What Will They Mean for Our Water, Land and Energy?
For generations, conservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry has centered on protecting the things that make this region extraordinary: rivers and wetlands, forests, wildlife habitat, working rural landscapes and the communities that live alongside them.
Now the region is confronting a very different kind of development pressure.
Data centers.
These enormous facilities contain the computer servers and infrastructure that power cloud computing, streaming, online services and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. As demand for digital infrastructure has exploded, South Carolina has become an attractive location for companies looking to build them.
The economic investment can be substantial. But so can the environmental footprint.
And some of the largest proposals are now appearing in the Lowcountry.
Data Centers Are Already Expanding in Dorchester County
Google has made major investments in South Carolina’s data-center infrastructure, including two campuses in Dorchester County—at Pine Hill Business Campus in Ridgeville and Winding Woods Commerce Park in St. George.
In 2024, Google announced a $3.3 billion South Carolina investment that included the two Dorchester County campuses. In 2025, the company announced an additional two-year, $9 billion investment in the state.
These facilities bring investment, construction activity and jobs.
But they also raise an important question:
How many large data centers can the Lowcountry support without fundamentally changing the region’s demand for electricity, water and land?
An Even Bigger Proposal Near the ACE Basin
That question became particularly urgent in Colleton County.
Developers have proposed a massive data-center campus on rural timberland along Cooks Hill Road south of Walterboro.
The proposed project would cover roughly 850 acres, with nine large industrial buildings and two electrical substations. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center, the proposed complex could demand approximately 1,000 megawatts of electricity.
Perhaps most concerning from a conservation perspective is its location.
The property sits within the larger ACE Basin landscape, one of the most significant conservation areas on the Atlantic Coast, and the project area itself contains more than 200 acres of wetlands.
The proposal immediately generated opposition from nearby landowners and conservation organizations.
In July 2026, Colleton County unanimously approved a six-month moratorium on data-center development approvals, the first such moratorium in the Lowcountry. The pause gives the county time to reconsider how these enormous industrial facilities should fit into its land-use plans.
That conversation may ultimately be more important than any single development.
Why Data Centers Have Such a Large Environmental Footprint
A data center can look surprisingly simple from the outside—essentially an enormous warehouse.
Inside, however, thousands of servers operate continuously.
Those computers generate tremendous amounts of heat and require electricity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
That creates several environmental concerns for the Lowcountry.
Electricity
Electricity may be the biggest issue.
A very large data-center campus can require power on a scale comparable to a city.
The proposed Colleton County project alone has been described as potentially requiring 1,000 megawatts.
That kind of demand doesn’t exist in isolation.
Utilities have to generate the electricity and build the transmission infrastructure necessary to deliver it.
South Carolina is already confronting rapidly increasing electricity demand. Santee Cooper and Dominion Energy are pursuing a new natural-gas generating station at Canadys in Colleton County capable of producing approximately 2,200 megawatts. The Public Service Commission approved the utilities’ application for the project in 2026, and environmental permitting is continuing.
Data centers are not the only reason electricity demand is growing—South Carolina is also experiencing population growth, manufacturing expansion and broader electrification—but large data centers add extraordinarily concentrated new loads to the system.
That raises an important climate question.
If the growth of artificial intelligence and cloud computing requires construction of additional fossil-fuel generation, then the environmental footprint of a data center extends far beyond the property where the servers are located.
Water
Then there is water.
Servers generate heat, and many data centers use water as part of their cooling systems.
That doesn’t mean every data center consumes the same amount of water. Cooling technologies vary considerably, and newer closed-loop, air-cooled and hybrid systems can reduce water demand.
Google says it typically reuses cooling water at its data centers three or more times before discharge. Dorchester County also says the new facilities will draw from multiple regional water sources rather than newly drilled dedicated county wells. Water infrastructure serving the projects includes connections involving the Lake Marion Regional Water Agency and Dorchester County Water Authority.
Google has also set a company goal of replenishing, on average, 120% of the freshwater it consumes across its offices and data centers by 2030 and has supported watershed restoration work in South Carolina.
Those are meaningful efforts.
But conservationists are asking a broader question:
What happens when multiple large facilities begin drawing water from the same regional systems?
The concern isn’t necessarily one data center.
It’s cumulative demand.
Wetlands and Wildlife Habitat
The Lowcountry isn’t Northern Virginia or another heavily urbanized data-center corridor.
Many potential development sites here contain forests, wetlands, headwater streams and wildlife habitat.
That makes where data centers are built almost as important as how they operate.
The proposed Colleton County campus illustrates the issue particularly clearly. More than 200 acres of wetlands occur within the approximately 850-acre project area, according to the South Carolina Environmental Law Project. The broader property could potentially encompass about 2,600 acres.
Large industrial campuses require more than buildings.
They may require roads, stormwater systems, electrical substations, transmission lines, water and sewer infrastructure, security lighting and other supporting development.
The result can be fragmentation of landscapes that previously functioned as connected forests and wetlands.
In a region such as the ACE Basin, those connections matter.
Wildlife doesn’t recognize property boundaries.
Neither does water.
Noise and Light
Data centers can also create environmental impacts that aren’t immediately obvious.
Cooling systems operate continuously.
Backup generators have to be tested.
Electrical equipment produces sound.
Large facilities require security lighting.
For an industrial park, those impacts may be expected.
For a rural road surrounded by forests, farms and homes, they can dramatically change the character of a place.
South Carolina lawmakers themselves have recognized these issues. Proposed state data-center legislation in 2026 included environmental review provisions addressing water consumption, wastewater, stormwater, noise, vibration, light pollution and compatibility with surrounding land uses.
That legislation did not ultimately pass during the session, but the debate illustrates how quickly data-center development has become a statewide issue.
Who Pays for the Electricity Infrastructure?
There is also an economic question closely connected to the environmental one.
When a facility requires hundreds of megawatts of electricity, utilities may need new substations, transmission lines or generation.
Who should pay for that infrastructure?
The data-center operator?
Or everybody who pays an electric bill?
Santee Cooper has proposed a High Impact Load Rate specifically aimed at very large electricity users such as data centers. Under the proposal, those customers would pay upfront for necessary system upgrades, an approach Santee Cooper says is intended to prevent those costs from being shifted onto other customers.
That is an important principle as the industry grows:
The extraordinary infrastructure requirements of a billion-dollar data center should not quietly become the responsibility of ordinary households and small businesses.
Data Centers Aren’t Inherently Bad
It would be too simple to frame this as technology versus the environment.
Data centers are part of modern infrastructure.
Every email, photograph stored in the cloud, streaming service, online business, scientific database—and increasingly every AI query—depends upon physical computers somewhere.
The question isn’t whether data centers should exist.
The better question is:
Where should we put them, how should we power them, and what environmental standards should they meet?
There is a tremendous difference between placing a data center on an existing industrial site with established electrical and water infrastructure and clearing hundreds of acres of rural forest and wetlands.
South Carolina’s own proposed Data Center Development Act recognized that distinction, identifying existing industrial parks, previously developed industrial properties and brownfields as particularly suitable locations.
That idea deserves serious consideration.
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