the Oasis

South Carolina isn’t spilling over with data center applications, but it is pretty rife with angst about them. 

By Scott Morgan, Managing Editor
Sept. 19,2026

Here’s the least insightful thing I could say for the rest of this year: Tech is freaking us out. 

We’re having real-life conversations about real life getting snuffed out by sentient (and, I assume, malevolent) AI. People are chopping down, spray-foaming, and hammer-beating Flock Safety cameras. And all over South Carolina, city, town, and county councils are enacting their moratoriums du lour. Last year they were on residential developments, this year they’re on data centers.

The logic of moratoriums on new developments, whether they’re aimed at curbing types of businesses or new homes or whatever, is always the same. It’s local officials realizing that their manageable hamlets of yore are growing faster than their ability to manage them anymore.

This is what is happening (at an existential level) with the AI discussion, in case that’s not clear. The question is no longer can we build it or should we build it better, it’s what do we do when it gets past our ability to control it?

With data centers, South Carolina is trying to find its place between processing-power needs and the extinction of our natural resources. The pauses happening all over the state, which can range from outright temporary bans like we’re seeing in Clarendon County, to rewritten zoning categorizations, like we’re seeing in Gaffney, are an attempt to slow down something that’s moving faster than laws and guardrails can keep up.

Like the residential construction pauses we’ve witnessed over the past two years (in mostly the same places now entertaining data center moratoriums), the goal of a moratorium is to give officials time to think through how to proceed before they get inundated with applications they won’t have the legal authority to turn away.

What’s being presented is a discussion of the pros and cons of data centers. Fair enough.

The pros are:

• Money from investment and jobs
• Digital infrastructure security
• National security
• The promise of new technologies that could solve nagging (especially environmental) problems
• Massive upgrades in computing power
• Competitiveness in business, tech, and security

And the cons are:

• They won’t create many jobs
• They could kill a bunch of jobs
• The consume water and energy like a bag of chips
• They generate land, air, water, and noise pollution
• They somehow will find a way to screw poor people

Weigh these at your leisure.

But practical pros and cons of data centers are not really what the broader discussion is all about. Tech is here and data center builders will, as sure as the ocean tide, build data centers in South Carolina. We can’t stop it, we can only delay it, and only for so long.

What this is really about is a loss of control. The old South Carolina that folks who grew up here want to hold onto is washing away. And the fear of tech, 2026 Edition, is a convenient scapegoat for talking about loss while working to look like you’re doing something. 

To be fair, local leaders are responding to their constituents’ concerns by talking about data centers and taking action of some kind. And a lot of elected local officials are probably sincere in their worries.

But I hope they are using these moratorium times to actually figure out how to embrace and use data centers, tather than mourn the death of something that, sorry folks, died a decade or two ago. 

Data centers are coming. And, it might help to know that they are already here. At least 48 data centers already exist in South Carolina. There are almost as many in just the Charlotte metro, and most of them you’ve never even recognized. I was chatting with a gentlemen (an environmental official) two evenings ago who told me about a data center on Fifth Street in Uptown Charlotte that no one even knew was there, but it has been for years. 

And it really exists. WBTV just toured it, coincidentally.

If you like hating on data centers, I’m not going to rob you of your joy. You do you, my friend.

But they’re coming. They’re here. There will be more. They will use our power grids to generate stupid art and illegal crypto. They will enable AI expansion. 

But they will also enable the enormous tech demands of this century. They will also build the foundation for the next century. We can’t all use AI every chance we get and then rail that they can’t build power stations in our backyard.

We don’t need panic or NIMBYism. What we do need are leaders who are braced for expansion. Who understand that sleepy ol’ South Carolina is dead. Who can manage all of this so that we grow competitively and smartly and with good context.

Nothing is all good or all bad. We’re not going to do it right if all we do with every new change is pause and panic.