Spartanburg County SC Council Unanimously Delays Third Reading of 12-Month Data Center Moratorium to September 21

Spartanburg County Council voted unanimously on August 17, 2026 to delay the third and final reading of a county-wide 12-month data center moratorium to September 21, with residents packing the chambers. The ordinance, which had already cleared two readings, would halt new data center development across the county for a year; a NorthMark project already under construction on Pine Street would be exempted. Council members cited the need for additional expert testimony and a Safety Committee meeting before taking the final vote, pushing a measure that appeared to be on the verge of adoption into a September showdown.

The exemption is the recognizable shape of this fight. Across the corpus, moratoria that pass do so with the projects already in the ground carved out — Jeffersonville, Indiana’s 8-0 vote exempted Meta (2026-08-04–jeffersonville-in-8-0-data-center-moratorium-meta-exempted), DeSoto County, Florida approved a moratorium with its loophole preserved (2026-07-29–desoto-county-fl-moratorium-approved-loophole-preserved), and Fort Worth advanced a freeze whose effective date sits months out and grandfathers the current pipeline (2026-08-13–fort-worth-louisville-consecutive-datacenter-moratorium-votes). Spartanburg is the corpus’s first South Carolina entry in the moratorium wave, extending a pattern already dense across North Carolina (2026-08-03–nc-moratorium-wave-11-counties-durham-hearing-aug24), Tennessee (2026-06-30–loudon-county-tn-six-month-data-center-moratorium), and Georgia (2026-08-11–walker-county-ga-datacenter-moratorium-180-days-study-committee). The September 21 reading is the vote that decides whether Spartanburg joins them.