Amid the Winter Storm, a Rural South Carolina County Quietly Approved a $2.4 Billion Data Center

As a rare winter storm bore down on South Carolina, bringing conditions that historically paralyze the state for days, local officials in a rural county quietly pushed through a massive $2.4 billion data center without most residents knowing it was even on the table.

“There was a public meeting, which most were unaware of,” Jessie Chandler, a resident of rural Marion County, told Capital B, referring to a Jan. 22 council meeting. “I know legally they had to announce the public meeting within a certain time frame for all of us to attend, but most of the county [was] preparing for this winter storm, which we know firsthand will affect us all because it has before.”

Marion County officials confirmed that the council signed a nondisclosure agreement, which barred their ability to make the data center public. On the agenda prior to the council meeting, the line item for the vote was called “Project Liberty,” but it did not list details of the project.

The pattern residents of this majority-Black rural county are experiencing is not isolated.

Across the country, developers are using NDAs to keep projects hidden while systematically choosing communities — often majority-Black rural counties — with less organized political and economic power. Marion County is no different. The area has a poverty and unemployment rate that is twice as high as the U.S. average.

Davante Lewis, a Louisiana Public Service Commissioner who has opposed data center projects, said the pattern of NDAs and tax deals negotiated before public input has become standard practice.

“Engagement, for me, shouldn’t happen after you’ve already signed the deal or you got the NDA and cut a tax deal. It should be at the beginning when you’re considering it,” Lewis told Capital B in October.

The practice is leaving communities in the dark about projects that will strain their water and power supplies.

By 2028, data centers are expected to use the same amount of water as 5.5 million people. Likewise, data centers are largely responsible for causing air pollution to spike for the first time since the pandemic began.

Rural counties are bearing this burden invisibly.

Marion County’s approval came just weeks after developers proposed a similar complex in another majority-Black rural county in Colleton County, South Carolina. The Colleton County complex came to be after developers first tried — and then failed — to place it in a predominantly white rural community where residents organized fierce resistance and filed lawsuits to block the project.

Days after Capital B reported on that proposal, the Southern Environmental Law Center filed a lawsuit to block an ordinance that makes it easier for data centers to be built in rural areas.

Similar zoning ordinances have been passed across the country to open up data center growth, from Louisiana to Georgia. “This zoning ordinance opens up a treasured and rural part of our state to industrial development and all the pollution and degradation that comes with it,” said Emily Wyche, SELC Senior Attorney.

The pattern in South Carolina is stark and a sign for the rest of the country, experts said.

The U.S. now has more gas-fired power plants in development than any other country in the world, according to researchers from the Global Energy Monitor, a U.S. nonprofit that tracks oil and gas developments.

Last year, data centers were responsible for more than half of that growth, and over the next five years, it is projected that more than one-third of new power plants will be used to directly power data centers.

Texas accounts for nearly a third of the U.S.’s planned buildout at a rate that is more than the next seven states combined. Louisiana and Pennsylvania are a distant second and third.

A pollutant from gas power plants — fine particulate matter known as PM2.5 — can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, causing respiratory and cardiovascular disease. It is linked to asthma attacks, strokes, dementia, and cancer.

Black Americans have the highest death rate from power plant pollution in the U.S. ​

“It’s just a constant vicious cycle,” said Sonya Sanders, a South Philadelphia resident turned environmental activist after a fossil fuel-related explosion in her neighborhood. “They are hurting us with this pollution, and more of it is never going to do good for us.”

The Secret Deal in South Carolina

At the Jan. 22 Marion County Council meeting, as most residents were preparing for the storm, several community members used the hearing to press council members on how little the public knew before the vote and how quickly the deal was moving.

Chandler was right about the storm’s impact on the states. The winter storm glazed much of South Carolina with ice and snow, causing hazardous roads, traffic accidents, school and airport closures, scattered power outages, and at least two cold-related deaths in the state.

At the meeting, Marion County resident Samuel Burns urged the council to slow down and share more information, saying taxpayers were being asked to weigh in on a project they still didn’t fully understand.

“I don’t know what it’s going to do to the county,” he said. “I would like to see a little bit more transparency coming from this body to inform the public, because this is going to affect all the taxpayers in Marion County.”

Others zeroed in on the project’s long‑term strain on local resources, especially water and electricity, in a county where recent studies already show long‑term groundwater declines.

“If there’s another drought, it would be a big one,” Dylan Coleman, a resident at the meeting. “Marion County is a farming community, and I think that’s important to the farmers around here.”

Deputy County Administrator Kent Williams said engineers for Project Liberty estimated each building would use about 7,175 gallons of water a day, and that there could be as many as six buildings. In all, that is the usage equivalent of roughly 150 households.

During that meeting, county officials approved a “Fee‑In‑Lieu of Tax agreement.” This will save the developers tens of millions of dollars compared with standard local taxes by only requiring them to pay an agreed-upon lump sum regardless of their revenue.

Williams told residents that if Project Liberty is fully built out, it could eventually generate about $28 million a year for the county — more than its entire current $25 million budget — even with the tax exemption.

But like many counties where these projects are proposed, the direct benefit of the technology might not trickle down. Just 66% of Marion County has regular access to the internet, compared with 90% of the U.S.

Likewise, the data center, if completed, would lead to roughly 20 permanent jobs in the county of 30,000.

The Marion County vote fits squarely within the Trump administration’s broader push to fast‑track data center construction across the country.

Last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Commerce Department to launch a financial‑support initiative — including loans, grants, and tax incentives — for large data centers like the scale of Project Liberty. The order, which the White House framed as essential to “winning the AI race” against China, also instructs agencies to eliminate or streamline environmental reviews to speed up construction.

At the state level, Republican‑led legislatures have followed suit, including Arkansas, Kentucky, Indiana, Louisiana, and Texas, which have all expanded tax exemptions or fast‑tracked zoning and permitting rules for data centers.

In Marion County, one county council official, Joel Rogers, did speak out against the project.

“We’ve only received in the last day or two important documents related to this project,” he said after the meeting. “I think I agree with the general sense of saying we need to slow down on this particular project, even for us.”