In December, on a two-lane road not far from the ACE Basin, a protected ecosystem and wildlife refuge in South Carolina, Paul Black drove past St. Paul AME Church and the cemetery where his wife’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother are buried, then slowed as the trees opened onto the piney tract.
Black is an environmental activist who has spent years fighting polluting projects across the South. But now he and Black residents in the rural South Carolina community are bracing for a new fight: to stop a proposed data center complex the size of 1,200 football fields.
This specific project in Colleton County would be one of the largest in the South, and only came to the area after developers tried — and failed — to build a similar campus in a predominantly white county in Georgia.
Black imagined a world where the generational rituals of rural life — raising livestock, growing food, and fishing — would cease to exist because of the proposed nine data centers and two substations that would replace woods and wetlands.
“All too often, these polluting industries and questionable zoning decisions land in Black and brown communities, places that are least empowered and have already carried the burden of past pollution,” he said.
The fight for this Black community is being waged on multiple fronts. In addition to this data center, residents are bracing for a controversial new $5 billion gas power plant and pipeline needed to keep the data center on. At the same time, President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to fast-track building AI data centers onto contaminated sites deemed too toxic for development without years of cleanup, including one not too far from them.
The proposal for this campus on timberland and wetlands is part of a broader build-out of power-hungry facilities across South Carolina.
To serve this new energy demand, the state’s power company, Santee Cooper, and Dominion Energy South Carolina are pushing the new gas plant on the banks of the Edisto River in Colleton County. The power plant project’s cost has already doubled to $5 billion, and environmental advocates warn it will threaten air quality, water, and critical habitats.
Given that the developers — Thomas & Hutton and Eagle Rock Partners, working on behalf of timber giant Weyerhaeuser — were willing to move this project to a poorer, Blacker area after opposition in Georgia, residents say this fight is about more than land. It is a test of who is asked to bear the risks of the data and AI boom, and what South Carolina is willing to sacrifice to power it.
“If a mostly white community can push back on this project and get it stopped, it’s unacceptable that the next move is to fly under the radar in a rural Black community with even less transparency,” Black added.
For organizers like Black, the ACE Basin fight is part of a much larger pattern they’ve been battling for generations.
For years, Black residents and their allies have fought to force the federal government to clean up the country’s most contaminated sites, known as Superfund sites, and to expand the funding for such work. It is a part of the environmental justice movement, born from Black and low-income communities locked into neighborhoods next to refineries, landfills, and nuclear facilities that whiter, wealthier areas kept out.
Now, in a sharp turn, the Trump administration wants to build data centers on these sites with lower environmental regulations for cleanup.
About 100 miles inland from where Colleton County residents are fighting this massive data campus, the Trump administration has tapped a former nuclear weapons complex in the Savannah River area — where workers recently discovered a radioactive wasp nest — as one of four flagship locations for new AI data centers and energy projects.
“They’re trying to expand use of the land for things that are extraneous to the cleanup mission, which is the most important thing going on out there,” said longtime watchdog Tom Clements, who has tracked federal nuclear policy in South Carolina for decades.
To environmental justice advocates watching both the ACE Basin fight and the Savannah River announcement, the move feels like a betrayal of those hard-won cleanups, repackaging sacrifice zones as prime real estate for the AI boom while communities are still grappling with contamination and long-term health risks.
“There’s a lot of national narrative around AI and data centers, but on the ground these fights are very simple: who gets sacrificed, and whose communities are treated as expendable,” said Robby Maynor, a climate campaign associate at the Southern Environmental Law Center.
The health toll of data centers and power plants
The proposed gas plant needed for the Colleton County data center campus could result in more than $30 million in local health care costs as residents begin to struggle through respiratory illnesses, according to a pollution analysis by the Southern Environmental Law Center.
The pollution from gas power plants, fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, can penetrate deep into the lungs and bloodstream, causing respiratory and cardiovascular disease. It is linked to asthma attacks, strokes, dementia, and cancer.
Black Americans have the highest death rate from such pollution in the U.S.
The data centers themselves add another layer of health risk. Each facility relies on diesel backup generators that are tested regularly and can be operated during grid emergencies. Diesel exhaust contains the same fine particle pollution as gas power plants.
But under federal rules, data centers face no time limits on diesel generator use during declared emergencies, and operators are typically required only to self-report their emissions.
“We believe there are cleaner, smarter, less risky ways to meet South Carolina’s energy needs,” said Eddy Moore, decarbonization director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.
Researchers examining air pollution near EPA-regulated data centers found that approximately 4 million people live within 1 mile of these facilities, exposing them to elevated levels of diesel exhaust and other pollutants.
The researchers found that the communities closest to data centers are “overwhelmingly” non-white.
How a Black community is responding to the data center push
On the evening of Dec. 16, residents packed into Emmanuel Baptist Church, a small white building just down the road from the proposed data center site. The church had coordinated with St. Paul AME and three other nearby Black churches to ensure word spread through the community.
Many who gathered had learned about the proposal only a week earlier. They came with questions about water — whether the data centers would drain the aquifer that feeds their private wells — and about noise, light pollution, and whether their property values would plummet. Others questioned where their family cemeteries sat in relation to the site boundaries.
A local pastor told Black, the environmental activist, he’d heard nothing about the project until Black called him, even though his church sits within sight of the proposed campus.
Jennifer Singleton, a resident who lives near the site, said the lack of transparency feels deliberate. “There’s a better place for this if it has to happen other than in a rural community,” she said. “This thing deserves a fight because it doesn’t need to be here.”
At the meeting, organizers explained that the developers are seeking a special exception to build on land zoned for rural development. The county’s own comprehensive plan designates the area as “countryside” that should be preserved.
“People in Colleton County are being told they’ll pay for this power plant, breathe its pollution, and then live next to data centers that aren’t even legally meant to be here,” Maynor said.
“For a community that had almost no time to get up to speed,” Black added, “the response has been proportionate to the threat. People are rallying because this is an existential threat to their community.”
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