Data Centers

Greenville has active data centers that take advantage of the region’s reliability of power and telecommunications as well as low costs. Local utilities work to provide adequate support and redundancy for these operations to maintain reliability. The community’s environment also makes it attractive in addressing risk assessments to maintaining a secure property.

Enterprise

Ahold Information Services
Ahold has a 60,000 square foot data center with built-in redundancies with dual independent electrical and fiber optic feeds. It also has dual UPS systems, separate diesel backup generators for both data center and office, 18″ raised floors, and finger print recognition security system.

BMW’s Information Technology Research Center (ITRC)
The BMW ITRC is the company’s only research and development outside of Bavaria, Germany. The facility, located at the Clemson University – Center for Automotive Research Center (CU-ICAR),  the facility accommodates engineers and students working to develop automative solutions.  Depth and scope of the data center is not public.

Third Party

Immedion LLC
Immedion is a 15,000 square foot colocation data center providing data center space for other companies’ servers within the Southeast region.

ArmorRack
ArmorRack offers cloud hosting and colocation services to help organizations secure data, mitigate risk and comply with regulations.

Location is an important factor in the data center site selection process.  Greenville County, SC offers a combination of favorable advantages to meet the unique needs of data center facilities.  The region is sheltered from disasters, has access to reliable utilities, has a strong IT workforce, and many other benefits.

Highlights for Our Properties

• Favorable environmental location with a historically low risk for natural disasters
• Low traffic area is well-served by local police and nearby fire protection
• Convenient access to the “Southern Connector” I -185 and major interstate, I-85
• Located just 21 miles from Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport
• Sites not in flight path
• Strong IT work force and vibrant IT community
• Fast track local permitting

Our sites are each 100-plus acres.  See Augusta Grove Lot 20 and South Greenville Enterprise Park for additional info or contact us.

Power

• Electrical service provider: Duke Energy, a regulated utility
  • Regulated utilities can offer price stability by preventing drastic fluctuations.
• Estimated cost of ( $/kWh) f or a data c enter user: $ 0.05
• Power generation mix:
  • Nuclear: 56.8%
  • Coal: 38.1%
  • Natural Gas: 4%
  • Hydro: Other Renewables: 1:1%
• Power capacity: capable of 25+ megawatts
• Transmission lines a long site boundary
• Nearest substations: ±1 mile from major electrical tie station
• On-site substation opportunity from Duke Energy

Water & Sewer

• Redundant water sources on-site and available from Greenville Water System, sewer services provided by ReWa
• 12″ Water line in close proximity, capable of being looped, capable of producing 1500 GPM
• 12″+ Sewer line
• Grove Creek is located nearby and could be used as an alternative cooling source

Fiber & Connectivity

• Nearby fiber infrastructure offers ready access to high bandwidth services
• Multiple providers on-site and in immediate vicinity, with diverse routing capabilities, including:
  • AT&T, Charter Business, T W Telecom, DukeNet, Level 3, Sprint

South Carolina

In addition to standard job creation and capital investment related incentives, the State of South Carolina offers incentives specific to Data Centers: South Carolina Code Section 12-36-2120(79) exempts from sales and use tax (a) computers, computer equipment and computer software used within a qualifying data center, and (b) electricity used by a qualifying data center or used by eligible business property located and used at the qualifying data center. Electricity used for purposes unrelated to the data center, such as electricity used in administrative offices, parking lots, cafeterias, maintenance shops and similar activities is not exempt. In order to qualify for the exemption, the data center facility must be certified by the South Carolina Department of Commerce and the following requirements must be met:

1. The taxpayer must invest at least $50 million in real and/ or personal property over a 5-year period. If two or more taxpayers are investing, the requirement is $75 million.
2. The taxpayer must create and maintain at least 25 full-time jobs at the facility with a cash compensation of 150% of the per capita income of the state or the county in which the facility is located, whichever is lower. The per capita income must be the most recently published data available at the time the facility is certified by Commerce.
3. The taxpayer must maintain the jobs for 3 consecutive years after certification by Commerce.

These requirements and the 5-year period begin accruing once the taxpayer notifies the Department of Revenue and Commerce in writing of its intention to claim the exemption. If the taxpayer meets the requirements to receive the exemption, it may claim the exemption on eligible purchases at any time during the period provided in South Carolina Code Section 12-54-85(F) including the time period prior to meeting the 3-year job maintenance requirement. Any subsequent purchases of qualified computer equipment, hardware and software or computers will qualify regardless of when the taxpayer makes the investments.

Greenville County

The Greenville Area Development Corporation may offer a Fee-in-Lieu of Property Taxes (FILOT) agreement to reduce the property tax burden over the long-term to a data center operator. FILOT agreements are subject to final approval by Greenville County Council.

The FILOT amounts to approximately a 42% tax reduction annually for 20 years on new capital investment occurring in a 5-year investment window. The company must commit to significant new investment (greater than $10 Million over 5 years), and the project must be competitive with other locations. The agreement works by lowering the assessment ratio from 10.5% to as low as 6% on real and personal property as well as locking the lock millage rate for 20 years. (Historically, millage has increased by 1.5% annually (School System)).

The inducement process involves a Bond/Incentive attorney preparing legal documents and takes approximately 8-weeks to secure final approval via County Council.

Duke Energy

Provides a four-year billing credit of 20% in year 1, 15% in year 2, 10% in year 3, and 5% in year 4 to qualifying projects. Qualifications include:

• Customer must add a minimum new load of 1,000 K W at one delivery point
• Customer must add capital investment in the facility is at least $ 400,000 per 1,000 K W of new load