If you've been following the data center story unfolding in Rowan County, the picture has gotten clearer — and more contentious — over the past several weeks. In April, county commissioners voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium on new data center rezonings, after more than 100 residents packed the hearing to push back on the wave of inquiries hitting Rowan land. The pause buys the county time to study the infrastructure impact and write tighter rules before the next project gets approved.
The catch: state law kept the moratorium from applying to the already-pending Long Ferry Road project, which is exactly the one most neighbors were showing up to fight. Residents at the April meeting described actual construction impact already in progress — one homeowner, Rick Mahaley, told commissioners about "machinery moving tons of dirt, being piled 135 feet from my front window." Their concerns center on three things: water capacity through Salisbury-Rowan Utilities, peak-load power demand on a Duke Energy grid that has already been asking customers to voluntarily cut usage, and a transparency gap — speakers said specific answers about scope and cooling design keep shifting.
Meanwhile, the City of Salisbury is reviewing its own separate proposal: a roughly 400,000-square-foot Flexential project on Henderson Grove Church Road that has surfaced its own round of community pushback, as the Salisbury Post reported. City staff held an input session in April and got pointed questions on noise, light spill, and the truck traffic that comes with construction. With the county moratorium running through April 2027, the next year of land-use politics in Rowan will revolve heavily around what gets defined as an acceptable data center neighbor.
For buyers and sellers looking at properties anywhere near Long Ferry Road, Henderson Grove Church Road, or the rural corridors east of I-85, this matters in concrete ways. Zoning decisions over the next 12 months will shape what your future neighbors look like, what the night sky looks like, and what your property is worth. If you're trying to weigh a purchase or list in those areas, I'm happy to walk you through the parcel-by-parcel picture — it's not the kind of thing a Zillow search can tell you.