Politics

The cultural mood turns sharply against AI data centers

The BorgWarner factory going up off McMurray Road in the Upward community (left) is not a data center. Neither is the vacant Coats America mill (right) in Laurel Park. [DYLAN SHEEHAN/Hendersonville Lightning]

By Bill Moss, Published: June 5, 2026

If it’s new and made of steel and concrete, it must be a data center. Even if it’s old, it must be a data center, as long as it’s vacant. It can’t be a warehouse/distribution or a factory or simply a vacant former mill because, well, a data center is scarier. …

Meaning, that big building behind the Blue Ridge Commerce Center is a data center, right? And the old Coats America thread mill in Laurel Park is gonna be one, too, right?

Wrong and wrong — and elected leaders are worn out from quashing the rumor.

The Upward rumor got deep-sixed last week when local and state officials announced that BorgWarner is building a manufacturing plant off McMurray Road.

So we asked county and Laurel Park leaders whether the Coats America building is an AI data center waiting to happen.

“It is not,” County Manager John Mitchell said. “There are no current permits that have been pulled or that someone is attempting to pull for any data center projects in the county. The Henderson County commissioners passed a zoning change I want to say five years ago that addressed the possibility of data mining or data centers of large industrial uses that consume large amounts of power and water. The code makes those very difficult to accomplish in the county.”

That preemptory strike against data centers, which came before opposition to data centers became a national NIMBY trend, hasn’t stopped worried residents from lighting up the county switchboard.

“We’ve probably gotten 20 or 30 emails from citizens concerned about that, and the board is concerned about it too, and we’ve discussed with the county attorney what options we might have to stop it,” Board of Commissioners Chair Bill Lapsley said of the Coats America site, which is in unincorporated Henderson County but subject to Laurel Park’s extraterritorial zoning jurisdiction.

Adopted in 2023 to guard against cryptocurrency mining operations, the county’s regulations are among the most restrictive in the state. The rules bar bitcoin mining facilities from locating within 2 miles of a home or residential zone, library, nursing facility, group care facility, day care center, park, church or school — and pile on a dozen more specific restrictions. Lapsley said commissioners may take a look at applying those restrictions and others to all data centers. Bitcoin mining is a close cousin of but not exactly the same as data centers, which are proliferating because of the need to feed the booming artificial intelligence industry.

County Attorney Russ Burrell has been advising commissioners on their options, which are limited because of the law the Legislature enacted in late 2024 that barred cities and counties from making land-use zones more restrictive by downzoning.

“If the commissioners take away a use from land, that’s a downzoning,” Burrell said. “What they can do is what five or six other counties and have done, issue a moratorium to study the things they can do — which is to persuade the Legislature to get rid of the downzoning (law) at least as far as data centers. Right now they’re bound by this issue of downzoning and they have to figure out what they can do around the downzoning.”

In Laurel Park, the vacant Coats America mill is the most visible object of curiosity. Since the plant closed and was bought by Ingles, residents of the town and parts west have wondered about its status. Many hoped Ingles would build a new supermarket there. But in recent weeks, social media was all fizzed up with a new possibility: A data center was going in.

“That was a bunch of bull--,” said Carey O’Cain, the usually mild-mannered Laurel Park mayor.

When he looked into the rumor, O’Cain found the source. There was a growing frenzy about a new data center going up in Henderson, all right, which turned out to be the town in Vance County near Kerr Lake on the Virginia line.

“Someone had picked that up and broadcast it around and the emails just wore my a-- out,” O’Cain said. “The first call I received was from Ingles: ‘What do you know about a data center going into our property?’ And I said, ‘That’s not true.’”

As for the hoped-for supermarket, that's highly unlikely, too, on the site penned in between the Ecusta Trail and the upcoming roundabout project on U.S. 64.

"That property is not big enough to build new Ingles on. They know that," O'Cain said, adding it's possible that Ingles could try to acquire property to the east to make it work.

‘We don’t have the sites’

Suffice it to say, elected leaders are in tune with the growing anxiety over the centers filled with acres of powerful computers firing out AI answers at the speed of light. The plants are energy hogs, water hogs, big noise polluters.

Lapsley, the county commission who is also a retired civil engineer,

“My middle son works for a construction contractor in Chicago,” Lapsley said. “He tells me that he's working on a number of these data centers in the Midwest, and he said, ‘Dad, you know these places are requiring 5-600 acres or more of flat land.’

“If that's what they need to build a site, plus huge amounts of power, we just don't have the sites here. They're not going to pay $100,000 an acre for that kind of place, not around here. I don't think the likelihood of one coming here is very high now. Maybe South Carolina has some property, but I don't think we've got sites for that.”

Just this week, the Hendersonville City Council signaled that it’s interested in doing what it can to block a data center. During the council comments segment at the tail end of Thursday night’s meeting, Gina Baxter raised the idea of a moratorium on the facilities.

“It's not as simple as just adopting a moratorium,” cautioned City Attorney Angela Beeker. “You've got to do some work, some study, and a little process before you do it, but we could certainly map out the steps and bring that back to you for consideration.”

Beeker noted that the state House had just passed a bill earlier that day regulating data centers as the political mood in Raleigh tilts away from data centers. Gov. Josh Stein and some legislators are calling for an end to economic development incentives to encourage the increasingly unpopular facilities.