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HKYNC News & Views April 19, 2026 – Executive Summary
Hickory Hound News & Views Archive
*** References are listed at the bottom of this document
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The Monday Mashup: ESR — Q2 2014 vs. Present Day 2026 — The Gap Between Big Finance and Everyday Life — By the beginning of April 2014, a major divide was forming between the success of big banks and the bank accounts of normal families. While the stock market was reaching record highs because of government support, most people weren't feeling the benefits. Large corporations had plenty of cash, which made the economy look strong on paper, but the reality for average households was much different. Prices were rising and personal debt was growing, yet paychecks weren't keeping up. Even though experts said the recession was over, the recovery wasn't reaching the middle class. Instead, the costs of keeping the system stable were being passed down to regular people.
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📤Next Week:
The Next Economic Stories of Relevance article will be released this Monday evening, August 17, 2026.
The next edition of the Monday Mashup is the last report that rounds out the legacy Economic Stories of Relevance series that ran from 2011 to 2014. This series demonstrates how we are dealing with a tangled economic web that was spun a generation ago. A path of purpose would be the arduous exercise of unspinning that web.
🧠Opening Reflection:
The Quiet Exchange
Every economy leaves a clear trail of what it demands from a place. Long before railroads, highways, or electrical grids, human settlement developed wherever dependable water made survival possible. Many of the earliest civilizations formed along great rivers, where people found drinking water, fertile soil, transportation, and the resources needed to sustain permanent communities. Coastal settlements also emerged around protected harbors, where ships could be sheltered from the volatile weather, tides, and currents of the open ocean. As populations expanded, people moved farther inland and upstream, developing new settlements around additional sources of water and other abundant natural resources. The routes differed, but the underlying dependency remained the same. Civilization has always depended upon water, and for much of human history, proximity to it was imperative for survival, transportation, agriculture, and trade.
During the 1800s, the development of the steam engine and the spread of the Industrial Revolution began changing that relationship. Communities no longer had to depend entirely upon waterways to move people, raw materials, and finished goods. The locomotive engine and the expanding railroad system connected places that had previously been separated by distance and geography. Cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte, and Hickory grew substantially because railroads connected their local resources, industries, and workers to a widening national market. Communities developed according to the resources available within their immediate surroundings, but their position along the rail system increasingly determined whether those resources could reach the rest of the country.
The early 20th century brought the expansion of the automobile and, to a lesser extent at first, the aircraft. Road systems developed throughout the century as miles of concrete and asphalt were laid to interconnect communities across the country and, through larger transportation networks, around the world. The automobile changed where people could live, work, shop, and conduct business. The highway system became the backbone of domestic transportation and trade, while aviation eventually compressed distances that had once defined the limits of human movement.
We will always depend upon water for our existence, but we no longer depend upon it as the primary means of travel. Aircraft shrank both the world and our perception of time. Christopher Columbus required more than a month to cross the Atlantic during his first voyage. The Mayflower spent more than two months crossing the North Atlantic. Centuries later, the Concorde could travel from New York to London in approximately three and a half hours. Geography remained the same, but infrastructure transformed what that geography meant.
Life has changed immensely since the founding of the United States. We moved from a collection of colonies to an empire, from a distant outpost to the largest economy in the world. From its advent through its heyday, the old industrial economy was impossible to ignore. Smokestacks rose above the horizon, and smoke sometimes billowed across the sky. The air carried the smell of lacquer, paint, burning fuel, and hot metal. Factory whistles sounded from dusk to dawn. Freight trucks crowded the roads surrounding the industrial core of the city. Workers arrived and departed in shifts defined by the factory clock. Its advantages and disadvantages were visible, audible, and measured through the daily rhythm of community life. The old industrial economy announced its presence.
The digital economy has arrived in a much quieter way. Along the U.S. 321 corridor, its presence can easily be overlooked. There is no whistle announcing a mass shift change because there is no large workforce changing shifts. Heavy traffic doesn't gather around the data centers because the permanent workforce is comparatively small, and access to these properties is deliberately restricted. These facilities are among the ultimate high-security zones of the modern economy.
Inside these massive, windowless buildings, thousands of servers operate around the clock. They maintain an exceptionally large and relatively steady electrical load while depending upon transmission lines, substations, utility capacity, and, depending upon the cooling system, potentially substantial amounts of water. A data center may appear peaceful from the road, but its demands don't disappear simply because the site is quiet.
