The Stokes County Project Delta Lawsuit: 1,845 Acres on the Dan River, a 3 to 2 Vote, and a Burial Ground

Project Delta arrived in Stokes County the way most hyperscale projects do: under a code name, with the end user undisclosed, and with a request to convert a large tract of residential-agricultural land in the Dan River corridor to heavy industrial use. The county's Planning Board reviewed the request and recommended denial. In January 2026, the Board of Commissioners approved it anyway, 3 to 2.

The board did two things in that vote, and the complaint challenges both. It rezoned the roughly 1,845 acre site to heavy industrial, and it amended the county's zoning ordinance to add data centers as a permitted use in heavy manufacturing districts. The second change, the plaintiffs argue, quietly opened more than a dozen other rural sites across the county to future data center development without any of them being the subject of a hearing.

The alleged defects are procedural and substantive at once: insufficient procedural safeguards, improper notice of the zoning changes, failure to provide meaningful opportunities for public participation, no factual basis for the decision, reliance on inflated tax revenue projections, and no adequate assessment of the project's impacts on noise, air quality, water resources, or the sacred Saura tribal sites on the land. The relief sought is to strike down both zoning actions entirely.

What sets Stokes County apart from the other rezoning cases on this tracker is who the plaintiffs are and what is on the land. The National Hairston Clan represents descendants of a family whose ancestors, including people who were enslaved in the region, are buried on the project site. As Robert Hairston put it in the announcement of the suit, their foreparents are buried on the data center site and deserve to rest in peace. 7 Directions of Service, an Indigenous-led organization, describes the Dan River corridor as home to Saura burial grounds and cultural sites, and frames the project as a threat to Indigenous heritage and to the river itself. The Dan River Basin Association brings the watershed. CleanAIRE NC brings air quality.

Alongside them are seven families who live near the site: Tim and Deborah Mabe, Terry and Barbara Woodcock, Roger and Jessica Richer, Ashleigh and Parker Tuttle, Tabatha Ashburn, David Beane and Lori Miller, and Rachel and Bryce Dillon. Tim Mabe described the rezoning as a threat not only to their ability to exist there but to the meaningful existence of the community they love.

The lawyers are Anne Harvey David, chief counsel for environmental justice at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, and Megan Kimball, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center. SELC is also counsel in the NAACP's Clean Air Act suit against xAI, which makes Stokes County part of a deliberate regional strategy by environmental justice litigators to treat data center siting as a civil rights issue.

Stokes County is the first data center rezoning challenge in North Carolina to reach a courtroom, and it landed as the state became one of the most active in the country on the issue. According to the national tracker we summarize in our moratorium tracker, North Carolina has 40 local moratoriums and bans, the fourth most of any state, including Charlotte's 150 day pause, Asheville's one year moratorium, Greensboro's 180 day pause on facilities of 10 megawatts or more, and Surry County's two year moratorium next door to Stokes. A statewide moratorium bill for facilities of 100 megawatts and up is pending in the legislature.

The Stokes County case tests whether a county that approved a project before that wave arrived followed its own procedures. Its closest legal cousin is the Coweta County, Georgia Project Sail suit, another challenge to a rural rezoning for a code-named hyperscale campus, and its heritage claims echo the battlefield preservation arguments that shaped the Digital Gateway fight in Virginia.

If a county near you is rezoning rural land for a code-named project, Stokes County offers a practical checklist:

• Get the Planning Board's recommendation. A commission that overrides its own planning staff and board is starting a legal fight from behind. The recommendation is a public record.
• Read the whole ordinance amendment, not just the site. A change to the use table can open every district of that type in the county.
• Document what is on the land. Cemeteries, cultural sites, wetlands, and river frontage are facts that a rezoning must account for, and the failure to assess them is a claim.
• Find institutional partners. Environmental groups, watershed associations, and civil rights organizations bring lawyers, and the Stokes County suit exists because they joined the families.

Move quickly; challenges to zoning decisions run on short clocks, as our deadlines guide explains. Our guide to fighting a proposed data center covers the substance, and our free case review connects you with an independent attorney in our network who handles data center cases in your state, at no cost and with no obligation.