Catch up: NorthMark Compute & Cloud Community Tele-Town Hall

NorthMark Compute & Cloud (NMC²) Community Tele-Town Hall

Tuesday, August 25, 2026

Editor’s note

This is a near-verbatim transcript of the Community Tele-Town Hall, prepared from an automated (machine-generated) transcript of the call. As a result, some words may be imperfectly captured; isolated unclear words and indistinct passages are flagged inline. Spoken wording is otherwise preserved, including filler, repetition, false starts, restarts and brief exchanges between speakers. Only punctuation, paragraph breaks and speaker labels (added for readability), corrected names and company-name variants, and clear mishearings of technical terms (marked in [square brackets]) have been changed. No substantive content has been removed.

The audio recording remains the authoritative record; where it differs from this transcript, the recording governs. For further information about some of the changes made, please see About this version at the end of the transcript.

—Transcript starts—

Daniel (Moderator): Hello, and thank you for joining this live telephone town hall tonight. I’m Daniel, the moderator, and I’ll be turning the call over to Sarah Knox with NorthMark Compute & Cloud (NMC²) shortly. But before I do, I’d like to let you know that this is an interactive event. We will want to hear from you. If you want to ask questions anytime during the call, please press star three. And one of our staff will come on the phone and take your question. Then you’ll go back into the main call. And if we are able to take your question live, the moderator will say your name. Then your line will be unmuted so you can ask your question. Again, that’s star three if you’d like to ask a question live tonight. Now I’ll turn things over to Sarah Knox with NorthMark Compute & Cloud (NMC²). Sarah, you’re up.

Sarah Knox (Director of External Affairs, NMC²): Hey, thanks. Can you all hear me okay, Daniel?

Daniel (Moderator): Yep.

Sarah Knox: Well, thank you, everybody, who joined the call tonight. I know there are several things happening around Spartanburg tonight, so I appreciate you taking some of your precious time to sit down and talk to us. I’m going to, before we really kick off the call, I want to introduce the folks that are sitting around the room in Spartanburg with me tonight. We’ve got four other folks besides myself here. And so I’m going to start just what we have around the room are some of our subject matter experts. And I’m going to start by kicking it over to Brian. Brian, do you just want to say hello to everybody real quick?

Brian: Hi, [I’m] Brian. Nice to meet everybody. Glad to be on the call. Thank you.

Sarah Knox: Brian is going to be answering calls sort of about some operations stuff, questions that we might get about operations and some power. Things like that. The next person we have in the room tonight is Joel. Joel, you want to say hello?

Joel: Hello, I’m Joel. Welcome, everybody. Looking forward to answering some questions and providing some information and insight.

Sarah Knox: Awesome. And then we’ll turn it over next to Lane. How about you go next?

Lane (Environmental Subject-Matter Expert): Hey, everybody. How’s it going? I’m Lane. I am your environmental subject matter expert for the site here in Spartanburg. Excited to talk to everybody tonight.

Sarah Knox: Awesome. And then Stephanie. Stephanie, do you want to introduce yourself real quick?

Stephanie (Air Emissions Specialist): Yeah. Hi, everyone. This is Stephanie. I will be focusing on any questions related to air.

Sarah Knox: Awesome. Thanks so much. You know, one of the things that we’re here to do tonight is to give you some updates on what’s going on in our project and also to listen to your concerns and hopefully answer some of your questions. This is, as I think many of you know, the second call that we’ve had this year. We had our first tele-town hall at the end of June where we had a one-hour call just like this where we took 23 or 24 questions. I wanted just to let everybody know we had over 100 folks call in for that. I think it was a great success. The full audio and transcript of that call is available on our South Pine Street website. So if you missed that or want to listen again or you were unsure if all of the questions that got asked got answered, please feel free to check out that transcript, which has been on our website since, I believe, the day after that [tele town hall] in June. And again, you can listen to it or you can read it. We have two more town halls that we’re scheduling for September and October this year. Both of those calls are going to be a chance for you to hear directly from us about the project and what we’re doing. And in one or two of those, you’ll hear from some of our leadership as well. So again, excited to start this call. And so the one thing that I want to tell the group tonight is that we are going to split this call into two parts, which is a little bit different than the first one we did.

