Chatham County agrees to a one-year pause on data centers and cryptocurrency mining.

Chatham County Implements Moratorium on Data Centers and Cryptocurrency Mining

On Wednesday, Chatham County officials approved a year-long moratorium halting the construction of data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations.

This ban affects all development approvals related to data centers, data processing facilities, virtual currency mining activities, and any activities associated with data processing facilities, as detailed during the county commission meeting.

The county highlighted that web services, hosting businesses, and genome sequencing will also be impacted by this suspension.

The rationale behind this decision is to provide county leaders with additional time to assess the environmental implications of data centers and to contemplate necessary regulations aimed at mitigating the adverse effects tied to these facilities and cryptocurrency mining.

A single hyperscale data center can use an enormous amount of electricity—hundreds of megawatts—and draw significant water, especially during the scorching summer months. For perspective, a 300-megawatt data center consumes electricity comparable to about 200,000 homes in North Carolina operating continuously, based on data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Residents across North Carolina have expressed concern over the establishment of large data centers. In New Hill, a rural area in Wake County, community members were taken aback by the approval of a 200-acre digital campus along Shearon Harris Road, close to the Harris Nuclear Power Plant.

Project documents indicate that this facility might require up to 1 million gallons of recycled water daily to keep servers cool during peak summer temperatures.

New Hill residents voiced their surprise about the massive scale of the proposed digital campus. Concerns similar to those in New Hill are prevalent statewide, from rural areas west of Charlotte, where major facilities operated by companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Meta exist, to the smaller, rapid “edge” data centers being suggested near urban hubs like Raleigh.

Researchers note that advancements in artificial intelligence push data centers to utilize substantially more electricity and produce heightened heat, leading to increased demands for both power and water.