From The Editor
October 28, 2025
South Carolina is becoming America’s newest computing colony — a sprawling power-hungry frontier for “hyperscale” data centers run by some of the wealthiest corporations on Earth. Behind the glossy press releases touting “AI innovation,” “job creation,” and “sustainable computing,” lies a quieter story: grid depletion, water strain, and taxpayer-funded infrastructure for private profit.
Over the past three years, Google, Amazon Web Services, Meta, and Microsoft have quietly bought up thousands of acres across the state, from Moncks Corner to Newberry County.
Each facility is marketed as a “data center” or “cloud region” — but in plain terms, they’re industrial-scale server farms, each pulling hundreds of megawatts from local utilities. To put that in perspective, a single modern data center can consume as much power as a mid-sized city.
South Carolina’s low land costs, permissive environmental laws, and generous tax exemptions made it irresistible. Duke Energy and Santee Cooper, the state’s dominant utilities, have fast‑tracked transmission upgrades and new generation capacity to feed the tech giants’ unprecedented appetite.
And who pays for those upgrades?
Not the tech companies — you do.
According to filings reviewed by energy analysts, more than 80% of new energy demand growth in South Carolina’s long-term utility plans comes from data centers and related industrial load growth, not from households or small businesses.
To meet that demand, utilities are planning new natural gas generation plants and multi-billion-dollar transmission corridors, essentially building a second grid to serve private industry — largely funded by public rate hikes.
Environmental advocates have also sounded alarms about massive water consumption. A single hyperscale data center can use up to 5 million gallons of water per day for evaporative cooling — roughly equivalent to the daily water use of 40,000 residents. With drought conditions already tightening across the southeast, that’s a threat no one is willing to confront publicly.
The core issue is simple: these facilities rely on the public grid but provide none of their own energy independence. They’re massive power drains with little accountability.
A growing number of engineers, economists, and policy reformers are now calling for a straightforward fix: require data centers to generate their own electricity.
“If you’re going to consume the power of a small city, you should build your own plant,” says an independent energy systems consultant who’s analyzed South Carolina’s data center buildout. “Otherwise, the public becomes your silent utility provider.”
Here’s what that would look like in practice:
On-site generation mandates. Any industrial project exceeding 100 MW in continuous draw must provide its own energy through localized systems — nuclear, geothermal, biomass, or hybrid solar-gas.
Transparency guarantees. Power and water use data made public, with no “proprietary” exemptions.
Heat-reuse obligations. Facilities must redirect waste heat into productive uses — greenhouses, district heating, or industrial drying operations — instead of venting it into the atmosphere.
No public subsidies unless energy self-sufficiency and environmental balance are proven.
What sounds punitive could actually spark a wave of genuine innovation.
AI and cloud companies are sitting on vast cash reserves. Requiring them to design self-sufficient energy ecosystems would drive advances in modular reactors, methane-to-power systems, advanced microgrids, and closed‑loop water recycling — technologies long delayed by cheap grid access.
In doing so, the public would be freed from footing the bill for private infrastructure. More importantly, it would expose the gap between corporate environmental rhetoric and operational reality.
South Carolina stands at a crossroads. Its leaders can continue selling cheap energy and public resources to global corporations while communities shoulder the cost — or they can demand accountability and ingenuity.
Requiring corporations to power their own machines isn’t anti‑business.
It’s anti‑extraction.
Because in the end, the question isn’t whether we need servers.
It’s whether we can afford a system that burns through our energy, our water, and our credibility just to keep them humming.
South Carolina tax payers deserve more honesty from their leaders. They need to solve these problems before they grant any permits to build these server farms. Call your Representative and Senator and ask that they do the right thing and back the tax payers of South Carolina and not the big corporations.
https://samueleburns.substack.com/p/who-keeps-the-lights-on-for-the-machines
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