By Will Atwater
Stokes County resident Tim Mabe likes to use a boat analogy to convey the size of a data center proposed for a nearly 2,000‑acre parcel along the Dan River that county commissioners voted to rezone for heavy industrial use in January.
“Stokes County wants to get in the boat‑building business, and their first boat is going to be an aircraft carrier,” he said during a recent meeting. “That gives you a sense of how ridiculous the size of this data center is for this little county, with no road or water infrastructure to support it.”
For Mabe and other residents, the fight is about more than traffic and noise. The site sits within land historically tied to the Hairston family and Black farming communities, part of a landscape they say county leaders should be protecting rather than turning over to heavy industry.
Mabe made his comments March 13, during a webinar announcing a lawsuit filed in Stokes County Superior Court by the Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the Southern Environmental Law Center. The groups are representing the National Hairston Clan, CleanAIRE NC, 7 Directions of Service and several local residents.
The lawsuit contends that in rezoning the land, the Stokes County Board of Commissioners’ “decisions were made without the procedural safeguards, factual analysis, and reasoned decision-making required by North Carolina Law.”
“It’s hard to understand why the county commissioners, against overwhelming opposition from their constituents, would relinquish this heritage and more than 1,800 acres of land for the sake of hypothetical revenues from a someday data center with an unidentified operator of unknown scale,” said Anne Harvey David, SCSJ’s chief counsel for environmental justice.
The lawsuit over the proposed Project Delta data center highlights a growing effort by communities across the state to halt zoning changes that are paving the way for a data center boom throughout the South. Communities are starting to look past the promise of jobs to the prospect of the massive facilities putting a strain on water resources, generating sound and light at all hours and driving up utility bills.
What’s at stake
Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft and Meta are pouring hundreds of billions into building data centers needed to power the next generation of artificial intelligence. Reaching those goals will require massive computing power housed in facilities that can be as large as several football fields or an “aircraft carrier,” as Mabe described.
While there are smaller-scale data centers in cities, the largest projects require expansive tracts of land. This reality is placing pressure on rural county officials — many with dwindling tax receipts, aging populations and infrastructure, and few economic opportunities — to accept what they see as lucrative deals from data center developers.
Advocates say data centers can affect nearby residents’ health through a mix of air, noise and water pollution and heat impacts.
“Data centers have a lot of impacts on nearby communities,” said Megan Kimball, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “They are loud, they are bright, they operate 24 hours a day, and in this case Project Delta would rely on generators that can run on diesel or methane, with a lot of air emissions. That can worsen asthma and cardiovascular disease, and the constant droning noise and light can disrupt people’s sleep and have mental health impacts.”
“When we visited a data center in Georgia, people living around it talked about constant stress and anxiety from the noise, chronic sleep disruption and that foggy‑brain feeling that comes with it,” said Crystal Cavalier‑Keck, director of 7 Directions of Service, an Indigenous -led community organization. “These massive data systems also need millions of gallons of cooling water and give off a lot of heat, which can warm nearby rivers and create local heat‑island effects that put extra strain on people’s hearts — especially elders, people who are sick and others who are already vulnerable during heat waves.”
These concerns are supported by health research that suggests, for instance, that diesel exhaust exposure can contribute to asthma, heart disease and premature death. Other studies associate chronic noise exposure with sleep disturbance, stress and increased cardiovascular risk.
This tension is deepening mistrust that some rural residents have of local officials, who they feel have cut deals with solar and other industry developers with little to no public input. They say they’re determined not to see the same scenario repeated.
“We’re having issues now with the solar farm going in across the street and the noise that they’re making,” said Stokes County resident and lawsuit plaintiff Rachel Dillon. “I can just imagine what’s going to happen when they decide to do the data center.”
For her part, Stokes County commissioner Sonya Cox said she’s in favor of the data center for the revenue it will bring to the county.
“I want my grandkids to be able to stay here and work and get good jobs,” she said at a public hearing in January. “I want us to have modern schools and appropriate fire and police protection. I want highly trained paramedics – enough paramedics so that when four of them are in Winston-Salem taking people to the hospital, there are some left here in our county when me or one of us has a heart attack.
“Do I want a data center? Not so much,” Cox continued. “But I do want the things the revenue can bring to our county.”
Push for a statewide pause
As data center moratoriums sprout up across the state, environmental advocates and community organizers gathered in Greensboro earlier this month for what was described as the North Carolina Data Center Convening, hosted by North Carolina Environmental Justice Network. For two days, more than 60 members of nonprofit advocacy organizations and community groups met to discuss a statewide strategy on how communities can push back against data centers.
The group agreed to work toward a state-wide ban on hyperscale data centers and cryptomining, Rania Masri, lead facilitator and director of organizing and policy for the NC Environmental Justice Network, wrote in an email to NC Health News.
