Property Managers - Does it ever feel like your brain is on FIRE?

The cloud is not in the sky, it is in a data center. It needs land, concrete, steel, water and electricity. The global datasphere is projected to reach 120 zettabytes by 2027. If one gigabyte were one brick, the datasphere would build every structure ever built by humanity twice, yearly.

Many commercial real estate firms and agents are finding themselves in the middle of the largest coordinated site selction process in the history of commercial real estate. The needs are: Cheap and abundant land, stable and massive power supply, access to water, fiber connectivity and a legal/regulatory environment that won't create friction.

Senate Bill 445 has several items that could make North Carolina even more friendly to surveillance industries, who heavily rely on data centers.

The companies building these facilities are not neutral infrastructure providers. They are participants in the global surveillance economy. They store data generated by surveillance systems that involve corporate, governmental and private. They comply with legal process from dozens of jurisdictions. They hold information about billions of people who have no idea their data lives in a building down the street from your house.

Section 19 of SB 445 expands warrantless state-level data pulls and explicitly authorizes dissemination to federal agencies. The state that hosts the data also quietly expanded its own warrantless access to data and its pipeline to federal authorities.

Your property value: Industrial data center development adjacent to residential areas affects property values in ways that are highly site-specific and rarely disclosed in advance. The combination of SB 382's downzoning freeze and SB 445's vesting extension means that once this development is approved, neighboring property owners have significantly diminished legal recourse.

Your phone records: If SB 445 passes, the SBI can pull your location history, device data, account activity, and metadata from your carrier without a warrant, without a judge, and without telling you. That information can be shared with any federal agency. You will not know it happened. There is no audit requirement. There is no public reporting on how many subpoenas are issued.

Your tax bill: Data centers routinely negotiate significant property tax abatements as a condition of siting. The public infrastructure costs — road improvements, utility upgrades, water system expansion — are borne by existing residents and taxpayers. The tax base benefit that was supposed to justify the deal is reduced or deferred for years. Rowan County residents are currently without a full public accounting of what the Long Ferry Road corridor will cost them versus what it will return.

Your water: 850 megawatts of gas generation at Buck Station requires cooling water from the Yadkin River system. Data centers themselves are significant water consumers for cooling. The interbasin transfer moratorium in SB 445 extends to 2028 — but the threshold for what counts as significant is 15 million gallons per day. Smaller transfers proceed unimpeded. The cumulative draw on regional water supply from this corridor has not been publicly modeled.

Economic development, legislative deregulation, and law enforcement tool expansion are three separate policy streams that happen to be moving simultaneously. NC's data center growth is driven by market forces, not a master plan. The SBI subpoena expansion reflects a legitimate operational need that predates the data center boom. Correlation is not causation and assuming coordination without direct evidence is the kind of leap that undermines credible journalism. But feel free to judge for yourself. Stay tuned! May 2026