And we are going to do the first half of this call, or the first part at least, we are going to give you updates on what’s happening around our site and some of the programs and projects we’re working on. I think that’s information that many people have questions about. So we are just going to give you some updates. And for the second half, we’re going to take as many questions both on this call and from folks who pre-submitted questions through the text message portal that was sent out last night. So we did receive a lot of questions, and thank you to those who submitted those questions. We received those this morning, and we will be answering some of those along with some live questions tonight. So I think at this point, I think we want to go ahead and kick it off and get started. The first thing we’re going to do, as I mentioned, is do updates. And so our first update — which Joel is going to give — [is] about our landscaping process that if you live by the site you may have been seeing recently. Joel, I’m going to turn it over to you.

Joel: Thank you, Sarah. Yes, we recognize during all this earth moving and construction phase that we are well underway in that there was definitely an opportunity to make an effort to A, provide something that was more visually appealing for those who were passing by, as well as potentially help utilize some of these solutions to help with maybe some dust control in the process, along with all the other dust mitigation efforts that we’ve made thus far that we’ll speak to later. So we’ve begun planting along the — right now, our first phase along the [South Pine Street] side is a variety of shrubs and trees, mostly some cypress evergreens and some magnolias. What was pertinent for us as we were trying to address this project was you typically can’t plant large trees in the summertime. That was an initial challenge. But our partners at [landscaping company name unclear], they’ve been a tremendous help to us in trying to provide a quick and not only a quick but effective and again aesthetically beautiful or pretty, at least, solution. They informed us [unclear phrase about magnolias and the planting season]. So we found some 10- to 14-foot magnolias, and then we’ll be planting some Nuttall oaks as well, about 25 feet tall, all to really generally make the site look better, as well as help with some screening and dust collection, or not dust collection, but dust mitigation for the site.

Those phases continue along South Pine Street, moving east, and then we will then begin looking at other phases along Dogwood Road and Southport Road. As we get into the fall, fall and winter, that will give us an opportunity to get a wider range of trees as well to relocate or to plant, and this will also allow us to really assess the site with any leaves lost in those areas as well on the south side. So from a landscaping standpoint, this has been a fun initiative so far. In addition to that is some temporary, we’ll call it fencing. It’s some more acoustic barriers, temporary barriers, that will surround our generator yard, our [reciprocating] generator yard, and go around the front entrance area. This will be far more [recessed] into the property, closer to the gen yard. But what this will be, it will be a green color. It will serve not only the general screening to just a lot of heavy equipment there, but it’ll also have some noise absorption or deflection properties, which should be helpful as well. If not for anything, just for the construction noise that go on as well. And again, these are all items that we’re addressing in the construction phase as it is today, as it will be for the immediate time. So we’re excited about that. That implementation for that barrier looks to be mid-late September to begin the installation. It’s pretty significant.

We decided to actually purchase that whole system so that we could utilize that not only there, but any particular area as this construction continues across the property. [The temporary system] we’re addressing right now has also been very helpful in helping us design and assess noise mitigation from a permanent solution standpoint. We recognize this is a concern for the community. It is a concern for us as well as we include this in our design and engineering. And there may be more information to share about that later in this discussion. But this has been, as we lay these things out, as we understand where everything lies, this will be an excellent opportunity to test the effectiveness of this temporary fencing as it relates to the final solution. So those are current activities going on now. These immediate beautification and landscaping processes will be ongoing for the next few months. So yeah, that’s everything we have there.

Sarah Knox: Thank you, Joel. That’s a great update. I know a lot of y’all, especially the ones who live near the site, have been noticing some different things going up and down, and so we wanted to make sure you heard directly from us what sort of landscaping we’re using. I talked to a gentleman recently who asked if we were going to be using native plants and species, and so that’s why I asked Joel specifically to talk about some of that. Really important stuff to talk about. [The next] update that we wanted to give is about some of the remediation efforts that we’ve been doing on the site. And so for that update, I’m going to turn it over to Lane. Lane, why don’t you tell us about the remediation that’s happening at the site.

Lane: Absolutely. Thanks, Sarah. So just so everyone knows, the current site was strategically chosen. And part of [the reason] to choose this site was the concept of redeveloping a brownfield site instead of disturbing undeveloped land. So we took full responsibility of the remediation of the site as it stood once we purchased it, and we kind of wanted to share some of the great accomplishments that we did or have done over the past year. So the structural redevelopment and demolition of the legacy buildings was very methodical to ensure not only the safety of our employees, our local community surrounding neighbors, and also the environment. Before work began, we ensured we had certified vendors that were brought in to test these structures, mainly for asbestos-containing material and [lead-based paint], because anyone that lived around here knows that the Kohler site was up for quite a while, and they had some really old buildings, and unfortunately, well, back in when those were built, those were the types of products that they had, so they built with. So when we started testing through that, we found that they did have those products within them, so we wanted to make sure that our employees stayed safe. And we remediated that. To date, our company has properly disposed of [unclear] over 400 tons of asbestos-containing material and around 60,000 linear feet of lead-based paint. So that’s for our structures that we had on site.

