Lawyers for a residents’ group have asked a South Carolina court to halt construction of a $2.8 billion data center in Spartanburg County, escalating a dispute over whether the project was allowed to skip the public planning review its opponents say state and local law required.
The Southern Environmental Law Center filed a request for a temporary injunction seeking to stop all construction at the site and to bar the county from further processing the land development while the underlying litigation proceeds, Fox Carolina reported Thursday.
The case, Concerned Citizens of Spartanburg County v. Valara Holdings, centers on a permitting classification. The complaint alleges construction was allowed to begin before the project underwent required review by the Spartanburg Planning Commission, with the developer using an abbreviated “minor” land development process that opponents say improperly bypassed mandatory public review.
A 457-megawatt facility on South Pine Street
The project is a 457-megawatt data center on South Pine Street developed by NorthMark, with subsidiary Valara Holdings handling construction, according to The Post and Courier. The original lawsuit was filed July 6.
“Anybody who drives past that site on South Pine Street will have no doubt in his or her mind that this is a major development,” SELC attorney Frank Holleman said, per the newspaper.
Spartanburg County has defended the classification. County Administrator Cole Alverson said the project falls under the county’s 1999 Unified Land Management Ordinance, last updated in 2022, and that staff are bound by it. “This project is under the 1999 ULMO. And so we as staff are governed by it, and we have to follow it,” he said. Alverson argued the industrial park designation functions as a legal mechanism for tax incentives only, and that single-parcel industrial sites have historically been classified as minor developments β citing prior treatment of Keurig Dr Pepper and Milo Tea facilities.
In a statement, Valara Holdings said the project “has been developed in close coordination with appropriate state and local authorities.” The county said it “trusts the legal process to reach a fair result once the matter is considered by the court.”
What it means
The dispute is less about whether data centers are permitted in Spartanburg County than about which procedural track a project of this scale belongs on β and that distinction carries real financial weight. A “minor” classification lets construction proceed on a staff-level determination; a “major” one triggers planning commission review, public hearings and the delay and political exposure that come with them.
For developers, the case is a reminder that entitlement risk on large data center projects increasingly runs through procedural challenges rather than outright zoning denials. An injunction granted mid-construction would be costly, and the possibility of one is now a live underwriting consideration in jurisdictions operating under decades-old land management ordinances that never contemplated facilities of this size or power draw. Whether the court grants relief here is unresolved, and neither side’s characterization of the ordinance has been tested in a ruling.
The Spartanburg fight is one of many. Residents in Independence, Mo., sued to block a $150 billion AI data center bond deal earlier this year, and communities and statehouses nationwide have moved to constrain the sector through moratoriums and new restrictions. In Congress, Rep. Ro Khanna has introduced a “Data Center Bill of Rights” intended to strengthen local authority to block such projects.