This contrast reveals one of the central illusions surrounding modern technology. We send documents, save photographs, conduct business, receive information, and communicate around the world without ever seeing the physical systems that make those activities possible. The screen gives our digital lives a sense of weightlessness. Behind that screen, however, land has been cleared, concrete has been poured, electrical power has been generated, and water has been moved. The experience may be virtual, but the infrastructure supporting it's physical.
The Foothills Corridor has experienced economic transitions before. This region once produced furniture, textiles, fiber, and other tangible goods that were shipped throughout the country and around the world. Those industries consumed resources and relied upon public infrastructure, but they also employed large numbers of local residents whose wages circulated through the surrounding economy. Big Tech arrives with a familiar promise of investment, property-tax revenue, status, and a place in the next economy. What it demands from the community, however, may not always align with what it returns.
This is where the quiet calculation begins. Property-tax revenue appears on one side of the ledger, while electrical capacity, water demand, infrastructure expansion, and long-term public risks accumulate on the other. The benefits are generally announced with fanfare, while the costs may emerge later through higher utility rates, stretched capital budgets, reduced system reliability, or diminished capacity for future growth. The central question isn't whether technology has value. The question is whether these massive projects pay their full freight or quietly transfer part of their cost to residential ratepayers and public water systems.
A year ago, that question remained largely a warning. We called for stronger utility oversight, megawatt-based impact fees, greater protections for water resources, and a clearer division between private investment and public responsibility. Since then, concrete pads have been poured, steel has risen, gigawatts of proposed demand have entered utility connection pipelines, and regional water systems have been required to account for growing and competing demands. What once appeared to be a future policy discussion is becoming part of the physical landscape.
The issue is no longer whether data centers will come. They are already establishing themselves throughout the Foothills. Nor is this a choice between embracing technology and rejecting progress. The real choice concerns the terms under which that progress takes place.
Rules determine whether growth strengthens public infrastructure or consumes its available capacity. They determine who pays for the electrical grid, who retains dependable access to water, who carries the risk when projections fail, and who remains protected after the ribbons are cut and the press releases have been forgotten.
The machinery behind the screen is now being connected to the machinery of our community. Before that connection becomes permanent, the community has a right to understand what is being exchanged—and whether that exchange is fair.
⭐ Feature Story ⭐
Regulating Big Tech Infrastructure: From Data Centers to Grid Stability
A Progress Report for the Foothills Corridor
Hickory Hound News & Views | August 2026
Introduction: One Year Later
In August 2025, the Hickory Hound argued that high-capacity data centers should no longer be treated simply as prestigious economic-development projects. Their physical demands place them in a different category. A hyperscale facility may occupy industrial land and generate substantial property value, but its defining relationship with the community runs through the electrical grid, the water system, wastewater capacity, fiber infrastructure, and the long-term public obligations created to serve it. That makes it utility-scale infrastructure, whether local development codes use that language or not.
The standard proposed at the time was straightforward. Data centers should be directed toward appropriate industrial or brownfield sites. Cooling systems should minimize or eliminate the use of potable water. Grid expansions and other dedicated infrastructure should be paid for by the companies creating the demand. Large facilities should operate under enforceable utility rates and long-term contracts that prevent their costs from shifting onto residential customers. Public reporting should identify water use, electrical demand, taxes paid, infrastructure contributions, and whether promised benefits are actually materializing. Impact fees, financial assurances, and decommissioning requirements should address costs that ordinary permitting doesn't capture.
One year later, the record is neither a failure nor a completed success. Microsoft has made important concessions. Catawba County and its municipalities have changed the tax bargain. North Carolina has begun reducing data-center subsidies and considering stronger large-load protections. Duke Energy has proposed a new tariff for its largest customers. Microsoft has also redesigned its cooling systems in ways that could sharply reduce water consumption.
Those changes matter. They also reveal the central Structural Realism question: did public institutions establish durable rules, or did one powerful company voluntarily improve one particular deal?
Structural Realism doesn't measure a project by the enthusiasm of its announcement or by the intensity of the opposition surrounding it. It asks who controls the essential resources, who receives the lasting return, who finances the supporting systems, and who carries the downside if projections fail. Applied here, the test is the difference between Activity and Progress. Construction, permits, and investment are activity. Progress exists when the resulting system strengthens public capacity, protects household margin, and produces a return that remains after the construction crews leave.
