TL;DR · 30-second read

The Short Version

A company called Energy Storage Solutions has dropped its plan for a $19.2 billion building full of computers for artificial intelligence in a rural North Carolina county.

At first it would have used about 300 megawatts of electricity, roughly what a couple of hundred thousand homes use, and possibly three times that later.

Local officials had already refused it a permit. Now they are considering a two-year ban on any new projects like it. The takeaway: a county vote can stop part of the artificial intelligence boom before a single computer is installed.

A proposed $19.2 billion AI data center in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, has been withdrawn by its developer, Energy Storage Solutions, Data Center Dynamics reported on July 15, 2026. County Manager Eric Evans told the board of commissioners at its July 6 meeting that the company had pulled the project earlier in the month. The multi-phase campus was planned for the Kingsboro development area near Tarboro, about 70 miles east of Raleigh.

The county denied the project a special-use permit late last year, when it was described as an eight-phase, 300MW campus on 52 acres. Other accounts put the eventual build-out at 300 acres and 900MW. At the same July 6 meeting, commissioners discussed a 24-month moratorium on new data center developments. A public hearing is scheduled for August.

Executive Summary

The Edgecombe withdrawal takes one of North Carolina’s largest announced AI data center proposals off the table, at least for now. The obstacle on the public record was not chips, turbines or transformers. It was a county special-use permit, the discretionary approval a local board can grant or refuse. Commissioners refused it, the developer appealed, and the project has now been withdrawn while that appeal was reported to be ongoing.

The episode matters beyond one county because two policy layers are tightening at once. Locally, Edgecombe is weighing a two-year pause on all new data center projects. At the state level, the House has passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would make data center developers pay upfront for the grid expansion, transmission upgrades and new generation their facilities require. Together they change both whether a campus can be built and who pays to power it.

For developers, utilities and the cloud and AI companies that lease capacity, the practical point is that a site’s local approval status now belongs in capacity forecasts alongside land and megawatts.

The Gate on This 300MW Campus Was a County Vote

Most public discussion of AI infrastructure constraints centres on chips, power supply and electrical equipment. In Edgecombe County, the documented obstacle came earlier than any of those. Late last year, the board of commissioners denied a special-use permit for an eight-phase, 300MW data center campus on 52 acres. A special-use permit is discretionary. Even where land is zoned for industrial use, a county board can attach conditions or say no. Energy Storage Solutions appealed and said it would proceed. By early July, the county manager was telling commissioners the project had been withdrawn.

The moratorium under discussion would turn one project’s rejection into a countywide freeze. For 24 months, no developer could bring a new data center through the county’s approval process. Campuses like this one are planned in phases across several years, so a two-year stop at the approval stage delays the first phase, and every phase behind it, by at least that long. That delay holds whether or not power, financing and tenants are ready.

Several groups absorb that risk. Developers and landowners assemble parcels on the expectation of approval. Utilities plan transmission and generation around announced loads. Tenants, usually cloud and AI companies, need capacity delivered on a specific date. For all of them, entitlement status, meaning whether a site actually holds the local approvals needed to build, is as material as the megawatt figure in the announcement. A single county vote removed a planned 300MW from the pipeline here, and possibly 900MW.

A $19.2 Billion Figure Without a Fixed Size

The $19.2 billion headline is the project’s most quoted number and its least anchored one. The permit application the county reviewed described 300MW on 52 acres. Other reports described a 300-acre campus reaching 900MW. Divided across 900MW, the figure works out to about $21 million per megawatt. Divided across 300MW, it is about $64 million per megawatt. A threefold gap makes it impossible to benchmark the proposal against other campuses or to tell whether the figure includes the servers and AI chips inside the buildings, which often cost more than the buildings themselves.

Headline figures for multi-phase campuses tend to describe a full build-out rather than a first phase. That makes them useful as a measure of ambition and weak as a measure of what is financed or contracted. For readers tracking AI capacity announcements, the useful distinction is between the capacity a regulator has actually reviewed, here 300MW, and the capacity that appears in the eventual vision, here up to 900MW.

North Carolina Moves the Grid Bill Toward Developers

The state-level change could matter more than any single county’s decision. The Ratepayer Protection Act, passed by the North Carolina House and awaiting Senate approval, would require data center developers to cover the upfront costs of grid expansion, transmission upgrades and new power generation for their facilities. The practical effect is to shift those costs away from a utility’s general customer base and onto the project. That raises the capital a developer needs before a site produces revenue, and it makes locations near existing grid capacity relatively more valuable.

The bill also includes a coal plant moratorium. Public utilities could not retire coal-fired plants until regulators approve new large-scale nuclear facilities. That provision would keep existing generation on the system while new supply is planned. Its cost and environmental trade-offs will be argued on their merits in the Senate.

Taken together, the local and state layers raise the bar for projects that lack committed customers and deep financing. Developers with signed tenants and capital to fund grid upgrades are better placed under these rules than those seeking approvals first and backers later. Counties and ratepayers gain more leverage over terms. The open question for the industry is how many other North Carolina counties adopt similar tools. The state has seen resident opposition to data center proposals in several places.

Background

North Carolina has become a hotspot for data center development, with some local residents opposing new projects in several parts of the state. Edgecombe County, whose seat is Tarboro, about 70 miles east of Raleigh, became one focal point when Energy Storage Solutions proposed a multi-phase AI data center campus in the Kingsboro development area.

The county board of commissioners denied the project a special-use permit late last year. The developer appealed and said it would proceed, before withdrawing the project in early July 2026. State lawmakers are meanwhile debating the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would make data center developers pay upfront for the grid infrastructure and generation their facilities require.

Sources

Source: North Carolina AI data center proposal withdrawn as county officials mull moratorium, Data Center Dynamics’ report on the withdrawal of Energy Storage Solutions’ $19.2 billion Edgecombe County project and the county’s proposed 24-month moratorium.