One structure we [left up], but most of them we were able to demolish and take down, and we’re going to rebuild. But we still had to make sure that that material that had asbestos and lead in it was properly disposed of. For the land cleanup portion, we inherited a pre-existing landfill, gray water retention ponds, and then also around 18 acres of unexploded World War II-era [ordnance]. Also, that wasn’t just the – those are also called UXOs, so if you hear me say that, that’s what that is. But also, there was random munitions and related devices from that era as well. So we’ll start with the landfill. The landfill was professionally encapsulated in accordance with the South Carolina regulations. This included a close watch by the state of South Carolina’s Department of Environmental Services. And then once that was closed out, it still has continuous environmental monitoring to ensure that the remediation remains effective. The next item I mentioned was the gray water retention ponds and surrounding soil. These were excavated. The surrounding soils were excavated as well as the ponds themselves, and all of that soil was removed. So anything that contained hazardous materials or anything that wasn’t natural to the earth was disposed of properly and then restored with clean fill and vegetation. For the unexploded World War II [ordnance], or the UXOs, most of these, talking to the Department of Defense, we worked very closely with them. They’re classified as deemed as safe.

So we still made sure they were disposed of properly and removed in coordination closely with the Department of Defense and found that there had been around seven tons or 14,000 pounds thus far that have been safely removed. And we continue to make sure that before anyone [works] on anything that’s undisturbed that that’s being researched and safety is taken very seriously and [put first] on that. So that’s just a few of the positive changes we’ve made. And as you heard earlier about the [beautification program], we’ll continue to [improve upon]. Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Knox: Awesome. Well, thank you, [Lane]. I think that’s always one thing that I like to talk to people about when I’m in the community is some of the remediation that we’ve done. I think the UXO stuff is just really cool, and I’m glad that you got to talk about it because I think when people get to hear about it, it’s such an interesting story. The third update that we wanted to talk to you about tonight is some of the safety records that we have going on right now and something that, honestly, we’re really proud of. So, Brian, I’m going to turn it over to you to tell us a little bit about some of our safety records right now.

Brian: Okay, happily. I’d love to talk about this. So it is a really big deal. Everybody that rides by the site, you see the number of people we have on site. We’ve had upwards of 1,900 craft personnel on site at any given time. That’s a lot of work hours to be working. And one of the things we’re really proud of is we just celebrated over 2.3 million craft hours with only one minor recordable injury. And what that does for, it kind of puts our total recordable incident rate well below or significantly below industry average. Something we’d really love to celebrate. The key to that, though, is it’s not just oversight and management, it’s the people on the ground, right? We’ve had over 1,400 observations that are turned in, whether it’s management or craft workers themselves. All of those are kind of safety conversations that happen in the field, and we use those lessons learned, best practices to share with the entire team to continue this safety record and continue building on the 2.3 million hours we’ve already achieved. One of the other things is our general contractor on the site is partnering with South Carolina OSHA to really even step our game up even better, right? There’s always room for improvement when it’s in safety. We don’t rest on our laurels. We don’t just take it for granted that we’ve been safe. We’re always looking for ways to improve. So OSHA has recognized that worker participation and hazard identification and some of the things that we’re doing there to promote safety on site and continue evolving this record.

Sarah Knox: Very good. And, Brian, just for those of us who might not know, when you say craft person and craft hours, what exactly does that mean?

Brian: Great question. Sorry about that. Craft hours, what I’m specifically talking about is not the management teams that are there. Craft personnel, so your electricians, your plumbers, mechanics, your heavy equipment operators, the men and women that are out there every day safely performing all this work.

Sarah Knox: That’s awesome. And we have about 1,400 of those on site right now?

Brian: Correct.