By that measure, Catawba County has improved the deal. It hasn't yet completed the rulebook.
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I. The Bargain Has Changed
Microsoft announced its Catawba County project in November 2022: a minimum investment of $1 billion over ten years, four data-center sites associated with Conover, Hickory, and Maiden, and at least 50 permanent jobs. The original incentive structure contemplated performance grants equal to 50 percent of real-property taxes and 85 percent of personal-property taxes over an initial ten-year period, with the possibility of extensions.
Construction slowed and then resumed in 2026 after a reported pause of approximately ten months. Building permits were subsequently reported at more than $900 million. Those numbers show that the project has moved well beyond an announcement. Concrete has been poured, utility work is underway, and the first major structures are rising.
The most important change, however, isn't visible at the construction sites. In June, Catawba County, Hickory, Conover, and Maiden announced that Microsoft would pay property taxes on the full value of its buildings, equipment, and infrastructure. On August 3, the Catawba County Board of Commissioners formally reported that Microsoft would forgo the economic-investment incentives contained in its development agreement. Related municipal agreements have also moved toward termination or release.
This is a real improvement. The original public bargain was built around returning a large share of the project's property taxes to Microsoft. The revised bargain preserves the full local tax base. For a capital-intensive facility that creates relatively few permanent jobs, that distinction is essential.
It also exposes the Capital-Employment Split. Microsoft is committing at least $1 billion while promising at least 50 permanent positions. The project may create substantial construction work, tax value, technical training, and additional demand within Catawba County's fiber-optic and electrical-supply cluster. Corning, Amphenol, contractors, utilities, and technical programs may capture secondary benefits. Still, this isn't a mass-employment project resembling the manufacturing plants that once placed hundreds or thousands of workers on a payroll. Its principal local return must therefore be measured through taxes, supplier activity, infrastructure contributions, and protection of public capacity.
Microsoft deserves credit for relinquishing the incentives. Yet the change came through the company's Community-First Infrastructure initiative, not through a generally applicable local rule. The distinction matters because the next developer may not volunteer to make the same concession. A responsible company can improve a project. Only a public standard can govern the next one.
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II. Water: Capacity isn't the Same as Security
The water issue has also changed materially. Microsoft says engineering advances made since the original 2022 planning estimates have reduced projected peak water demand by 75 to 80 percent and wastewater demand by 85 to 90 percent. The company reports that the revised facilities will rely primarily upon liquid cooling in a closed-loop system, continually recirculating coolant and losing little or no water through evaporation.
Local officials estimate that all four Microsoft sites, once fully operational, will use approximately one percent of Hickory's daily water-production capacity. That percentage sounds reassuring, but percentages require a denominator. Hickory's treatment plant is rated at 32 million gallons per day. One percent therefore implies approximately 320,000 gallons per day across the four sites.
The city's 2025 Local Water Supply Plan shows average withdrawals of approximately 16.75 million gallons per day, or about 52 percent of available supply. Compared with actual average withdrawal rather than maximum plant capacity, 320,000 gallons would equal approximately 1.9 percent. The plan projects total demand of about 24.1 million gallons per day by 2030, or approximately 75 percent of available supply. Most of that projected increase comes from wholesale water sales, which are expected to rise from about 5.5 million gallons per day in 2025 to approximately 12.7 million gallons per day in 2030.
These figures don't support the claim that Microsoft's four sites are about to exhaust Hickory's treatment capacity. They do support a demand for clearer accounting. The public still needs to know whether the 320,000-gallon estimate represents average daily use, peak demand, or maximum contractual capacity. It needs to know how much water is required for the initial filling and periodic maintenance of the closed-loop systems, whether the supply is treated drinking water, and how much ultimately returns through the wastewater system. Hickory's 2025 supply plan reports no reclaimed-water use, which makes the source of industrial cooling water a legitimate question rather than a settled answer.
The timing adds another layer. During the 2026 drought, Hickory entered Stage 2 of the Catawba-Wateree Low Inflow Protocol and imposed mandatory restrictions intended to reduce water use by 5 to 10 percent. That doesn't mean the Microsoft facilities caused the drought or threatened the system. It means that spare treatment capacity and drought security aren't the same thing. A plant can have room on an average day while the basin is under regional stress.
