NorthMark Strategies’ high-performance computing campus at 4000 South Pine Street in Spartanburg — the former Kohler manufacturing site — has not yet opened for operations, but the company has already applied to significantly expand its power load, requesting an additional 400 megawatts of capacity from Duke Energy.
The request, filed with the S.C. Public Service Commission this spring, drew immediate attention from Spartanburg County residents and energy policy observers. When NorthMark announced the $2.8 billion project in April 2025, county officials and state leaders had stressed that the facility would generate its own power on-site and place little to no demand on existing infrastructure. County Council Vice Chairman David Britt had cited zero cost to taxpayers and minimal grid impact as central selling points at the original announcement.
NorthMark’s response to the controversy was that larger power needs had always been part of the long-term plan. Initial operations at the Spartanburg facility are still expected in the third quarter of 2026, when Phase 1 — renovation of a 350,000-square-foot warehouse on the campus — is set to come online. Supercomputing clusters supporting machine learning and systems modeling will occupy that phase. Subsequent phases would expand into a 500,000-square-foot manufacturing building on the same site.
The 400-megawatt application — filed before Phase 1 operations begin — has prompted community groups to call on the PSC to scrutinize the request before approval. A Duke Energy spokesperson noted that the company’s $103 billion capital plan through 2030 is partly designed to meet exactly this type of commercial demand growth in the Carolinas, where 200,000 new residents are joining Duke’s service territory annually.
The PSC has been asked by community advocates to open a formal generic docket on data center power allocation by June 1, 2026. NorthMark has stated that its facility will create 27 specialized full-time jobs and hundreds of construction-phase roles during the multi-year buildout.