Sarah Knox: Great. Yeah, thank you. That’s a really great update and exciting. I’m proud of you all on the team. That’s a good number to be [at]. The next update that we’re going to give is actually mine, and I’m excited to tell you about what we’re going to be doing. So I’m going to give you all an update on some of our charitable giving strategies that we have. When we chose Spartanburg, I think it’s important for us to say that when we chose this, we knew that we wanted to be like long-term residents of this county and that we wanted to give back to the community. So knowing that, I’m excited to update you all that we are launching our charitable giving arm. We are going to launch that next week on September 1st. We’re launching it with a new website, which is going to be solely dedicated to charitable giving. We are going to be making that website URL live or public next week on both our existing SouthPineStreet.com website and through our social media channels. We’ll also be emailing out that new URL to folks who are signed up to receive updates from us. Our current priority bucket for the charitable giving that we’re excited to be kicking off are STEM education, workforce development, resource stewardship, and public safety. And these were categories that we chose based on talking to members of the community, to our employees in Spartanburg, and to our leadership team as to what we thought was really important for us to give back to.

And so what we are doing when we launch this website on September 1st is we are inviting any and all Spartanburg, excuse me, Spartanburg-based or serving [501(c)(3)s] to go onto the site and apply for funding starting on September 1st. Applications are going to be accepted on a rolling basis, and they are going to be reviewed when they are submitted by a team of our South Carolina employees. So, again, you can go onto that site if you [work for], or [are] the CEO or president of a nonprofit that serves or is in Spartanburg, and we will review those. A team of our South Carolina employees will review those. We will get, if you do apply, applicants should expect to receive progress reports on the status of their request on a regular basis. We are going to be announcing new quarterly funding. As I said, we’ll take these applications on a rolling basis, but we will announce funding rounds every quarter starting in October of this year. We will announce a round of quarterly funding. And each quarter, we are committing to giving between $250,000 and $500,000, depending on what applications we receive and how they fit into our overall giving strategy of STEM education, workforce development, resource stewardship, and public safety.

What I’m excited to say is that to kick off and celebrate the launch of our charitable giving arm, we’re going to be holding a giving week next week, the first week of September, where we are going to be giving $1 million in charitable contributions to several Spartanburg-based organizations. And I’m really excited about this. I think it’s a really great way for us to launch our charitable giving strategy here in this county by showing our commitment to the county and to the people of this county. And so I’m really excited about next week. The organizations that we chose for this week were a direct result of listening to people like yourself who are on this call tonight and other members of the community and our Spartanburg-based employees to hear, again, what organizations matter to y’all and to our employees and picking those based off of how they fit into our categories of funding. So I’m hoping that you’ll join me in celebrating the launch of this charitable giving arm next week. You will receive, if you are signed up for our alerts, again, as I mentioned, you’ll receive an email with a link to that new website. And then we’ll be releasing a press release at the beginning of next week to announce all of our $1 million charitable giving across several Spartanburg-based organizations. So I’m really excited about it.

I hope that it’s something that makes you excited, and hopefully we have a good partnership moving forward with a lot of these groups that will be applying for funding. So that’s the update on charitable giving and what we anticipate. The next and final update that we’ll give before we move over to our second half of the night, which is where we’ll be taking questions, is about a new program that we are going to be launching shortly. And joining me in talking about that is going to be Joel. And so, Joel, why don’t you kick off talking about this, and then maybe me and you can just [tag-team] how we want to talk about this. Does that work?

Joel: Sure. Absolutely. Great. Sarah, thanks. And I’m telling you, I am really excited about this giving program and just the general working for NorthMark, being here, living here in Spartanburg, both as a community member as well as, again, someone who is working for NorthMark. This is a lovely [unclear] of two things coming together. And I’m really excited about this as a whole. There’s a lot of good, I know there’s a lot of great organizations here in this county, in this town, that really should [unclear]. Jump on this, and I think we’d love to work with. Yeah, this new initiative, Good Neighbor Program, or oftentimes I call it a Good Neighbor Initiative, is something that we recognize, again, kind of piggybacking off what I mentioned earlier from an update regarding our landscaping and beautification project, in that we recognize there is, again, a lot of dirt being moved around. There’s demolition. There is, again, just a lot of construction going on. And, well, it makes a mess, frankly. We know that. We’ve done quite a bit to do our best to keep that down. We have regular routes, frequent routes of water trucks. We also have [a truck wash at] the Pine Street entrance [to] clean those trucks. We have general, in addition to standard erosion control, we have hay matting and [seeding] over soil areas, over soil disturbance areas, street sweepers, and then frankly, not only for safety purposes, which is a primary driver, but we also have strictly adhered to speed limits. Signs are posted everywhere. In fact, a couple of our areas, we have signage that actually tells you the speed you’re going actively, such that we’re not kicking up any dust or minimizing as much dust as getting kicked up as possible.

