Written by Jack Heath, Information Technology Specialist, 2026
On a Sunday afternoon in Clemmons, I watched representatives from Stokes and Forsyth county talk about people who voted routinely against each other on practically everything sitting together and agreeing completely over a moratorium on data centers for all the same reasons. And that's just not something you see in this political climate.
It may have been a Democratic cluster meetup, but opinions didn't sort the way the invitation suggested. Sure, plenty of the left but no shortage of support from MAGA, and nobody found that strange. The subject wasn't a candidate. It was a data center — a proposed hyperscale campus in Rural Hall, a few miles up the road — and from the floor, more than once, somebody said it plainly: this is not a Republican or Democrat issue.
I've worked in technology for more than thirty years. I work on the kind of infrastructure of those facilities house. So, I sat there with one BIG question:
How does a zoning fight over a farm turn into a four-party coalition against AI and big data?
Because that's what it is now. And the industry built it.
The first grievance is legitimate, local, and winnable — because it's about siting. In Forsyth County's Unified Development Ordinance, the use is listed as "Computer Data Center — Services A, except for Barber and Beauty Shops." Read that again. A hyperscale campus — a $3 billion, roughly 1.3-million-square-foot project — sits in the same services category the ordinance uses for barber shops. There is no hyperscale category. The ordinance has no shelf for the thing, so the thing gets slid onto whatever shelf is open.
Start with the water, because the neighbors do. A facility like this is a plumbing system the size of a neighborhood, and 'closed-loop' doesn't mean sealed: water evaporates to shed heat, the minerals left behind concentrate, and the operator continuously bleeds off part of the loop — blowdown — and replaces it with fresh water. That discharge is chemically treated, and it leaves warmer than it arrived. Warmer water holds less oxygen. Point it toward a small creek and the creek changes — and here the chain is Beaver Dam Creek to Muddy Creek to the Yadkin River, with a drinking-water lake in the same system. Then add the part that never makes the rendering: 130 acres of pasture becomes roof and pavement, and rain that used to soak in now reaches the creek all at once. Ask the people downstream about flood plains.
None of that is an argument the facility can't run. It is an argument that somebody has to ask the questions — how much water, in and out, at what temperature, with what in it, measured by whom — and write the answers down as conditions the operator can be held to. North Carolina has an instrument for every piece: discharge permits, withdrawal registration, stormwater rules. A special-use process can attach the rest — caps, monitoring, reporting. A 'Services A' classification attaches none of them. No hearing. No evidence. No hook to hang a condition on. The questions never get asked, because the category never asks them.
The community noticed. And when the immediate fight was over, they went further: on September 28, citizens filed their own text amendment proposing a "Hyperscale Data Center Campus" use — 25 megawatts and up, special-use permit required. Their draft caps potable water at 10 million gallons a year, mandates closed-loop cooling, and makes the operator report consumption twice a year. Sit with that for a second: the neighbors are drafting the zoning category the county never wrote. When residents have to do the ordinance's homework, the trust is already spent.
The project at the center of it, Iron Spur, was proposed for Wall Farm — about 130 acres, a century farm in the middle of Rural Hall — by the Drox Group out of Charlotte. On July 30, the Board of Commissioners denied the rezoning, 5–2, on Commissioner Dan Besse's motion. Besse has since warned publicly that the petitioners will come back with cosmetic changes. Even the win doesn't feel like an ending to the people who won it. And Forsyth isn't an outlier: neighboring Stokes County voided its own hyperscale rezoning, Project Delta, rather than let it stand.
The second grievance was already in the culture before anyone proposed a building. Long before a facility had a Forsyth County address, people were carrying a general anxiety about AI — jobs, control, the feeling that something powerful is arriving faster than anybody agreed to. That fear doesn't need a local target. But give it one — a fence line, a substation, a transmission corridor — and it lands with both feet. A neighbor who couldn't have told you what a language model was two years ago now has a mailing address for everything that worries him.
The third grievance is the door. This is the one the industry keeps underestimating. If a hyperscale data center can pass through a classification written for barber shop, what else can? The asphalt plant. The warehouse. Whatever heavy use finds the same loose shelf next. So the fight is never only about one building. It's about whether the written rules mean anything — and people who might have shrugged at a single facility will fight for years over a precedent.
