Walterboro Data Center, Walterboro, South Carolina

Eagle Rock Partners' proposed Walterboro data center campus would put nine buildings on 859 acres of timberland along Cooks Hill Road, southeast of Walterboro in Colleton County, South Carolina, at the head of the ACE Basin. The $6 billion project would be the state's first gigawatt data center, and Ken Loeber, co-founder of the Charlotte-based firm, estimated it would need 1,000 megawatts of electricity.

The ACE Basin, a 350,000-acre estuary named for the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers, is home to nine federally endangered species, including wood storks and leatherback turtles. "To the extent that they use any water at all it will pose a great risk to the Ashepoo River system and the ecology of that river system," state Sen. Chip Campsen told the county zoning board on Dec. 18, 2025. Loeber said the campus would use about 12,000 gallons of water a day and touch just 1 1/2 of the site's 235 wetland acres.

Opponents filled the rest of the three-hour meeting. "The answer is not here, not now, not ever," said Richard Burke, whose parents live near the site. The request came about a month after the county council amended its zoning code so rural data centers could be approved as a special exception in a single Zoning Board of Appeals vote, which the Southern Environmental Law Center's Robby Maynor said offered little public oversight. Santee Cooper paid about $1.2 million for a 99-acre plot on the same tax parcel to build a new substation.

The zoning board took no action that night, saying it would vote at an unspecified future meeting; no vote on the Eagle Rock campus has since been reported. The county council passed a six-month data center moratorium in July 2026, then in September approved a Digital Infrastructure Overlay District opening much of the county's rural land to data centers and repealing the moratorium outside a few protected zones. Any approval still rests with Colleton County, which would also require state water and well permits and a power study from the project's electric provider.