Sarah Knox: I’m sorry. No, no, no. I was just going to say, I’m glad you made those points about the things that we are doing, because I think we are doing as much as we can, a lot on site to mitigate some of this. So I’m glad you brought that up.

Joel: Thank you. But despite all that, there still is some dust. And we recognize that. And so this program, this Good Neighbor Initiative or Good Neighbor Program, was something that a team here started building together and trying to see, well, really, like, how can we, again, be a good neighbor? Again, that is kind of the point of this, not just short-term but long-term, how we [at] NorthMark see ourselves in this community. So this is a program we’re looking to launch this fall. There are a lot of things to put in place to make sure that this all lines up. But in general, what this will look like is we’ve looked at basically the map, and we recognize, we decided to say, all right, we’d like to do something for all households that are within a one-mile radius of our site. And by the way, not even a mile radius from the center of our site, a mile from every edge of our site. So we wanted to make sure this was something that would not be, that frankly would include everyone that could be potentially even impacted by our construction and the dust, pardon our dust, if you will. So all households within a mile radius will receive a year’s worth [of a] car wash subscription or a membership for up to two cars per address, two cars that would be parked at that site, just in case some dust is knocked up there. Frankly, I checked my own house, and I was just outside of this, so I was bummed out. So I don’t get to capitalize on this, but that’s okay. I’m happy with all those that do.

So yes, we’ll have a one-year car wash subscription or membership. And that will be with two vendors in the area, and there’ll be more to share there with those partners. And in addition to that, we will also provide, we want to provide a year’s worth of HVAC filters, like, you know, home air filters, dust filters, you know. And that will be up to four air returns per home. Typically, most homes have about two, sometimes three, but we wanted to really cover our bases here. So four there. And talking with our partners on this, I admit I’m pretty slack myself, but I only change my air filters every two or three months. We want to provide you an opportunity to change your air filters once a month. So if you feel like making this stretch out over time, by all means, that’s up to you. We have no problems with that. But this is something we felt would be a good opportunity. And so that’s everybody within a mile of our property. In addition to all that, anyone within three-quarters of a mile, we will provide a service for your home, the exterior home, to have a pressure washing, or you could say pressure washing is what it is, but external washing the house. If you live within three-quarters of a mile, we’ll pay for one of those washings in the next year. If you’re within half a mile of the property, we’ll pay for two washings, we’ll say once every six months, approximately.

So, again, everything in an effort that if anybody is or potentially being affected by the dust of the current project on construction, that we want to take care of that. We want to address that. This is important to us. So, I don’t know. There’s more to talk about, Sarah. Is there anything you want to add there?

Sarah Knox: Yeah. There’s a few things that I think are just that I’m sure people are thinking right now as they’re hearing this, especially if you’re living within that radius. So just a few things that I want to make sure that we note. One is that participation in this program is going to be completely voluntary. Participation is opt-in, so I’m not going to go wash your cars or your house without you signing up. Don’t worry. So you’re going to have the opportunity, if you live within this radius, to opt-in for this. And when you opt in, you can choose some or all of these services. So again, you could tell us you don’t want the pressure washes, but you want the car wash. That’s perfectly fine. A couple other things that I want to note is that the services that we’re talking about providing here are going to be contracted with a third-party provider. So we are not the provider of these services. We are simply going to pay a third-party provider to give eligible residents who sign up for these services the services. So that’s important to note. It’s not going to be any of us pressure washing your home. We’re going to be utilizing a local company here to do that, and we’ll be paying them, but they’ll be the one providing the service. As bad as Brian would love to do a charity car wash drive-through — [brief overlapping remark unclear] — we’re not doing that. We’re not doing that. We’re going to use some local vendors.