The Catawba River is also not Hickory's private reservoir. Water is shared throughout a rapidly growing basin. Charlotte Water already holds authority to transfer as much as 33 million gallons per day from the Catawba basin into the Rocky River basin and is pursuing a larger future allocation. Hickory supplies several neighboring systems through wholesale contracts. Industrial expansion, residential growth, drought, power generation, and interbasin transfers all draw upon the same connected resource.
That is why the water audit can't end with the statement that Microsoft will use one percent of plant capacity. Treatment capacity measures what Hickory can process. Basin yield measures what the river system can reliably provide. Drought protocol measures what happens when inflows fall. Each answers a different question.
The public also needs to know whether Microsoft's projected demand is already included in Hickory's 2030 forecast, what curtailment rules apply during future drought stages, and whether Microsoft's corporate promise to replenish more water than it withdraws will be fulfilled within the Catawba basin and in a location that benefits the affected system. A global water-positive balance doesn't automatically restore water to the community from which it was taken.
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III. Following the Pipes to the Financing
The most important local cost question may be buried beneath the ground. Hickory has discussed an approximately $15 million water-and-sewer expansion associated with the Microsoft project. City documents describe water-line extensions, a loop to provide redundancy, and wastewater-pumping infrastructure.
That investment isn't automatically a subsidy. Public utilities routinely build extensions that are repaid through developer contributions, connection charges, capacity fees, and future utility revenue. The problem is that the complete cost allocation isn't readily visible to the public.
The institutional audit therefore requires a direct accounting. How much money did Hickory advance? What portion is Microsoft contractually required to reimburse? Do capacity and connection charges recover the complete construction cost or only the initial connection? Who pays for financing, maintenance, eventual replacement, and unused capacity if the project changes? Does any unrecovered portion remain in the Water and Sewer Fund, which is financed by user fees?
This is the point at which Tax Base and Rate Base separate. Full property taxation strengthens the tax base that supports general government. Water and sewer expansions are financed through a utility rate base paid by customers. A project can improve one side of that ledger while still shifting costs onto the other. Celebrating property-tax revenue without examining utility financing produces only half of the picture.
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IV. The Missing Local Rulebook
The publicly available records reviewed for this report show no Catawba County or municipal rule establishing a data-center-specific impact fee scaled to megawatt demand. No separate Very Large Customer water rate has been identified. No local requirement mandates quarterly public reporting of site-level electricity use, water withdrawal, wastewater discharge, taxes paid, and infrastructure contributions. No data-center-specific decommissioning bond appears in the published rules. Nor has a comprehensive utility-style zoning system replaced the existing industrial framework with uniform standards for cooling, noise, setbacks, backup generation, and end-of-life restoration.
This doesn't mean local governments have taken no action. Ordinary building, erosion-control, stormwater, water, sewer, and system-development charges still apply. Projects are reviewed against available infrastructure, and economic-development officials now describe a more selective, case-by-case examination of size, developer quality, and utility demand. Catawba County is also rewriting its Unified Development Ordinance. Those processes provide tools and opportunities.
They don't yet amount to a specialized regulatory system.
North Carolina law complicates the impact-fee question. Local governments don't possess broad, general authority to impose any development impact fee they choose. State law does authorize water and sewer system-development fees, but those charges must be calculated according to statutory methods and tied to qualifying capital costs. If a per-megawatt charge exceeds existing local authority, the alternatives include special legislation, a utility tariff, or a negotiated development agreement. The limitation is real, but it doesn't justify silence. It makes transparent cost recovery and state-level action more important.
Charlotte chose a temporary 150-day moratorium while it studies data-center rules. Catawba County has chosen to complete existing projects and rely more heavily upon case-by-case infrastructure review. That may be a defensible approach for projects already far into development, but it shouldn't become a permanent substitute for written standards.
Structural Realism describes the unresolved danger as a Resource Siphon. The term doesn't assume that every large project exploits the community. It establishes a test. Does the private beneficiary carry the full marginal cost of the land, water, power, roads, wastewater capacity, environmental protection, and financial risk it creates? Does the local return justify the resources committed? If either answer is uncertain, the public system may be transferring leverage outward while retaining the obligation at home.
