North Carolina’s data center industry is helping grow the state’s economy and delivering measurable returns to communities across North Carolina. In 2024 alone, North Carolina’s data center industry helped: 

• Contribute $18.45 billion to the state’s GDP
• Generate more than $1.39 billion in state and local tax revenue–enough to fund nearly half of North Carolina’s education services. 
• Provide more than $10.6 billion in labor income to hardworking North Carolinians.

As a growing digital infrastructure hub, North Carolina ranks 10th nationally for the number of jobs supported by the data center industry. In fact, data centers in North Carolina directly employed more than 25,000 people in 2024 and helped support more than 117,000 jobs across the Tarheel state. These jobs span a wide range of industries and skill levels across IT, security, engineering, construction, telecommunications, and more.

Keeping data centers on American soil is critical to our national security. In addition to securing our sensitive information in the United States, data centers also provide the digital infrastructure that ensures U.S. competitiveness in artificial intelligence and other cutting edge technologies that are essential to our economic competitiveness and national security.

Data centers are critical infrastructure enabling America’s technological future. They support the digitization of our economy, widespread vehicle and building electrification, the onshoring of advanced manufacturing, growth in controlled environment agriculture, and other 21st-century economic drivers.

Data centers are highly energy-efficient facilities that help enable energy savings for homes and businesses. The industry prioritizes reducing energy use and increasing efficiency and facilities are designed to optimize efficiencies from day one.

In fact, while data center computing workloads increased nearly 550% between 2010 and 2018, electricity consumption grew only 6%, due to efficiencies from the cloud migration, improvements in cooling systems, and other operational and technological efficiency gains at modern data centers.

Data centers are among the largest buyers of clean energy in the country.

• Wind and solar capacity contracted to data center providers and customers represented half of the total U.S. corporate renewables market in 2024.
• Four of the top five purchasers of renewable energy in the U.S. are data center companies
• Many operators have committed to carbon neutrality and 100% clean energy by 2030

Data centers are some of the largest buyers of clean energy, contributing to our collective sustainability goals. The data center industry has accelerated the economy-wide transition to clean energy and has created demand for more clean energy in the regions where they operate.

Data centers accelerate the clean energy transition in the U.S. with commitments to purchase clean energy and by funding the development of new sources of clean energy. In fact, wind and solar capacity contracted to data center providers and customers represented two-thirds of the total U.S. corporate renewables market last year and four of the top five purchasers of renewable energy in the U.S. are companies that operate data centers. Many data center companies have committed to being carbon neutral and supporting their operations with 100% clean energy by 2030.