Uptown’s quiet data center is adding a 200,000-square-foot building as the city decides what comes after the moratorium

Charlotte has been arguing about data centers all summer, and one has sat in Uptown, largely unnoticed, for two decades. Digital Realty’s campus between Trade and Fifth streets opened in 2006 and looks like ordinary office buildings, Axios Charlotte reported after touring it this month. It is now adding a fourth building: 200,000 square feet and 12 megawatts of capacity, beside roughly 100,000 existing square feet drawing 2 megawatts.

The project is moving while the city’s 150-day moratorium on new data centers is in force, because state law exempts developments that already had permits or had made substantial expenditures. That exemption, and what replaces the moratorium when it expires on November 5, is the business question of the fall for one of Charlotte’s fastest-growing land uses.

What is being built

The Uptown expansion required demolition. Digital Realty tore down an older building on the site and said it was not feasible to preserve its century-old facade, despite pleas from the American Institute of Architects’ local chapter, according to Axios. The new structure will multiply the campus’s power draw sixfold, from 2 to 14 megawatts, which is still small by the standards of the projects driving the debate.

Those are on the west side. Digital Realty is also planning two 200-megawatt buildings of 1.3 million square feet each off Moores Chapel Road in west Charlotte, with a new Duke Energy substation paid for by the developer, Axios reported. The company already had city approval for both the Moores Chapel and Trade Street campuses before the moratorium, according to earlier Axios reporting, which is why neither is affected by it.

Digital Realty’s public affairs head, Kevin Gundersen, told WCNC in June that data centers are the physical manifestation of the cloud, and that after 25 years of flat electricity demand the country had entered a period of rising demand. The company was the only operator that granted a local station a tour after months of requests.

The moratorium and its clock

The Charlotte City Council voted unanimously on June 8 to enact a 150-day moratorium on new data centers, giving staff time to draft regulations for facilities that can currently be built by right in several zoning districts, including next to homes and in Uptown. A few dates and figures frame what happens next:

• The moratorium expires on November 5.
• On September 8, the council’s Transportation, Planning and Development Committee recommended extending it by up to nine months, WFAE reported, after a staff study submitted September 1 found the impacts of data centers depend heavily on facility type, site layout and even local climate.
• Deputy City Manager Alyson Craig said staff needed the time to work through air-pollution monitoring and allowable noise levels before bringing permanent rules.
• An extension requires a public hearing and a full council vote; the council took up next steps at its September 14 business meeting.
• Projects already permitted or with substantial spending, including the first phase of the PowerHouse Charlotte campus in University City and Digital Realty’s approved sites, are exempt under state law, city attorney Andrea Leslie-Fite has said.

The city’s data center task force has asked to see ordinance language before the extension is finalized, arguing that any rules for future data centers must take effect together to avoid a cycle of repeat moratoriums and an unpredictable business environment.

What the industry wants, and what neighbors want

Douglas Welton, chair of the city’s planning commission, told Axios that some task force members want community benefits in return for approvals, a framework Charlotte has used for large projects before. Developers want certainty: clear zoning rules, known noise and monitoring standards and a timeline. Both sides say the piecemeal approach is the worst outcome.

The neighborhood concerns are concrete. A City of Charlotte presentation cited by Axios said one University City data center uses 1.2 million gallons of water a day. A state report this year found North Carolina electricity bills have risen 22 percent since 2020, naming data center demand among the causes alongside population growth and gas prices. And American Tower’s proposal for a data center of up to 40,000 square feet on Hood Road in east Charlotte, which drew the loudest opposition, has had its public hearing delayed for months by the moratorium.

More than 50 North Carolina communities have adopted data center moratoriums of their own, according to a newsletter tracking the issue, and Durham, Apex and Chatham County all acted before Charlotte did.

The Uptown campus is also a reminder of how the industry looked before the boom. A 2-megawatt building serving banks and hospitals is the kind of data center Charlotte hosted for twenty years without a zoning fight. The 200-megawatt buildings on Moores Chapel Road are a hundred times that scale, and the moratorium exists because the city’s ordinance never distinguished between the two. Drawing that line, by megawatts, water use or setback from homes, is the task the extension would buy time for.

Why it matters

Charlotte’s economy runs on banks, and banks run on data centers; the servers between Trade and Fifth have been part of that plumbing since before the iPhone. The question the council faces in the next six weeks is not whether data centers belong here but how large, where, under what rules and with what obligations to the neighborhoods that host them.

Digital Realty’s Uptown building will rise regardless. The Moores Chapel campus will too. What the moratorium decides is everything after that, and the November 5 date is now the one to watch. We will report the council’s extension vote and the draft regulations when they are released.

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