Zoning at the AWS Data Center Campus in Richmond County, North Carolina

A specific, massive, already-underway project

On June 4, 2025, Richmond County and North Carolina state officials announced that Amazon Web Services would invest an estimated $10 billion to build a new data-center campus in the Hamlet-Rockingham area -- reported as the largest single capital project in North Carolina's history. The campus sits on nearly 800 acres within the Energy Way Industrial Park, a more than 700-acre industrial site a couple of miles south of Interstate 74 below Hamlet, near the South Carolina line; Amazon acquired the entire industrial park rather than a portion of it. The plan calls for 20 data-center buildings, each roughly 200,000 to 225,000 square feet, supporting cloud-computing and artificial-intelligence operations, and the project is expected to create at least 500 new high-skilled jobs over five years -- information-technology technicians, systems engineers, mechanical technicians, facility and program managers, and security personnel. Construction had already broken ground by mid-2025, per Data Center Dynamics reporting -- this is a live, under-construction project, not a proposal awaiting approval.

Why the site was zoning-ready: Heavy Industrial under the 2022 Land Use Plan

One reason this project moved as fast as it did is that the Energy Way site was already zoned Heavy Industrial, consistent with Richmond County's 2022 Land Use Plan -- the county had positioned this specific industrial park for exactly this kind of large-scale industrial use well before Amazon's announcement. That matters for understanding the surrounding land market: Richmond County has an established pattern of designating and holding ready large industrial-park tracts (Energy Way, and separately the Rockingham West Industrial Park, where Duke Energy purchased 21 acres in May 2024) rather than rezoning agricultural or residential land reactively when a large employer shows interest.

For a buyer evaluating land near Hamlet or Rockingham, that means the AWS project itself doesn't necessarily signal that nearby non-industrial-zoned land is about to be rezoned -- the county appears to prefer channeling large projects into already-designated industrial parks. But it does mean real, current infrastructure investment (power capacity, road access, utility extension) is flowing into this specific corridor, which can affect adjacent land values and development interest even without a rezoning of those adjacent parcels.

What this means for land near the corridor

If you're evaluating land anywhere near Energy Way, Hamlet, or Rockingham, the AWS project and the broader Energy Way/Rockingham West industrial-park activity (Global Packaging's $25 million expansion, Duke Energy's 21-acre 2024 purchase, ongoing shell-building construction) are worth understanding as a package: this is a county actively growing its industrial base around designated Heavy Industrial land, with real capital already committed and construction underway rather than merely announced. Ask Richmond County Planning & Zoning and the Richmond County Economic Development office directly about current infrastructure extension plans (water, sewer, power, road improvements) tied to the AWS campus, since those improvements can extend value and development interest to nearby parcels even outside the industrial park's own boundary.

A large-scale data-center campus also has real water and power demand; if your land relies on the same regional utility infrastructure, it's reasonable to ask the relevant utility (electric cooperative or Duke Energy service territory, and the applicable water/sewer authority) whether capacity planning near Hamlet and Rockingham has been affected by this specific project.