Plans for a nearly $20B data center campus in North Carolina are on ice as local lawmakers consider a development moratorium.
The Edgecombe County courthouse in Tarboro, North Carolina
Energy Storage Solutions has withdrawn its offer to buy the 28 acres for the project inside a massive shovel-ready site identified by the state for fast-tracked development, Edgecombe County Manager Eric Evans told county commissioners at a meeting Monday.
Management at Energy Storage Solutions sent a letter to the county “noting that they want to withdraw consideration of the project from the county,” Evans said.
“Just for the public to know, that project is officially off board for the public consideration,” he said after commissioners voted to return a deposit that had been placed for the acquisition.
Energy Storage Solutions, a Robersonville, North Carolina-based LLC managed by Daniel Shaffer, had secured unanimous approval at the end of last year from the county commission for land use amendments that would have allowed the project to go forward, the Triangle Business Journal reported.
Shaffer told the publication at the time that it was moving forward with a $19.2B data center and energy storage development set to be built across eight $800M phases. Financing and potential tenants for the project were never publicly disclosed.
The development was set to rise in the 1,700-acre Kingsboro CSX Select Megasite, one of five shovel-ready properties identified by the state as ready to host large industrial operations.
Energy Storage Solutions didn’t respond to a request for comment from Bisnow on Wednesday morning about the project in Edgecombe County, roughly an hour’s drive east of Raleigh in central North Carolina with a population of less than 50,000 people and no major existing data center presence.
Shaffer is also suing the Tarboro Town Council in Edgecombe County Superior Court over a monthslong battle to secure permits for a $6.4B project on 50 acres in the town, where residents have raised concerns about potential noise and water pollution, the TBJ reported.
The Edgecombe County commissioners later in the meeting discussed a potential 24-month moratorium on data center development after the board received a petition with 1,362 signatures voicing concern about future development in the county, which has a population of roughly 49,100 people.
The Kingsboro Megasite project is the latest to be canceled amid rising anti-data center sentiment in local communities where the developments have been popping up and sometimes encroaching on neighborhoods.
Blackstone’s QTS this month walked away from a high-profile project in Prince William County amid a legal battle in the core data center market, which has grown to 1.5 gigawatts of capacity in the last decade, three times the computing power in all of Silicon Valley.