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V. From Tax Base to Rate Base
The electrical grid is where the local story becomes a statewide structural issue. Data centers don't merely consume large amounts of electricity. Their connection requests can require new transmission lines, substations, generation capacity, and long-range reserve planning years before the facilities reach full operation. If a projected load arrives late, uses less power than promised, or is abandoned, the utility may be left with infrastructure that other customers must finance.
North Carolina's Energy Policy Task Force acknowledged this problem in February 2026. It recommended large-load tariff options, greater transparency, stronger financial protections, and measures to prevent speculative projects and stranded assets from being shifted onto other customers. Existing Duke Energy high-load-factor rates weren't designed for the scale and risk profile of the current data-center pipeline.
Duke has now proposed a special tariff generally covering customers at or above 50 megawatts with an 80 percent load factor, or customers at or above 100 megawatts regardless of load factor. The proposal would use 10- or 15-year contracts and require customers to pay for at least 75 percent of their contracted demand. Consumer and environmental advocates have pressed for a lower threshold, 20-year terms, and minimum payments closer to 85 percent.
Those details determine who carries the risk. The megawatt threshold decides which facilities qualify. The contract term decides how long the customer remains responsible. The minimum-billing requirement determines how much of the promised load must be paid for even if actual consumption falls short. Credit, exit, and termination provisions determine who pays when a project fails.
Duke has also signed a national Ratepayer Protection Pledge and says its individual large-load contracts now contain provisions intended to protect other customers. That is movement in the right direction. Yet a voluntary pledge and confidential project-specific contracts aren't equivalent to a transparent, commission-approved tariff that applies automatically.
The issue is especially important because residential customers are already facing higher bills. A proposed Duke Energy Carolinas settlement would raise residential rates by approximately 9.5 percent over two years while creating a faster process for large-load rate protections. That proposed residential increase isn't proof that data centers caused the rate case. It demonstrates that households are being asked to absorb higher utility costs while the rules governing the largest new loads remain unsettled.
The local audit therefore needs answers from Duke and the Utilities Commission. What electrical demand has Microsoft requested for each Catawba County site? Which substations, transmission lines, and generation resources are attributable to those requests? Who paid for the interconnection facilities? Which tariff or contract applies today? Will the sites fall under the proposed large-load tariff, or will they remain governed by confidential agreements? What financial assurance protects other customers if Microsoft delays or reduces its demand?
Without those answers, grid stability remains an assurance rather than an auditable allocation of cost and risk.
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VI. The State Has Begun to Move
North Carolina has taken one concrete step. The 2026 Appropriations Act repealed the sales-and-use tax exemption for electricity consumed by certified and qualifying data centers. The change applies to billing periods beginning on or after August 6, 2026, and subjects data-center electricity to the combined general sales-tax rate. Other exemptions for qualifying equipment, software, and support infrastructure remain.
The state also added a quarterly reporting requirement for the amount of electricity tax paid. That will improve the Department of Revenue's information, but it isn't the public operational transparency envisioned in the 2025 proposal. Tax reporting doesn't reveal site-level megawatt demand, water use, peak-load performance, infrastructure costs, or whether corporate conservation promises are being met.
Senate Bill 730, the Ratepayer Protection Act, would go farther. The House-passed version applies its principal data-center rules at a 100-megawatt threshold. It would require a sound assessment during local approval, allow local governments to demand review of water, air quality, thermal plumes, agricultural resources, and other effects, establish water-use standards that could require closed-loop or reclaimed-water systems, and prohibit evaporative cooling for covered projects. It would also require future electric-service contracts to contain minimum billing, long-term cost recovery, credit protection, and termination provisions designed to prevent other customers from subsidizing data-center service. Prospective local incentives for covered data centers would be prohibited.
As of this writing, Senate Bill 730 hasn't become law. It passed the House in June and was referred to the Senate Rules Committee. Its protections don't govern Microsoft's existing approvals, and several provisions would apply only to future projects or future utility contracts.
The state has therefore moved from denial toward recognition. It has acknowledged the tax subsidy, the water issue, the siting issue, and the ratepayer risk. What it hasn't yet done is complete a stable statewide framework.
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VII. What Paying Full Freight Requires
The goal isn't to stop digital development. Data centers are one node in a much larger system that includes fiber production, cloud services, hospitals, schools, finance, manufacturing, smartphones, logistics, and artificial intelligence. The Foothills are positioned to participate because the region possesses industrial land, fiber expertise, technical trades, utility access, and proximity to larger metropolitan markets.