And so, again, when we knew we wanted to announce this, we had a couple of things that we knew people would ask. Just so quickly, we’ll run through here, and then we’ll get on to the second half of our call tonight. How will you know when the program is launching? We are going to make sure that everybody within this radius has a hard copy of our program introduction brochure. So be on the lookout for that. We’ll talk about timeline here in a minute, but that is we’re going to work to get everybody a hard copy. Additionally, it’s going to be announced on our website. So if you check out our website, when we launch, there will be updates there. And then finally, our social media channels are going to be updated with that info. How will you know if you’re eligible? As Joel already said, all residents living within a one-mile radius are going to be eligible. When you do opt in on our form on our website, you’re going to have to provide us with your address, and if there are any issues with eligibility at that point, we will flag them at that time. How will you be able to opt in for the program? There’s going to be a specific launch page on our website for eligible residents, and so that’s where you’ll opt in. And a couple other things that, again, we thought people might have questions about. Can renters opt in? Yes, renters are able to opt in, but you will only be able to opt in for the car wash service.

The other services that we’re willing to provide, the owner of that property will need to opt in for them themselves. And how long will the program last? And just running through some questions we thought y’all might have. Right now, we’re slated for it to last a year from the time that it launches, but that could extend depending on what construction timelines look like. And then the final question that I think you all might have right now that we want to try to answer is when will the program launch? Probably the biggest one, right, is when will it launch? So we are working towards a finalized launch date now, and we expect it to be within the next month and a half. And so we are working towards that, and we will have an exact date for you shortly here. And again, we’ll be using our social media and website to update you with that final deadline. And the website, just in case you don’t know, is www.southpinestreet.com. That’s southpinestreet.com. That’s our website.

Sarah Knox: We’re about halfway through the call now, so we’re going to switch it over to our questions. And we’re going to start now with a couple of questions that we had pre-submitted through our text channel. Several of you texted in questions last night, and we want to make sure we get to as many of those as we can, as well as some of the live callers that we have tonight. So we’ll kick it off. And the first question that we wanted to read that was pre-submitted last night was, what makes you different or the same as any other data center in South Carolina? And so I’m going to take that question. I think there are three main things that make our project different from other facilities or other data centers in South Carolina. One, and I think this is something that is super important, is that we are the owner, operator, and end user of all of our center, of all our data halls. We are not speculatively building this center in hopes of attracting a third-party client or customer. The collection of companies that we have does cutting-edge math, science, physics, and advanced manufacturing research, and that type of research requires compute space. So I think it’s one of the things that I tell people a lot is that we are a company that needs a data center, not a data center company, if that makes sense, right? And so I think that’s something that’s really important and that maybe most people may or may not know.

So some of this is obviously… Anyway, I think that’s one thing that makes us very different is that we are the end user of our data center. And that’s actually why we call it a high-performance compute center and not always a data center. We call it high performance compute because that is the output and what the center is actually doing is doing high performance compute. So the second thing that makes us sort of unique from other data centers in South Carolina is that we are bringing our own power. So we’re one of the first data centers in South Carolina to commit to generating our own power for our center. 97% of the energy we need is going to be generated by us. We did this to place minimal demand on the grid and to avoid impacting ratepayers. And hypothetically, as I think many of you on this call will know, the maximum amount of power we can generate on site is 457 megawatts or will be if approved and fully built out. At the end, when all the construction is over, that’s what the site could and would be. And that capacity accommodates necessary redundancy. And then the last point I’ll make that makes us a little bit different is that as the end users of this high-performance compute center, as I said that we are, we do not require high reliability, something that most data centers require. We do not require public utilities to maintain uptime.

We have the ability to power down and restart our workloads if needed, which is important, especially during times when there’s bad weather and all kind of other stuff. That’s an important thing to note. So that hopefully answers that question. Our second, we’ll answer, do a couple more pre-submitted questions before we take some live callers. Our second question that was texted in last night is, how many data centers has NorthMark ever built? Brian, I’m going to [turn] that over to you.

Brian: Oh, yeah, of course. So this will be the first [high-performance compute center] NorthMark has built from the ground up. We’ve operated in many data centers and co-location data centers. We’ve leased space from other owners to run our compute, and we’ve been doing that for more than a decade now. So we’ve got a lot of experience with the operations and use of them, but this is the first one, high-performance computer center, we’ve built for ourselves. Now, while it is the first one the company has built, Our leadership team really prioritized reaching out into the data center community, construction communities, to bring in experience from across all levels of advanced computing, operations, engineering, and infrastructure development in order to make this project a success, right, to try to get as many voices in with different experiences, lessons learned, best practices to really make this a success.

Sarah Knox: Thank you, Brian. We took a couple of pre-submitted. I want to go to some live questions. It looks like the first question I have up here is from someone named Spencer, and it looks like, Spencer, you have a question about transparency. Spencer, you should be live now. Can you hear us?

