Many Salisbury residents likely missed the news that our City Council just approved a massive, 296,518-square-foot data center on Henderson Grove Church Road. Spanning nearly 96 acres of local land, just over five football fields, the project is being spearheaded by Trammell Crow Co. and operated by Flexential. While it may appear otherwise, this is hardly an investment in our community. A sober look at the hard data from across the country reveals a vastly different story — one of speculative overbuilding, immense utility strain, with local residents paying for the multi-million-dollar cost of needed upgrading, and a high risk of leaving communities with an empty concrete shell.
The unique economics of data centers make them an incredibly volatile gamble for local municipalities. According to modern infrastructure data, out of every dollar invested in a data center, a staggering 85 percent goes entirely into internal technology — short-lived computer silicon, servers and cooling racks. Only 15 percent is spent on the actual physical building and land. Because AI and enterprise hardware face a brutal obsolescence cycle of just three to five years, these facilities are structurally unstable long-term assets.
Furthermore, Flexential is not Google or Meta; they operate on a “colocation” model. This means they build massive, empty structures ahead of demand and attempt to rent out “space and power” to smaller corporate clients. In fact, Flexential announced in their newsletter of Aug. 18 that they had recently secured an $800-million credit facility specifically to “build ahead” of infrastructure needs. This is the definition of a speculative build. If the tech market experiences a correction, or if corporate tenants migrate back to public clouds, retail colocation facilities like the one planned for Henderson Grove Church Road are historically the first to experience devastating vacancy rates.
The physical building may go up, but there is a looming probability it will sit empty. Across the United States, roughly 50 percent of planned data center projects are currently facing massive delays or outright cancellations because the electrical grid cannot supply the power. Grid interconnection queues now stretch five years or longer. Flexential can easily throw up a 296,000-square-foot concrete monolith, only to leave it vacant for years waiting on utility providers to upgrade substation transformers.
When the dust settles, what does Salisbury actually get? Data centers are notoriously poor job creators. Flexential’s highly automated facility will likely yield fewer than 30 to 50 permanent on-site roles once construction ends. For a handful of security guards and a few technicians, our local grid, water resources, and air quality will bear the brunt of massive diesel backup generators.
A City Council vote is a serious hurdle, but it is not the final word. As I understand it, the vote simply changed the property’s label to “Light Industrial with a Conditional District Overlay.” It did not grant permission to build. It only gives Trammell Crow and Flexential the right to apply for development. Before the foundation can be poured, the developer must clear a gauntlet of administrative, environmental and engineering reviews. This pipeline of permits and agencies responsible provides ample opportunity for the public to protest the building of an AI data center and state regulators can still delay or effectively block the project if the developer fails to meet strict state-level standards. We must insist these standards be applied.
The building of the AI data center, with all the problems it will likely create, with no benefit to the community, can yet be stopped!
Eugene Goetz lives in Salisbury.
