point most often missed. The value a data center creates for a community is not determined at the ribbon cutting. It is determined months or years earlier, at the negotiating table, in decisions about cooling technology, infrastructure cost allocation, water commitments, and local investment. By the time the public sees a project, the terms that decide whether it becomes a windfall or a fight are already set. That is the discipline behind doing it right. It is upstream work, and it is invisible to nearly everyone until it is too late to change.
The implications follow directly. For companies and investors, the early and quiet phase is the main event, not the paperwork that comes after. The binding constraints are now power and trust, and both are won or lost before the first public hearing. For North Carolina and South Carolina, the opportunity is enormous and disproportionately rural. A moratorium that hardens into a permanent no does not merely stop one project. It takes a county out of the running for the kind of investment that turned the Catawba Valley around.
Data centers are important infrastructure. They store the medical records, clear the payments, and run the everyday services that families, businesses, and governments depend on. Sited carelessly, they breed exactly the backlash now spreading across both Carolinas. Done right, they can fund schools, revive industrial towns, and anchor a regional economy for a generation. The difference is not luck, and it is not the size of the check. It is the work done early, in good faith, before anyone outside the room knows the project exists.