“We need a pause on data center development in NC until we develop the necessary guard rails and conditions to protect all our communities, our livelihoods, and the state economy,” Masri said.
Sophie Loeb, a policy analyst with the Center for Progressive Reform, said the conversation has shifted from “data centers 101” to “our nuts‑and‑bolts strategy to combat the rise of data centers in North Carolina.”
“What we hope to gain from this is a statewide strategy to make sure that any data center development that occurs is happening in a way that is fair for our communities and is a sound investment,” said Steph Gans, assistant director for Clean Water for North Carolina, an environmental advocacy group.
Groundwater concerns
Bill Kearney, director of the Warren County Environmental Action Team, said he came to the convening with the legacy of his county’s PCB landfill fight in mind. He also brought fresh concerns about solar and data center projects moving into rural communities.
“We need energy and we need jobs, but we don’t want to be hustled and fooled by pennies while people are extracting millions.”
For Belinda Joyner, a longtime environmental justice organizer from Northampton County, the negative impacts of heavy industry are already familiar. Her community lives with pollution from an Enviva wood pellet plant and other industry. She said county commissioners recently voted to rezone land to make way for a data center near the Enviva site.
“You’re talking about a rural place, [where] some of us are on county water, some are on well water,” Joyner said. “And then with the generators, electric and water bills would be higher to compensate [for something] that’s not going to be a benefit to the county or to the people.”
She warned that a large data center could use enormous amounts of water each day, putting pressure on residents’ wells and county water supplies. It’s top of mind for some people, given that as of March 17, all 100 North Carolina counties were experiencing some level of drought, and Stokes County was in severe drought, according to the state’s Drought Management Advisory Council.
“We don’t want a one‑year moratorium, we want five or 10 years,” Joyner said, adding that the longer window would give the community time to be better prepared and less likely to be taken advantage of.
Emily Sutton, Haw Riverkeeper and executive director of Haw River Assembly, said those worries about water are compounded by the fact that North Carolina has few tools to track or limit how much water data centers might use.
“North Carolina is one of very few states that does not have a water withdrawal permit for industries, and so we don’t have a way to regulate how much water an industry is pulling from the system,” she said. “That makes public access to information a real barrier, because they’re not required to tell us how much they’re withdrawing.”
The state requires large surface and groundwater withdrawals to be registered and reported, but actual withdrawal permits are required only for large groundwater users in the Central Coastal Plain Capacity Use Area, a 15‑county region in eastern North Carolina, according to the North Carolina Division of Water Resources.
At least four North Carolina jurisdictions have now approved temporary moratoriums on data centers and, in most cases, cryptocurrency mining: Gates County, Chatham County, the town of Canton and the city of Brevard, which adopted a 90‑day pause. Apex, Boone and Orange County are considering similar one‑year moratoriums, according to media reports.
In addition to the moratoriums, the NC Environmental Justice Network notes that there are 19 proposed data centers across the state and four projects that have been withdrawn.
A hidden law that locks in rezonings
Harvey said county officials should be cautious about changing zoning to allow data centers because a recent state law makes those decisions hard to undo. Tucked into the 2024 Disaster Recovery Act, which was meant to address the effects of Helene, is a provision that bars local governments from “down‑zoning” property without the written consent of all affected owners, making it much harder for counties to reverse or tighten zoning.
“Once a county authorizes more uses in a particular district, it cannot walk that back if the results are disastrous,” Harvey said. “With that in mind, I think it would be prudent for counties — and potentially the state — to take a good hard look at what these data centers entail: their water usage, air pollution, generator use and what the impact to the public utility system is going to be for energy costs when rates are already increasing across North Carolina.”
University of Michigan Associate Professor Michael Craig, who studies electricity systems and costs, said uncertainty about how data centers will be powered makes planning even more difficult for utilities and communities.
Craig said that data centers can either build their own generators and produce their own electricity or plug directly into the grid and draw power like any other large customer. These approaches have very different implications for demand and costs.
“A utility has to plan ahead — you can’t just turn around and build a power plant in a year,” Craig said. “What the utility builds, whether it gets used or not, you’re gonna pay for it.”
The lawsuit is now before Stokes County Superior Court, where a judge will decide whether commissioners followed state law in approving the rezoning and related text changes. The plaintiffs are asking the court to invalidate the Project Delta decision and block the data center from moving forward while the case is heard.
North Carolina Black Alliance Environmental Justice Coordinator Brayndon Stafford said strong community benefits agreements are one way to make sure data center deals don’t deepen existing environmental harms in counties already burdened by factory farms, landfills or PFAS contamination. Such agreements, he said, can help ensure that companies are “not adding additional burden” and are also “working to help remove the burden that’s already there.”
Update: This story has been updated with comments from Stokes County commissioner Sonya Cox.
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