Power, Capital and the New Rules of Building in the Carolinas

The Carolinas have moved past the point where being called an emerging market makes sense, but the region hasn’t been fully repriced by capital, power planners or local governments to match that shift. Duke Energy’s contracted data center load has surged past 7.6 GB behind a $103 billion capital plan, construction spending in the region is up 32% year over year, and two states are actively rewriting the rules for who pays for grid buildout and how fast local tolerance runs out. Every stakeholder in this room, whether they’re deploying capital, running site selection or building the asset, is making decisions in a market where the fundamentals are shifting faster than the playbooks built for Northern Virginia or Texas.