Connectivity, however, doesn't determine who captures the value. A region can host the infrastructure while profits, data, and strategic control flow elsewhere. The local return depends upon the rules attached to the physical assets.
A full-freight standard would require several elements. Large-load electric tariffs should be public, automatic, and strong enough to recover transmission, generation, and stranded-asset risk through long contracts, minimum payments, credit security, and enforceable exit provisions. Water rules should require closed-loop or similarly low-consumption cooling, restrict routine reliance on potable water where alternatives exist, establish drought-curtailment obligations, and disclose average, peak, and consumptive use. Development agreements should identify every public infrastructure contribution, every developer reimbursement, and every lifecycle obligation.
Quarterly reporting should make the public bargain visible: megawatts contracted and used, gallons withdrawn and discharged, taxes assessed and paid, incentives received, infrastructure costs reimbursed, jobs created, and local purchasing completed. Site standards should protect nearby residents from noise, diesel generation, construction effects, and incompatible land use. Decommissioning bonds should ensure that specialized buildings, generators, cooling systems, and utility connections don't become public liabilities at the end of their useful life.
None of these measures is anti-technology. They are the ordinary disciplines applied whenever private development becomes large enough to shape a public system.
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Conclusion: A Better Deal isn't Yet a Public Standard
One year after the original warning, the record contains meaningful progress. Microsoft is giving up its local incentive grants and paying property taxes on full value. Its redesigned cooling systems appear likely to use far less water than the original planning estimates. North Carolina has ended the electricity sales-tax exemption. Duke has proposed a large-load tariff. Legislators have drafted rules addressing cooling, siting, incentives, and ratepayer protection.
That isn't nothing. It's also not completion.
Most of the strongest protections remain company-specific, voluntary, pending, confidential, or limited to future projects. The public still lacks a complete accounting of Hickory's utility-extension financing. It doesn't have publicly confirmed site-level electrical-demand figures, a final large-load tariff, public quarterly operating data, a local megawatt-based charge, or a specialized decommissioning requirement. Senate Bill 730 remains unfinished.
The central distinction is no longer between supporting data centers and opposing them. It's between negotiated promises and durable institutions. Microsoft may prove to be a responsible operator. The rulebook must be written for the company that isn't.
Catawba County has improved this particular bargain. The next responsibility is to turn the best parts of that bargain into standards that apply before the next announcement, before the next utility extension, and before the next large load enters the planning queue.
Structural Realism requires the community to look beyond the visible construction and follow the underlying exchange. If the tax base grows while the rate base absorbs the risk, the system hasn't protected the public. If private capital pays its full incremental cost, strengthens local capacity, and produces a durable return, the digital buildout can become genuine progress.
The question isn't whether the Foothills will participate in the next economy. They already are. The question is whether the institutions governing that transition are strong enough to ensure that the people who live here share in the value without inheriting the bill.
α My Own Time Ω
When the Bill Comes Home
Most people will never set foot inside a data center. They will not walk through the server rooms, study the complex cooling systems, or see the electricity flowing through the power stations that keep our digital world running. While these buildings may seem far removed from our daily lives, the costs they generate don't stay hidden. Eventually, the bill reaches the community. Average households have been carrying the financial weight of the infrastructure needed to support these facilities.
These costs show up on your summer electric bill, at a time when air conditioning in North Carolina isn't a luxury, but a necessity during hot, humid days. You can also see them in the rate hikes requested by utility companies to pay for facility expansions. These costs stem from public water and power systems stretched thin to meet demands that everyday families didn't create. It might be easy to dismiss one small charge as manageable, but the real issue is that families aren't dealing with just one increase. Over the past few years, households have faced rising costs for electricity, housing, groceries, gas, insurance, and medical care, leaving many at a financial breaking point.
This financial pressure affects all generations. Older residents can't count on future pay raises, promotions, or extra years of work to make up for the money lost to these rising expenses. Many are living on fixed incomes, have limited savings, or are managing health issues that make it difficult to handle these additional costs. Younger families may have more years of work ahead, but they are already dealing with high rent, childcare expenses, student debt, job instability, and the increasing difficulty of building a stable future. While their specific situations differ, everyone is feeling the squeeze of a shrinking budget.