When we allow large industrial operations to enter through zoning categories meant for small commercial uses — the kind designed for barber shops and boutiques — we create a loophole big enough for heavy industry to slip through without real public scrutiny.
My own town is living that problem right now. A hot-mix asphalt plant has been proposed at 6010 Gun Club Road in Clemmons — sitting on Muddy Creek, near multiple neighborhoods, and just 1.3 miles from an elementary school. The applicant filed for an air permit in July, and because of how the zoning is structured, no village council vote is required.
Different industry, same door: a high-impact use that neighbors never got to vote on, entering through whichever process asks the fewest questions.
That's why a zoning fight over a data center is never only about the data center. It's about the precedent — the way one exception becomes the pathway for the next heavy use, each one reshaping a community without the community's consent.
Impact map: No Asphalt Clemmons — the group's own map of the proposed plant's radius.
The fourth grievance is trust. Underneath the other three sits a simpler question: do the people in that room believe the people they elected are representing them — or going for a quick payoff? A loophole reads like a payoff whether one changed hands or not. And once neighbors start doing that arithmetic about their own commissioners, every vote those officials take afterward gets re-read in its light. Projects end. People face elections.
Which brings it to integrity, because that's what this fight is actually measuring. If you want AI adoption — real adoption, people building on the technology instead of bracing against it — the people implementing it have to act with integrity, and they have to demonstrate it, not announce it. Demonstrate that the data these systems gather and the gains from these initiatives will not be used in any negative way against the communities and workers asked to host them. Demonstrate that massive adoption of AI is not a method to fire people. Put people first, in the paperwork, in the siting, in the staffing — where it can be checked.
People can tell the difference between a knock at the front door and a noise at the back window. Come in the front door, palms out, where everyone can see your hands. Sneak in the back, face covered, and don't be surprised when the neighborhood organizes.
Stack the four and you get a lot of angry people unified in anti-AI and anti-data center sentiment. In it, you'll also hear the economic version of the argument: that administrations steer these facilities onto cheap rural land — land made cheaper, the coalition argues, by tariffs and industrial farming squeezing family farms — and call the transaction growth. You don't have to buy every link in that chain to hear what the people making it are actually saying: decisions made somewhere else devalued the farm, and now decisions made somewhere else have arrived to buy it.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Duke Energy expects data centers and other large users to account for more than 80 percent of its new demand growth. These facilities are coming, at scale, whether any single county cooperates or not. Which makes the manner of their arrival the whole ballgame.
And the power has a politics of its own. Duke's current plan answers that growth with roughly 9,650 megawatts of new gas by 2033 — more than twice its solar target — delays three coal plants' retirements, and calls wind uneconomic through 2040. The homeowner's side of the ledger runs the other way: the federal credit for owned rooftop solar and batteries ended last December; Duke pays exported rooftop power at a wholesale ~3.4 cents; and the one real home-battery subsidy was capped at about 6,000 homes and is nearly gone. In Lee County, a developer is preparing the state's first fracking application — not despite the data centers, but for one: a gas well to power an AI campus on site. In September, the Utilities Commission itself pushed back, denying Duke a turbine beside Amazon's campus and calling the forecast 'insufficiently reliable.' Notice who makes every one of those calls. Not the technology. Not the building. The plan, the tariff, the permit — politics, all the way down.
Here is the own-goal. A siting dispute is fixable. You write a category, you hold a hearing, you set setbacks and water conditions, a project gets approved or it doesn't, and everybody goes home still neighbors. That's local government doing its ordinary work. But route the project through a loophole instead — hurry it in while early revenue is on the table — and you convert a siting problem into a corruption problem.
The coalition in Forsyth County did not disband when the rezoning was denied. It has a mailing list now. It has practice. The next proposal, in the next county, inherits it.
After the denial, Piedmont Environmental Alliance said it in one sentence: "This coalition is not anti-data center but we are concerned with the way they are entering NC." The industry should read that as a gift. The opposition is publishing its terms.
So here is the work order — and it is the real case for a moratorium. Not a ban: a pause, justified because these four things have to exist before the next application lands, and right now they don't. For those of us who build these things, it isn't complicated:
Nobody ordered the coalition that met in Clemmons last Sunday. It was assembled — by haste, by loopholes, by the assumption that the politics would take care of themselves. They won't. At this point, the politics are the project and early voting is under way.
Not a great time to have people angry at policies green lit under your tenure.