Valara Holdings, LLC, a subsidiary of NorthMark Strategies, is actively building a private data center campus on South Pine Street in unincorporated Spartanburg County, South Carolina. The project, valued at $2.8–$3 billion, will span more than 900,000 square feet across four buildings and is paired with a dedicated natural-gas power plant in the 450–460 megawatt range. Construction is underway and is planned to continue through 2028, as first reported by The State and covered by WIS, WYFF4, and FOX Carolina.

The campus sits on nearly 300 acres near 4000 Pine Street in a largely residential stretch of Spartanburg County. Permits and news releases describe four data center buildings, a power yard, internal roadways, a site access road, and electrical equipment houses. The onsite gas plant is built solely to serve the campus, not the public grid.

Valara Holdings, LLC is a development subsidiary of NorthMark Strategies. The Spartanburg County campus appears to be among its most capital-intensive public-facing projects, structured around the private-generation model that lets the developer sidestep public utility procurement timelines entirely by building its own dedicated power supply.

The project has drawn meaningful opposition. The Southern Environmental Law Center and local residents filed lawsuits and motions for preliminary injunction, arguing the project falls under South Carolina's Utility Facility Siting and Environmental Protection Act and requires Public Service Commission approval before the gas plant can operate. On August 27, 2026, the PSC dismissed that challenge, ruling that Valara, generating power solely for its own facility as a private business, is not subject to the state utility-siting rules in question and does not need PSC approval.

Separate local legal actions, including a motion for a temporary injunction and a county-level proposal for a one-year moratorium on new data centers, remain active. County officials have explicitly stated that the Valara project, already under construction, is not subject to the proposed moratorium. Construction has continued through the litigation.

Spartanburg County brings real trades depth. BMW's manufacturing plant in nearby Greer and decades of automotive and advanced manufacturing supply-chain growth have built a regional workforce with strong mechanical, electrical, civil, and industrial maintenance skills. Most large-project contractors draw from the broader Greenville-Spartanburg corridor on a non-union basis, and that pool is capable of supporting a four-building construction program.

The complication is the gas plant. A captive 450-plus megawatt generation facility is not a typical data center mechanical yard. It requires high-pressure gas system specialists, combustion turbine operators, and power-plant-grade instrumentation and controls technicians. That experience in Spartanburg County is concentrated inside regional utility operations, not private-sector contractor pipelines. Valara and its contractors will almost certainly need to recruit outside the immediate market, drawing from utility operations across the Carolinas or competing for talent with the I-85 corridor's ongoing wave of automotive and logistics expansions that are already absorbing skilled trades at volume.

For staffing firms, the near-term construction wave is addressable with regional sourcing. The operations and power-plant workforce is a harder, longer fill requiring a wider net from the start. We break down roles, pay benchmarks, and where the talent is in our guide to hiring data center talent in Spartanburg County. Sources: The State, which first reported the project, and trade and local coverage by WIS, WYFF4, and FOX Carolina.