On Monday night, the Gaffney City Council voted, unanimously, to approve a new zoning classification that holds data center builders responsible for mitigating the effects of their facilities.
The Industrial District 2, or ID-2, classification sets several guidelines as to what can be built and what requirements and specifications a data center must meet if it is to be within Gaffney municipal boundaries.
“Applicants in ID-2 areas, for data centers, will be required to provide written verification from the Gaffney Board of Public Works that power and water infrastructure is sufficient to accommodate the increase in use caused by the data center,” said Dale Guffey, Gaffney’s assistant director of community development, at a November City Planning Board meeting detailing what would be in the final ordinance. “We're not just going to take their word for it, we need written verification from the Gaffney Board of Public Works.”
Data center applicants also will be required to submit a noise study, conducted by an acoustical engineer registered in South Carolina; post-construction noise testing also “may be required if deemed necessary by the city,” Guffey said.
City officials say they do not want to outlaw data centers, and would not really be able to do so without inviting litigation anyway. And they don’t want to restrict how data centers would achieve the goals of not disrupting natural resources or baffling noise. They say they just want to make sure that thought goes into the building of data centers in the city, before applicants line up to build one.
There are no data center applications in Gaffney currently, but the city did have a small data center about a decade ago, which did not run AI operations. That center was a single building that generated numerous noise complaints from residents, and closed down after only a few years.
But data centers, used to process large cryptocurrency functions and to help operate and store artificial intelligence media, are coming to South Carolina. Cities and counties all over the state are trying to weigh the benefits of data centers with their downsides.
The chief benefit is upfront investment, which can pump billions of dollars into a city’s economy, even though the financial value of these facilities can depreciate rapidly.
The chief downside is the environmental cost of operating and cooling data centers, which can require enormous amounts of water and power consumption.
In October, Pew Research Center published a report on data centers that outlined their consumption needs, now and in the next five years.
“U.S. data centers consumed 183 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2024, according to [International Energy Agency] estimates,” the report states. “That works out to more than 4% of the country’s total electricity consumption last year – and is roughly equivalent to the annual electricity demand of the entire nation of Pakistan. By 2030, this figure is projected to grow by 133% to 426 TWh.”
Data centers also take up large pieces of land. In York County, the company building a data center near Lake Wylie, QTS, in late December bought more than 400 acres of new land near where its data center would go. The land, as originally reported in the Rock Hill Herald, sits just below a similar-sized plot of land that QTS already owns.
In Colleton County, the development of a series of nine data center buildings is on the table that would take up 859 acres of the wetlands-heavy county. A citizen group opposed to the project is pushing back against a special exemption that would allow the builders, Thomas & Hutton Engineering and Eagle Rock Partners, to build the project in a currently rural-zoned parcel.
There is no single recognized number of data centers in South Carolina. Commercial sites that track data centers vary from 15 at DataCenters.com to 31 on DataCenterMap.com.