This is why we can't simplify the debate into whether someone supports or opposes technology. That is a misleading narrative. A community can welcome new investment while still demanding honest accounting and the truth about how this growth will affect their personal lives. The average person understands the value of digital infrastructure, but that doesn't mean local households should be expected to subsidize some of the wealthiest corporations on the planet.
People aren't asking for protection from the future. They are asking who will pay for it. If private developments require massive amounts of electricity, water, land, and public resources, then those costs should remain with the companies that are creating the demand and collecting the profits. If a community invests in the infrastructure needed for these facilities to run, then they should expect a fair return on that investment, because that is exactly what this is: an investment. The public shouldn't be required to finance the future twice—first by paying for the infrastructure built to support these companies, and then again when the bills for that infrastructure arrive at their doors.
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Source Notes
1. Catawba County, “Microsoft to Invest $1B in Technology Facilities in Catawba County,” November 9, 2022. https://www.catawbacountync.gov/news/microsoft-to-invest-1b-in-technology-facilities-in-catawba-county/
2. Data Center Dynamics, “Microsoft to invest at least $1bn on four data centers in Catawba County, NC,” November 2022. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-to-invest-at-least-1bn-on-four-data-centers-in-catawba-county-nc/
3. Catawba County, “Joint Statement on Microsoft Data Center Development in Catawba County,” June 23, 2026. https://www.catawbacountync.gov/news/joint-statement-on-microsoft-data-center-development-in-catawba-county/
4. Catawba County, “BOC Recap: 8/3/26,” August 4, 2026. https://catawbacountync.gov/news/boc-recap-8-3-26/
5. WHKY, “Microsoft Says New Cooling Technology Will Dramatically Cut Water Use at Catawba County Data Centers,” July 7, 2026. https://whky.com/microsoft-says-new-cooling-technology-will-dramatically-cut-water-use-at-catawba-county-data-centers/
6. North Carolina Division of Water Resources, City of Hickory 2025 Local Water Supply Plan. https://www.ncwater.org/wudc/app/lwsp/report.php?pwsid=01-18-010&year=2025
7. City of Hickory, Stage 2 Low Inflow Protocol notices, April-June 2026. https://www.hickorync.gov/drought
8. City of Hickory Council agenda concerning the approximately $15 million Microsoft water-and-sewer expansion, January 21, 2025. https://www.hickorync.gov/sites/default/files/hickoryncgov/Council/Agendas/20250121%20-%20City%20Council%20Agenda%20-%20January%2021%2C%202025.pdf
9. North Carolina General Statutes, Chapter 162A, Article 8, System Development Fees. https://www.ncleg.gov/EnactedLegislation/Statutes/HTML/ByArticle/Chapter_162A/Article_8.html
10. Catawba County, Unified Development Ordinance Update. https://www.catawbacountync.gov/county-services/planning-and-parks/ordinances-procedures-and-programs/unified-development-ordinance-udo-update/
11. North Carolina Department of Revenue, “Important Notice: Repeal of Exemptions for Electricity Used at Datacenters,” July 23, 2026. https://www.ncdor.gov/taxes-forms/sales-and-use-tax/other-sales-and-use-tax-resources/important-notices-issued-sales-and-use-tax-division/important-notice-repeal-exemptions-electricity-used-datacenters
12. North Carolina General Assembly, Senate Bill 730, Fifth Edition, and bill history. https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2025/S730
13. North Carolina Energy Policy Task Force, 2026 Report. https://governor.nc.gov/documents/files/nc-energy-policy-task-force-2026-report/open
14. Canary Media, “Duke Energy proposes special rules for data centers in North Carolina,” July 2026. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/data-centers/duke-energy-proposes-special-rules-for-data-centers-in-north-carolina
15. WRAL, reporting on Duke Energy's Ratepayer Protection Pledge and proposed North Carolina rate-case settlement, July 2026. https://www.wral.com/news/nccapitol/duke-energy-data-center-pledge-north-carolina-july-2026/
16. City of Charlotte, “Frequently Asked Questions: Data Centers & Moratorium,” June 2026. https://www.charlottenc.gov/City-News/Data-Centers-Moratorium-FAQs
17. City of Charlotte, Charlotte Water Interbasin Transfer. https://www.charlottenc.gov/water/Water-Quality/Charlotte-Water-IBT
18. Microsoft Local, Catawba County construction and water-use updates, 2026. https://local.microsoft.com/communities/americas/north-carolina/