Spencer: I can. Transparency. I’ve heard you repeatedly state NorthMark as being transparent, but I disagree. When this project started, you first said it was going to be 48-[megawatt] building. And on today’s call, you’re saying it’s going to be a 450-[megawatt] data center. Now, I’m expecting you’ll say it’s a [gigawatt] before the end of the year. How are we really supposed to trust anything you say with regards to your center?

Sarah Knox: Spencer, thanks so much for asking that question. It’s one, frankly, that we get asked a lot, and I’m glad we were able to hear from you. What I would say is, again, first, thank you for that question. But I want to confirm that, you know, the county has publicly confirmed that they were aware of the broader plans and the broad plans for this project from the beginning, and we have worked with state and local regulators throughout this entire permitting process. You know, I guess on our very first press release, we mentioned that we would be self-generating power. But I want to just clarify that you were right, Spencer, that we did not, in that press release, say exactly how many megawatts we would be generating. And I think it’s safe to say at this point that we realize now that we could have done a better job in acknowledging and communicating — or communicating — with the residents around the site in Spartanburg. And I will say that what I can tell you is I understand that trust has to be built, and trust is easily lost. But I want to say that moving forward, I am committed, the company is committed, we around this room are committed to listening more, responding to concerns, and being proactive about building that trust in this community. It’s really important to us. And I know you mentioned that you anticipate that we’re going to announce later that the site is even bigger. I can confirm that the current project plan is 458 megawatts and that there are no plans to expand beyond that, and that that plan was — was, again, just to reiterate — made, uh, available to county and state [unclear] regulators and decision makers from, from the very first, uh, conversations we had. So, um, thank you, and I hope that answered your question, and I’m sure a lot of other people are asking the same thing, uh.

Sarah Knox: The next question I have here is, uh, from — looks like from Monty — about the company needing information. I’m going to take you live, Monty.

Monty: Yeah, hello? Yeah, this is Monty. I live here in this neighborhood that you all are talking about where you’re doing this program. I’m going to have to give you all my… why would I give you all that personal information just to get a free car wash?

Sarah Knox: Thank you, Monty, for asking that. Joel, do you want to take that?

Joel: Yeah, happy to speak to that. And first off, Monty, I hope you’re having a great evening. I’m at least joining the cooler weather at least right now since the past couple weeks. Honestly, the only information that would be needed is that the suppliers or the vendors or partners, they would need it. So, for example, with the car wash, the only information they would need, if you’ve ever had a car wash subscription before, I’ve had it off and on, is typically license tag, make and model, and maybe color of the car. We’re confirming those details with the vendor right now. But it’s that typical membership information that we would pass along to them so that they could set your account up. Any of your financial information would not be something you would not submit, nor would we want. And then the other information really is like contact info. Typically a phone number, there would be addresses because you’d get the little flyer, but a phone number and a name so when the home wash service needs to schedule an appointment, they have someone to be able to get a hold of. So apart from those basic things, that would be what the vendors would require. And that would be the only information. I hope that helps.

Sarah Knox: The next question we have is from Larry. Larry, it looks like you have a question about the difference in data center and high compute center. Larry, are you able to hear us?

Larry: I am. I am. I hope this is not a dumb question, but you all keep saying this is a high compute center, and it just looks a lot like a data center to me. And I go, what’s the difference between those two, and what do you guys actually do in there?

Sarah Knox: Yeah, thank you, Larry. That’s a great question, and I’m glad you asked it. And, Brian, do you want to take that one?

Brian: I’d be happy to take this one. And, Larry, I get it. It does get sometimes confusing, right? So from the outside, they look the same. Hey, they’ve got computers that do the same thing. But in the industry, when we talk about a data center, we’re talking about your hyperscalers like [Meta] or [Google]. They’re building these large data centers in the gigawatt size. Or even some of your speculative data centers that are looking to build a space and then lease that space out for somebody that wants to use this. You have multiple tenants, but it’s all about how many computers they can throw in the room and how much compute they can put on for other people. [Whereas] a high-performance computing center, the reason we talk about that that way, is that it’s specifically only used for us, right? We use high-performance compute to run jobs, to run studies, or whatever it is we need to run to do research for our broad companies, but it’s only for our internal use. It’s not sharing with anybody. It’s not using any data. It’s not scraping any data off the Internet about anybody in the area. That’s where they’re different between what most people refer to as a data center. They think social media, hyperscale, [or leased] space. High-performance compute is a purpose-built or internal use only computer center.

