Zoning in McCormick County, South Carolina: The 2026 Data Center Fight

A 1,000-acre data center proposal, a few miles from downtown McCormick

In 2026, Pollard Lumber Company proposed hosting a large data-center development -- roughly 1,000 acres -- on its property between Whitetown Road and Main Street, just a few miles from downtown McCormick. Company officials said the project would also bring a new natural-gas pipeline to the county, in partnership with Kinder Morgan, positioning it as infrastructure investment beyond the data center itself. The scale of the proposal is genuinely large relative to McCormick County's small size and population -- this is South Carolina's least-populous county, as covered on our county hub page -- which is part of why it drew hundreds of residents to public meetings in both July and August 2026 to debate the plan directly with county officials.

The Planning Commission pushed back: a moratorium, a denial, and a new ordinance

The McCormick County Planning Commission did not simply wave the proposal through. As of late July 2026, the commission recommended a nine-month pause on data-center development countywide, separately denied a specific rezoning request tied to the proposed data-center site itself, and recommended that the county draft a dedicated data-center ordinance intended to protect neighboring landowners going forward -- a headline from that period summarized the Planning Commission's position bluntly: no rezoning, no data center. Resident opposition centered on concerns common to data-center siting fights nationally but applied here to this specific rural community: noise from cooling systems, the heavy water use data centers typically require, and general strain on local roads and utilities that a small, rural county's infrastructure wasn't built to support.

This page could not confirm county council's final action on the rezoning request, the proposed moratorium, or the recommended data-center ordinance as of September 2026 -- a Planning Commission recommendation is a formal step in South Carolina's zoning-amendment process, but it is not itself the county's final decision, which rests with county council. Anyone evaluating land near the Whitetown Road/Main Street area, or considering how this dispute might affect county-wide zoning policy going forward, should confirm the current status of all three (the specific rezoning denial's finality, any adopted moratorium, and any new data-center ordinance text) directly with the McCormick County Planning & Zoning office rather than relying on the July-August 2026 snapshot reported here.

What this means beyond the specific parcel

Even for a buyer with no direct interest in the Pollard Lumber tract, this dispute is a useful signal about how McCormick County's zoning process handles a large, contested proposal: the Planning Commission has shown it will recommend denying a specific rezoning and drafting new protective ordinance language in response to organized resident opposition, rather than treating growth-oriented development proposals as presumptively favorable. If a future data-center, industrial, or similarly large-scale proposal surfaces on or near your own parcel, that same process -- public comment period, Planning Commission review, and a final county council vote -- is the path any specific rezoning would need to follow, and the 2026 Pollard Lumber case is a concrete, current example of exactly how that process can play out.