Something is happening in town halls and county commission chambers across North and South Carolina, and it is not what most data center developers expected. In the span of a few months, dozens of communities have voted to slow down, study, or stop new data center development. The story is no longer confined to one rural county or one contested site. It is now a regional pattern, and it carries a lesson for every company, investor, and vendor with capital tied to the digital infrastructure buildout.
The lesson is simple. You cannot walk into a community, fast-track a major project, and expect to be welcomed because you are a large player with a large checkbook. The communities now hitting pause are telling stakeholders exactly that.
The scale of the shift
In North Carolina, the wave started with Gates County in December 2025 and has not slowed. Charlotte became the largest community to act when its City Council voted unanimously on June 8 for a 150-day moratorium running through November 5. Rowan County approved a one-year pause in April. Cumberland County followed with a six-month moratorium on June 15, voted through 7 to 0. Holly Springs and Orange County adopted one-year pauses. Hillsborough and Boiling Spring Lakes did the same, even though neither had received a single data center proposal. Asheville advanced its own one-year moratorium out of committee in mid-June. Durham extended a 60-day pause to a full year.
South Carolina is moving along a parallel track. Chester County approved the first reading of a six-month pause on June 15. Spartanburg County directed staff to draft a one-year moratorium that same week, after having already rejected a $3 billion project earlier in the year. York County rewrote its rules in March, shifting data centers from a permitted use to a special exception that now requires public review before the Board of Zoning Appeals.
Both legislatures are circling the issue. North Carolina lawmakers have filed bills to repeal data center sales tax exemptions and, in one case, to impose a two-year statewide moratorium. South Carolina has measures that would freeze new approvals until the General Assembly builds a permanent oversight process.
This is a governance gap, not technophobia
It is tempting to read this as fear of artificial intelligence or hostility to industry. That reading is wrong, and acting on it will cost developers dearly.
Listen to what local officials actually say when they vote. In Asheville, the city attorney explained that the development ordinance has no definition for a data center, which means the city has no tools to regulate one. Hillsborough adopted a two-month pause for the same reason, with no proposal on the table and no one speaking against it at the hearing. Holly Springs paused while it updates its Unified Development Ordinance. The common thread is procedural, not ideological. Most of these communities are not equipped, on paper, to evaluate a project of this size and intensity. The moratorium is the tool they reach for to buy time to write rules.
That reframing matters. The obstacle is a planning vacuum, not a closed door. A developer who understands this can help fill the vacuum rather than fight it. A developer who misreads it will spend the moratorium period treating allies as adversaries.
The failures share a signature
The projects that have collapsed in the Carolinas did not fail on their technical merits. They failed on process and trust.
In Marion County, South Carolina, officials approved a $2.4 billion Stream Data Centers project in January, during a winter storm, after council members signed non-disclosure agreements that kept residents in the dark until after the vote. The community erupted. The project is now dead, formally canceled in June.
In Stokes County, North Carolina, commissioners rezoned roughly 1,845 acres along the Dan River for the Project Delta complex in January, overriding their own planning board’s recommendation and approving the change before an end user was even identified. The land carries deep cultural significance, including Saura tribal sites and Hairston family cemeteries. A lawsuit followed. By April, the county had voided its own rezoning, conceding that it failed to meet statutory notice requirements. The developer must now start over.
In Spartanburg County, residents accused the council of knowing about a proposed project months before it acknowledged one, and questioned why the moratorium surfaced only as an election approached.
The pattern is secrecy, speed, and scale. Each of these projects moved fast, revealed little, and asked a community to absorb something enormous before it had a chance to understand it. Trust, once lost that way, does not come back at the permitting stage. It is gone before the application is filed.
Power is overtaking zoning as the binding constraint
Here is the development that should reshape site selection. Marion County’s project did not ultimately die because of community anger, though there was plenty of it. Stream walked away because it could not source utility power within the required timeframe. The grid could not deliver.
This is the quiet story underneath the loud one. Duke Energy projects that data centers account for roughly 80 percent of new electricity demand growth in North Carolina. Utilities are stretched, interconnection queues are long, and rate cases are pending. Even where a community wants a project, power availability and timing are becoming the real gatekeepers. For investors and vendors, this means a signed incentive agreement is no longer the milestone that matters most. Confirmed, deliverable power is.
What the moratoriums protect, and what they cannot touch
State law shapes the field in ways many developers learn too late. North Carolina moratoriums cannot reach projects with vested rights or active site work. Rowan County’s pause explicitly excludes the Long Ferry Road site because preparation was already underway. Charlotte’s moratorium does not touch two already-approved projects totaling close to a million square feet. The line between a vested project and a frozen one is where value is now won or lost, and it is a line drawn by procedure, not negotiation.
The other hard truth is timing. Communities are now passing pre-emptive moratoriums before any developer appears. By the time a company identifies a site, the ordinance governing that site may already be written, and it may be written without that company’s input. The window to shape the rules is closing earlier than it used to.
The path forward
Data centers are important infrastructure. They support modern commerce, government services, and the technologies that will define the next decade. But communities are being asked to absorb the noise, the water demand, the power load, and the permanence of these facilities. They deserve to be treated as stakeholders in the decision, not as the final obstacle in front of it.
Most of the conflict now playing out across the Carolinas was avoidable. It is avoidable when companies engage before the vote rather than after it. It is avoidable when they explain clearly what they are proposing, what the benefits are, and where the genuine trade-offs lie. It is avoidable when they listen in good faith and show how they intend to be responsible stewards over the long life of a facility.
Brick and mortar, utility capacity, and zoning approvals only carry a project so far. None of them substitute for community trust. The developers, investors, and vendors who understand the landscape they are stepping into, and who counsel with local experts who can serve as honest brokers in these conversations, will be the ones still building when the moratoriums lift. The rest will be starting over, in Stokes County and everywhere it repeats.