Teresa Earnhardt's $30 Billion Data Center Died in Mooresville. The Town Just Voted to Make Sure the Next One Waits a Year.

On a stretch of farmland between Patterson Farm Road and Rustic Road east of downtown Mooresville, North Carolina, a company called Tract once planned to build $30 billion worth of data centers. The land belonged to Teresa Earnhardt, the widow of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt Sr. Her stepson, Kerry Earnhardt, posted a video telling his father's old fans that Dale would be "livid" to see his family's name tied to the project. Thirteen months later, on August 13th, 2025, Mayor Chris Carney announced that Tract had formally withdrawn its rezoning request. The $30 billion campus was dead before a single building permit was filed.

Kerry Earnhardt's video did more than embarrass his stepmother. It put real numbers in front of people who hadn't seen them: five buildings on 400 acres, roughly 500,000 gallons of water a day, 350 megawatts of power draw, and 120 diesel backup generators. Residents organized fast, under names like No Data Center Mooresville and a Facebook group called No to Rezoning! No to Mooresville NC Tech Park. Hundreds showed up to public meetings. For a project that size, in a town of roughly 50,000 people, that kind of visible, organized opposition is rare, and it worked.

It worked partly because the town's own commissioners were already uneasy before the backlash fully organized. Commissioner Gary West and Mayor Carney both said publicly they probably wouldn't vote yes without knowing who the actual tenant would be. Tract was what the industry calls a site-ready developer: a company that buys and entitles land on spec, then sells or leases the finished site to whichever hyperscaler eventually signs a lease. West questioned at the time whether a deal with no named end-user met his own bar for what he called smart growth — a skeptical instinct that predates, and doesn't depend on, the Earnhardt family's involvement. The watershed concerns tied to land annexed into town limits two years earlier, with rights connected to the Coddle Creek Reservoir, gave the opposition its sharpest and most specific argument. But the commissioners' own doubts about an unnamed tenant is what should have been the headline from the start, long before a NASCAR legend's name turned it into national news.

A site-ready filing isn't a tenant

On GridPermit's own evidence ladder, a rezoning application from a developer with no named end-user sits near the bottom rung. It's a real filing, with real acreage and a real timeline attached, and it deserves to be taken seriously as a possible project. But by itself it can't tell a town how much power the eventual occupant will actually draw, how much water it will actually use, or whether the deal ever closes at all. Mooresville's commissioners were asking roughly the right question in 2025 before anyone handed them a framework for it. What the town did next is spend fifteen months, and one dead $30 billion project, relearning in public that a speculative site plan and a signed tenant carry two very different kinds of risk — and that the gap between them is exactly where a town needs its own rules, not a developer's reassurances.

On Monday night, November 2nd, the board of commissioners voted unanimously to impose a 12-month moratorium on new data center applications anywhere in Mooresville. West, who chaired the town through both the Tract collapse and this vote, framed the pause as time to decide something more basic than any single project: whether Mooresville wants a data center in town at all, and if it does, on what terms — how much power it can draw, how much water it can use, and where that water comes from and where it goes afterward. The moratorium doesn't touch GIGA Data Centers' existing colocation facility, already running on two dedicated 250kV transmission lines straight from Duke Energy generating stations into an on-site substation. It stops anything new cold for a year, with no application, no study, and no vote until the pause lifts or the board writes the rules it says it's missing.

Mooresville isn't acting alone

A week before Mooresville voted, Charlotte's city council extended its own data center moratorium, first adopted in June, out to October 18th, 2027 — effectively another eleven months, passed unanimously, with city staff saying the extra runway is meant to give state lawmakers a chance to act first. Local reporting on Mooresville's vote put the number of other North Carolina cities and towns that have adopted some form of data center pause at 56; other trackers, counting by different methods, land closer to fifty jurisdictions that have taken some kind of formal action since the start of the year. The exact tally moves depending on who's counting and how, but the direction doesn't: North Carolina has more local data center moratoriums on the books right now than any other state in the country, and the pace hasn't slowed.

What a town's moratorium can't touch is the rate case. Duke Energy serves most of this corner of the state, and its own fight over who pays for data center load — not whether one gets built, but how the cost of building for it gets split between the hyperscaler and everyone else on the grid — is playing out separately at the North Carolina Utilities Commission, where regulators have already denied Duke a gas turbine request it couldn't tie to a specific cost allocation. A twelve-month pause on new zoning applications in Mooresville does nothing to settle that question, and it was never designed to. Zoning decides where a data center can go. A rate case decides who pays for the power once it's there. Mooresville only controls the first lever.

Killing the Tract project didn't make the underlying demand disappear. It moved it one county road over. Compass Datacenters, a Dallas-based developer, filed its own rezoning request in nearby Statesville for 340 acres on Stamey Farm Road, and the city council there approved it unanimously in September 2025, over the same kind of resident objections about noise, traffic, and farmland loss that killed the Mooresville project a year later. Statesville has no moratorium of its own on the books. Iredell County, which contains both towns, grew by roughly 6,000 residents last year and now ranks among the fastest-growing counties in the state — exactly the kind of growth that makes a data center's land, power, and water appetite look small in a developer's slide deck and large once it's sitting next to someone's farm.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. Today, voters in ten states are deciding 41 separate ballot measures tied to data centers, from a $2 billion Amazon project in Sunbury, Ohio to zoning fights in towns most people outside them have never heard of. Mooresville's vote wasn't on anyone's ballot. It came from five commissioners who'd already watched one deal collapse under them and decided they'd rather write the rules themselves than wait for the next Kerry Earnhardt to show up with a camera.

I think the real lesson out of Iredell County isn't that organized residents can beat a $30 billion developer, though they can, and did. It's that a moratorium drawn at the town line doesn't make a project disappear — it makes the project drive to the next town over that hasn't passed one yet. Mooresville now has a year to write rules with actual numbers in them: a power ceiling, a water cap, a real answer for where a 350-megawatt load's water goes once it's done cooling servers, instead of leaning on an unnamed developer's good behavior or a NASCAR family's name recognition to do the work zoning should have done from the start. Statesville, and whichever town is next, don't have that year yet. They have a council vote and a company's promise.