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, exposing the racial divide in AI data center development.

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, exposing the environmental aspect of the racial divide in AI data center construction.

“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.

Read the full article about the racial divide in AI data center construction by Adam Mahoney at Capital B News.