AINEWS
Without a state data center registry, 15 South Carolina counties are writing their own moratoriums. Colleton's council hears public comment Monday on a proposed zoning pause.
On Monday evening, Colleton County council will open a public hearing in Walterboro on a proposed "digital infrastructure overlay," a zoning layer that would, in effect, pause new data centers while the county studies what they would cost in water and electricity. The hearing is one of at least 15 such deliberations now playing out across South Carolina, a wave of county-level moratoriums that has emerged because the state itself does not track the data centers already inside its borders. (Hot Augusta, Sept. 10, 2026)
The pattern stretches from rural Marion County, where a project called Liberty has run into local pushback, to coastal Mount Pleasant in Charleston County, one of the first South Carolina towns to weigh a ban. In between sit counties that have either approved or are actively drafting temporary freezes. The most explicit example is Fairfield County, which gave initial approval in August to a 12-month moratorium built around town halls, expert work sessions, and site visits. Most of the proposed bans so far have come from rural counties, where the water and power math lands on smaller systems.
South Carolina does not maintain a registry of data centers. It does not require a state siting permit. It does not publish an aggregate model of how much water and power the facilities collectively pull. The "at least 20" data centers planned or operating in the state, a figure cited by the environmental advocacy group Data Center Watch, is itself a lower bound assembled from public reporting rather than a government tally.
That opacity is what the counties are trying to fix on their own timelines. Fairfield's 12-month pause is the cleanest version of the response: buy time, run the hearings, then write the rules. Colleton's proposed overlay is a more formal version of the same move, drafted as a planning tool rather than a flat ban. The Monday hearing, scheduled for 5:30 p.m. in Council Chambers in Walterboro, is the first chance for Colleton residents to weigh in. The Coastal Conservation League and the Southern Environmental Law Center are both urging attendance, framing the hearing as the public's only reliable seat at the table.
Some estimates put a single large data center's water use at roughly 5 million gallons per day, the daily draw of a small town. Other researchers expect U.S. data centers to consume up to 12 percent of all U.S. electricity by 2028. Neither figure is a South Carolina specific tally, and neither is independently verified, but together they describe the scale of the question each county is being asked to answer without help from the state.
Data Center Watch reports that resident pushback blocked or delayed roughly $64 billion worth of data center projects across the country between May 2024 and March 2025, a national total, not a South Carolina one. The South Carolina projects named in that tracker include Project Spero in Spartanburg, Project Liberty in Marion, and the Eagle Rock Partners project in Colleton County. Each now sits in the path of a county-level deliberation that did not exist a year ago.
The Colleton hearing is the next public checkpoint. After Monday, the council will decide whether to advance the overlay or send it back for revision. Fairfield's 12-month clock is already running. Marion, Spartanburg, and Mount Pleasant are in various stages of their own processes. None of the pauses is a final answer; all of them are a way to keep asking the question the state has not.
The question, repeated in Council Chambers and town halls around the state, is the same one: when does a local government get a vote on infrastructure that arrived before the rules did?