Interior of a modern data center. If approved, an 860-acre data center campus proposed for South Carolina’s Lowcountry would mark the state's first gigawatt center. (Stock photo by Imaginima/Getty Images)
WALTERBORO — An 860-acre data center campus proposed for South Carolina’s Lowcountry, if approved and built, would mark the first gigawatt center in the Palmetto State.
Colleton County residents and other opponents of the $6 billion project packed the auditorium of the county civic center Thursday, voicing their concerns and seeking more information on the project that is in the early phase of development. Such massive energy hogging centers are facing pushback nationwide even as more are planned to power technical advancements being driven by artificial intelligence.
The first hurdle the developers of the nine-building campus face is securing a zoning exception for the property that would allow for a more industrial use. The project is proposed for a timberland tract about four miles southeast of Walterboro.
Only Ken Loeber, co-founder of the Charlotte-based development firm Eagle Rock Partners, spoke in favor of the project.
“The AI race that our country is in with other countries around the world is real,” Loeber said of the need for the center.
Opponents took up the remainder of the three-hour meeting, which grew rowdy at times with chants, heckling and multiple threats by the board to end the meeting if the disruptions continued. In addition to residents, opponents included environmental activists, a state senator and a Democratic gubernatorial candidate.
At the heart of the matter is the campuses proximity to South Carolina’s beloved ACE Basin.
The 350,000-acre undeveloped estuary named for the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto rivers that feed it is home to nine federally endangered species, including peregrine falcons, wood storks and leatherback turtles. There are also six species federally designated as threatened and 30 other state protected species.
“The most significant conservation achievement in the state of South Carolina, I’d dare say on the entire East Coast, is the protection of the ACE Basin,” state Sen. Chip Campsen, R-Isle of Palms, told members of the county zoning board.
While the site does contain about 235 acres of wetland, Loeber said the campus would impact just 1 1/2 of those wetland acres with roads needed to access the property.
Meanwhile, the Ashepoo River lies about six miles south of the data center site. Residents were worried about how much water the center might pull from the river and groundwater system that they also rely on for their own homes and farms.
“To the extent that they use any water at all it will pose a great risk to the Ashepoo River system and the ecology of that river system,” Campsen said.
“Rural South Carolina is under attack by for-profits who seek to steal God’s gift to us — our water — right out from underneath our feet,” added Mullins McLeod, a Democratic candidate for governor who grew up in Walterboro.
The answer to the water use question, according to Loeber: about 12,000 gallons of water a day, the equivalent of 14, four-bedroom homes.
It amounts to a tenth of 1% of the 4.2 billion gallons available in the county annually, according to Loeber.
“So the amount of water that we’re using every day is not billions and billions of gallons,” he said. “That is the way data centers in the past might have been developed. It’s not the way the modern data center is used.”
The center accomplishes this by continuously recycling the water it uses to cool the hundreds of thousands of servers it stores. That means the center operator would only have to fill the cooling tanks once. Most of the daily water usage would be from an estimated 500 employees hired to operate the facility, Loeber said.
While this type of system is less water intensive, it can be be more power intensive.
Loeber told the SC Daily Gazette he estimates the center will need 1,000 megawatts of electricity.
That would take up nearly all of Santee Cooper’s share of a 2,200-megawatt, natural gas-fired power plant that the state-owned utility company is seeking to build, in partnership with Virginia-headquarted Dominion Energy, in nearby Canadys.
By comparison, other large data centers in the state operated by tech giants, such as Google and Meta, use about 200 megawatts each.
The $5 billion Canadys gas plant and a $431 million natural gas pipeline needed to power it have only just started the state and federal permitting process. Operations won’t begin until the 2030s, so it would likely take power providers at least that long to produce the amount of energy this proposed gigawatt center needs.
Loeber went on to tell the zoning board that his company is developing this project speculatively meaning it does not have a specific tenant lined up at this time. However, data centers of this size often appeal to those same major technology users, such as Amazon.
Colleton County residents, both those that have lived in the area for decades and newcomers, raised concerns about how the data center would impact the landscape, as well as the value of the homes where they had planned to spend their retirement years. One man suggested a data center is better suited for an industrial area, rather than chasing cheap, rural land in an area traditionally used for agriculture.
“The main question is why here? Why now? The answer is not here, not now, not ever,” said Richard Burke, whose parents live near the site.
Another woman called into question the jobs and pay being promised by the developers.
Loeber said about 30% of the 500 permanent jobs would be in IT. Another 30% would be facility management and maintenance jobs, ranging from entry-level to highly technical. The last 30% would be security personnel, plus another 10% of administrative workers.
But Shannon Wait said her experience working at one of Google’s data centers in Berkeley County was not the opportunity she expected. For the two years she was there, Wait said she and others were kept on as temporary workers rather than full-time employees, earning $15 an hour on contracts that she had to renew every three months.
“I was constantly on the job hunt,” she said.
Residents also worried about how quickly the project seemed to be moving, with one man calling it “governance run amok.” The request came about a month after the Colleton County Council amended its zoning code to make exceptions for data centers.
The zoning board took no action, saying it would vote on the request at an unspecified future meeting.
In addition to the rezoning request, the center still needs to complete numerous county and state level permits for noise, construction, water use and permission to drill wells. It also will need a study from electric providers to determine when there might be enough power on the grid to meet the center’s needs.
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