Note: This article was originally shared in SACE’s free newsletter, “Wired In,” which includes relevant articles, media clips, and actions to take. Join us to receive Wired In once a month in your inbox, and see August’s full newsletter here.
This issue of Wired In is all about the speculative data center gold rush. SACE is now calling for an 18-month moratorium on new large data centers across all five of our states. A pause is not a “no,” not yet. It is a call for time to get the facts straight, protect utility customers and communities, and put real guardrails in place before decades of costly fossil fuel infrastructure are locked into our power bills.
The scale of what’s coming justifies the pause. The South already accounts for 48% of all planned U.S. data centers, and SACE’s five focus states — Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida — sit squarely in its path:
- Tennessee: Data center load has grown from 1% to 19% of TVA’s industrial load since 2019, backed by roughly $50 billion in new generation.
- Georgia: Metro Atlanta now has the largest data center construction pipeline in the country, and Georgia Power’s 10,000 MW procurement request rests on a highly improbable 1-in-500 planning scenario.
- The Carolinas: Duke says data centers will drive over 85% of its load growth, justifying 9.7 GW of new gas plants.
- Florida: Lawmakers moved faster than most, passing a law this year requiring data centers to cover the cost of their own power — but the buildout is still arriving faster than communities can weigh in on where and how.
The response has been just as widespread — and it’s coming from the ground up. In neighborhoods and towns across our region, people are organizing to understand what a proposed data center would actually mean for their water, their power bills, and their backyard, and to gain agency in what happens in their communities before decisions are made for them. More than 70 counties, cities, and towns in our five states have already paused new data center development or are taking steps to do so.
Why a moratorium now? Because the data center buildout is outrunning everyone who’s supposed to be regulating it. In a recent article, I laid out the broader case for a pause — the land, air, water, and money at stake, and the trillion-dollar bet handing tech billionaires outsized control over our economy. The rest of this Wired In issue is the evidence: Maggie Shober on whether Georgia Power customers will foot the bill for OpenAI’s newly approved data center north of Savannah, and how TVA’s new data center rate got approved on a single slide with no transparency on what’s in the rate design and zero questions from the TVA Board Directors; Anne Morrison and Eddy Moore on why the real large water use hides at the power plant, not just the data center; and Alex Strong on why SACE is standing with North Carolina’s environmental justice communities against a state AI roadmap stacked against them.
These five articles are just the tip of the iceberg. Decisions to approve data centers get made almost every week, most with far less scrutiny than is warranted. Just last week, after a tumultuous and secretive process, the Georgia Public Service Commission staff approved the contract between Georgia Power and OpenAI to power a 3.2 gigawatt hyperscale data center (using more energy than three nuclear power plants produce) planned for Effingham County in southeast Georgia — without a direct vote from the Commission itself. Also last week, South Carolina regulators quietly ruled that a data center developer doesn’t even need separate approval to build its own gas plant — no hearing, no independent review, just a green light. These aren’t one-off examples. It’s how this speculative buildout actually happens: case by case, meeting by meeting, often behind closed doors, with the public finding out only after the decision is already locked in.
The thread running through all of it is the same: an invasive worldview proclaiming, “move fast, break things, and trust us.” If given transparent and accurate information, my hunch is that the good people of the Southeast will not sell their communities out to the tech billionaires’ bet on a dehumanized, artificial world.
As data centers reshape how the Southeast produces and consumes energy, our focus on core clean energy priorities of decarbonization remains unwavering. On September 10, at 11 AM ET, SACE will host its “Transportation Electrification in the Southeast” seventh annual report webinar, highlighting the strong electric vehicle market momentum and resilience worth celebrating in our region. It’s a push to keep working on what’s right, even as the federal government and Silicon Valley attempt to erase the science and awareness of climate disruption.
SACE will continue to track data center developments, the impacts on energy in our states, and share resources for communities to demand transparency and have a real say in what gets built near them. You can take action now by signing a petition for a data center moratorium in your state with the links in the actions near the bottom of this newsletter.
This is our region, our power grid, our electric bills, our air and water. Our future isn’t theirs to dictate; it’s ours to build. Join the Clean Energy Generation movement and help set the terms for what comes next.
Join the Clean Energy Generation
To view the full August 2026 “Wired In” newsletter with featured stories and ways to take action, click here.
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