North Carolina cluster / Charlotte Jun 8 150-day / Triangle + Piedmont / 9 jurisdictions / Duke non-RTO territory

Plain-English version of the geography. North Carolina's data center backlash has concentrated in two adjacent regions: the Charlotte metro (Mecklenburg + Rowan) and the Research Triangle (Durham, Wake, Orange, Chatham). In roughly five weeks, at least nine local governments there have paused or moved to pause data center development. The anchor vote. Charlotte City Council voted unanimously on June 8 for a 150-day moratorium running through November 5. Like most of these, it exempts projects already in the development pipeline — including two data centers in East Charlotte — and tasks city staff with drafting permanent regulations during the pause. The rest of the cluster, by jurisdiction: • Rowan County — one-year moratorium, but explicitly carves out the Edged Energy campus already under development (the same in-flight-project exemption pattern seen in Coweta GA and Boone IN). • Durham (city) — passed a 60-day emergency moratorium in May, now extending it toward a full 12 months. • Durham County — voting on a 12-month pause via a Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) amendment plus the state-required consistency statement. • Holly Springs (Wake County) — one-year pause approved June 16. • Cumberland County / Fayetteville — six-month moratorium, June 15 (covered earlier; Fort Bragg adjacency). • Orange County + Hillsborough — two-month pauses each, passed preemptively (Hillsborough had received no data center proposals). • Chatham County, Apex, Wake County — additional pauses passed across the Triangle. The counter-example inside the cluster. Salisbury (Rowan County) chose a different path: rather than a moratorium, it passed a zoning text amendment that allows data centers but caps maximum size — the 'regulate, don't ban' off-ramp that reappears in today's second section.

Primary source · WFAE (Charlotte's NPR) — Charlotte City Council approves 150-day data center moratorium ↗