Touring this Charlotte data center is like taking a peek inside the cloud

Our Take

Credit to the Charlotte Observer's Catherine Muccigrosso and the IHHAAC Board channel for getting a camera past the mantrap doors. Most of what the public sees about data centers is a fence line and a press release, so a walkthrough of the cages, the racks, and that constant mechanical hum is genuinely useful — it demystifies a building type that's about to define a lot of local politics.

But let's be clear about scale: Segra's facility runs at 2.5 megawatts. The hyperscale AI campuses now getting proposed and permitted across the Carolinas and the rest of the country run into the hundreds of megawatts, sometimes over a gigawatt — hundreds of times the footprint, the power draw, and the water and land demands shown in this tour. A friendly, mid-size telecom data center is a fine explainer, but it shouldn't become the mental picture regulators, ratepayers, or reporters use when they think about what's actually landing in their county.

The real questions — who pays for the substations, who eats the water withdrawals, what tax abatements got signed and by whom — don't show up on a facility tour. That's the paperwork trail we track. Check our facility map to see what's actually proposed or under construction near you, and if you want to push back on a deal before it's final, our take-action page has the how-to.