A rezoning vote in Stokes County, NC will decide whether historic Saura and plantation land becomes a large, privately developed data center campus.
The site’s attraction is classic AI infrastructure math: cheap rural land near Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Power Station, implying strong grid access for high-density compute like GPU clusters.
The developer, ELS, is pitching up to $20 million a year in tax revenue, but providing limited public detail on actual data center scale, power draw, or long-term energy commitments.
Water and noise are already pressure points, with ELS promising lower-water cooling and a 70 dB noise cap, signaling standard hyperscale-style design concerns without clear enforcement mechanisms.
The deepest friction is over land use: shifting ancestral, archeologically sensitive farmland into heavy industrial use for cloud and AI workloads, with burial sites for Indigenous and enslaved people at the center.
Local opposition is organized and experienced from past fights over fracking and other industrial projects, so project risk is high even if rezoning passes.
This is a useful case study in how AI data center siting decisions intersect with grid proximity, rural tax promises, cultural heritage, and community resistance.
Source: Historic land at crux of Stokes County data center controversy | 88.5 WFDD
