"Four million Americans live within 1 mile of a data center. The communities closest to them are “overwhelmingly” non-white."

"In December, on a two-lane road not far from the ACE Basin, a protected ecosystem and wildlife refuge in South Carolina, Paul Black drove past St. Paul AME Church and the cemetery where his wife’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother are buried, then slowed as the trees opened onto the piney tract.

​Black is an environmental activist who has spent years fighting polluting projects across the South. But now he and Black residents in the rural South Carolina community are bracing for a new fight: to stop a proposed data center complex the size of 1,200 football fields.

This specific project in Colleton County would be one of the largest in the South, and only came to the area after developers tried — and failed — to build a similar campus in a predominantly white county in Georgia.​

Black imagined a world where the generational rituals of rural life — raising livestock, growing food, and fishing — would cease to exist because of the proposed nine data centers and two substations that would replace woods and wetlands."

Adam Mahoney reports for Capital B January 6, 2026. [2]