By John Spruill
Let's start with the simplest question, because a lot of folks have never been told the answer. What is a data center? It's a building full of computers. That's it.
Every photo on your phone, every bank statement, every episode you stream, every medical record at the hospital has to physically live somewhere. When people say something is "in the cloud," there is no cloud. There is a building, with rows of computers in it, running around the clock, holding your information and sending it back when you tap the screen. That is a data center.
There is no version of modern life without them. The only question is where they get built, and who benefits.
Lately the answer to that second question has gotten lost. In about two years, data centers have gone from a business-page curiosity to a kind of folk villain, accused of draining wells, doubling power bills, and giving nothing back. Communities across North Carolina have passed or considered moratoriums. An Elon University poll this spring found 44 percent of North Carolinians opposed a large data center in their own community and 24 percent supported one, with nearly a third undecided. That undecided third is who this is written for. Some of the opposition came from real places treated badly by bad deals. But a lot of it is outdated or simply wrong, and the counties that could use the investment most are being talked out of the conversation before they have had it.
They are not all the same building, and that is where the argument goes sideways. Your hospital has one in a closet, and so does the bank. A colocation building is a landlord renting space and power to other companies, and those bring the least benefit locally, since often you cannot find out who the tenants even are. A hyperscale campus is what Apple built in Maiden and Google built in Lenoir: one company owning the building, the land and every machine inside it, running steadily around the clock. Then there are the artificial intelligence training campuses now making headlines, far larger, needing transmission built to carry them. Nearly every frightening number in circulation comes from that last kind and gets applied to all of them, a little like judging every truck on the road by an eighteen-wheeler.
Take the water, the most outdated worry of all. The scary figure, hundreds of thousands of gallons a day, comes from an older cooling design that boils water off into the air. Newer buildings seal the water in a circuit and reuse it, like the radiator in your truck. The developer of a closed-loop campus in Wisconsin says it will use about 22,000 gallons a day, roughly what 65 houses use, against something like five million for an equivalent building cooled the older way. Those figures come from the company rather than from independent research, but the engineering difference is real. Senate Bill 730 would bar evaporative cooling outright at any facility drawing 100 megawatts or more, require applicants to attest that their cooling system minimizes water use, and direct state regulators to write water-use standards that can mandate closed-loop or reclaimed water. The House passed it in June and it sits before the Senate now, so it is not law. But the water question is answered by which design gets built, and that is a thing a permit can settle.
Take the power bills. Researchers at Rutgers compared 22,834 ZIP codes across 24 states over a decade. Places that got a data center saw bills move by about two dollars a month at the high end, and their more rigorous comparisons produced smaller effects that were not statistically significant. Rutgers calls its own evidence weak, mixed and small. That is not proof data centers never move a bill. It is a long way from what you have been hearing. Texas and Virginia added the most demand and had the smallest rate increases; California and New York added the least and had the largest.
Here is the part that is true. On the regional grid running from Virginia to Illinois, data centers have driven up the price of reserving power. That grid's own market monitor attributes $29.4 billion across the last four capacity auctions to data center demand, or 46 percent of the total. Demand from these facilities is the largest single driver, though generation availability and interconnection delays matter too. The piece a state can actually fix is the contract. Senate Bill 730 would require every data center to sign an electric service contract with minimum billing, a term long enough to recover the utility's costs, and credit protections if the company defaults, all of it designed to keep the rest of us from subsidizing them.
And here is the part nobody mentions. This corner of the state sits on that same regional grid. We are already paying our share of the cost of an industry built somewhere else. The only question is whether we keep paying while collecting nothing.
The jobs deserve an honest accounting, starting with the fact that the numbers vary enormously and Brookings warns they are routinely overstated. A facility might employ several dozen people or several hundred. Google reportedly has around 400 at Lenoir, after nineteen years of expansion. Whatever the count, the work is technicians and electricians and security at $70,000 to $100,000 a year, in a county where the typical household earns about half that, and building the place takes 800 to 1,500 construction workers for two to four years. It is not a factory with five hundred jobs, and anybody promising you a thousand is selling something. But the jobs were never the point.
The tax base is the point. North Carolina waives sales tax on the equipment, and that is Raleigh's decision, not ours. Property tax is what a county controls, and property tax is where the money is. Google's campus in Caldwell County paid roughly $5.2 million in property taxes last year, close to a tenth of that whole county's collection, from one taxpayer. Caldwell and Lenoir did grant Google some incentives, which is the point: an abatement is a choice a county makes, not a condition the industry imposes. Brookings found that at hyperscale campuses, incentives came to only about two percent of construction investment, because those companies choose sites for power, land and fiber. At colocation buildings, the landlord kind, incentives ran to 62 percent. Another reason the difference between the two is worth knowing.
So here is the arithmetic. Washington County's entire tax base is about $1.08 billion. Our property tax brings in roughly $7.6 million a year. Every penny on our tax rate raises about $103,000. Those are our own budget numbers.
A facility of the size this industry routinely builds would generate an estimated $5.1 to $6.8 million a year. That assumes roughly $600 to $800 million in taxable value, the buildings plus the servers and cooling equipment inside them, at our own rate of 84 cents per hundred plus the penny for drainage. A different project would produce a different number, and that assumption is the one to argue with. But at that scale it is close to doubling what this county collects, from a single taxpayer, on a few hundred acres, with no new children in the schools and almost no new traffic once construction ends. A larger campus would be worth proportionally more. Commissioners could finally fund what has been unfundable for thirty years, or cut the rate for every household and farm in this county.
How large a facility this grid could actually serve is a question for the utility, not a newspaper column. Until a formal study is done, every number here is an estimate.
The skeptics are not wrong about everything. Most of the reassuring research predates the recent boom in artificial intelligence, and the newest facilities are bigger than the ones those researchers measured. Not every company that comes knocking is Apple. Those are fair points, and they argue for standards, not a closed door.
Which is where this ought to land. Washington County should be open to anything responsible.
Responsible means a named operator with the balance sheet to finish what it starts. Full property taxes, no abatement. Closed-loop cooling. The developer paying for its own power lines, substations and water upgrades instead of sending that bill to the rest of us. Groundwater monitoring, because the Castle Hayne aquifer is our drinking water. Noise limits for the nearest neighbors. And a plan for the site if the company's plans change.
None of that is hostile to a serious company. Most of it is how the good ones already build. It is also a great deal easier to settle before somebody applies than afterward.
For decades this county has watched its young people leave for work that ought to have existed here, and its tax base sit still while everything else got more expensive. Data centers are not a moral question. They are a question of land, power, water, and people who know how to run industrial operations, which is what rural counties have always had to trade on. Demonizing an entire industry is a luxury a county like ours cannot afford. Neither is a bad deal. The room between those two is a lot wider than the shouting suggests.
John Spruill is a member of the Washington County Board of Commissioners. This column reflects his own research and his own opinions. It does not speak for the Board, for any other commissioner, or for county staff, none of whom were consulted in writing it. No data center application is before the county, and the Board has taken no position on the subject.
Sources: Rutgers New Jersey State Policy Lab; Brookings Institution; Monitoring Analytics/PJM; N.C. Senate Bill 730; The Assembly NC; Washington County FY27 budget workbook; Vantage Data Centers.