Sarah Knox: Yeah, thank you, Brian. I think that answers that question well. We’re going to take one more live caller and then get back to some of these pre-submitted questions, so I do want to make sure that we’re addressing both the people who were called in and also the people who took time to submit questions last night. The last one I’ll take for this round before we take some pre-submitted, and we’ll go back to some live callers after this, but the last one I’ll do from this round is Joe. Joe, it looks like you have a question about the chemicals that we’re using to treat the water. Joe, you should be live now. Joe, can you hear us?

Joe: Can you hear me?

Sarah Knox: Yeah, I can hear you now, it sounds like.

Joe: Hello?

Sarah Knox / Team: Yep, we can hear you.

Joe: Okay, hey, thanks. Hey, thanks for taking my question tonight. You know, on the last call, you guys said that you were treating wastewater, your wastewater with chemicals. But you didn’t really talk about what chemicals you’re using to do that. And how do we know, how do the residents of Spartanburg know if there’s any kind of issue with that water? How are you testing it? Those kinds of things.

Sarah Knox: Yeah, thanks, Joe. That’s a great question. And it sounds like you listened to our last [tele town hall] or read the transcript, which I appreciate. [Lane], do you want to take that question?

Lane: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Joe, for the question. And actually, I believe I answered that question on the last call. We were kind of running out of time, and I wasn’t able to get too much into the details. So I’m excited to go more into the details with you guys tonight. So as I said earlier, I’m the environmental subject matter expert on site, and I work physically on site, so I need to know all of these things inside and outside to make sure that we’re in compliance with not only the city’s regulations, the state’s regulations, and the federal regulations, right? So I just want to clarify the way that question was answered and possibly something that was said on the previous call. We do not, do not treat our wastewater, okay? The city, the [Spartanburg Sanitary Sewer District], they treat wastewater. We do not have a treatment facility. What we do is we have chemicals that we use in our cooling towers, and they treat the cooling towers and the water inside them per industry standards. So for the cooling towers themselves, I’ll get into the chemicals we use, because this is where it comes into the wastewater with our chemicals. Whenever these questions are being asked, the cooling towers is where this stands, and nowhere else on site. So we use the minimal amounts to meet the intended outcome of each of these chemicals. So we have two different sets that we use chemicals for. The first one is for the open towers themselves, the ones that are open to the environment.

We use Formula 2007LT. This is what we call the workhorse chemical. Because this chemical helps with scale buildup, and it’s one of the biggest [unclear: efficiency…]. So scale buildup is one of the biggest efficiency killers in our cooling towers. So if we have that scale buildup, they work harder and they use more water. So we don’t want that. So we have to use this chemical to make sure that that scaling and corrosion is prevented. So that chemical works hardcore to make sure we’re in compliance there. The next chemical is Formula 305, and it’s a fast-acting microbial eliminator to eliminate health hazards such as Legionella, because we don’t want anything [dispersing] to the atmosphere that’s going to make anyone sick. So this is a requirement per [regulatory standards]. [It] means that we have to use this formula to make sure that we eliminate those. Formula 315 is a persistent [biofilm-focused] eliminator that works slower but lasts longer. This is alternated with the previous one I mentioned, the formula 305, to prevent that microbial buildup. So they’re kind of used together in a sense. One is quick and one is long-term. [Formula] 248L is for periodic maintenance, cleaning, to dissolve any buildup on the towers. So the biocides and the corrosion inhibitors that I spoke about can do their jobs. So these aren’t something that’s just injected daily, all the time. These are things that are needed to keep our cooling towers running efficiently and effectively.

The second part of this is our [hydronic systems]. So these aren’t exposed to the atmosphere. Everything inside these stay within these systems. They don’t get drained to sewer. They stay within the systems and they continue to circulate. These systems use formula 641 to prevent corrosion and some propylene glycol to ensure that they’re protected from freezing weather because they’re usually outside and also they have proper heat transfer in our piping. [Brief unclear transition.] Just so you know where this comes from, I’ve been an environmental professional for almost 20 years, and I’ve worked in multiple industries. I’ve worked in government, contracting, private, public sectors, and I’ve worked with many companies that have cooling towers for multiple purposes, whether it’s I’ve worked at power plants that’s had them, I’ve worked at semiconductor plants that’s had them, and every one of these sites have used these chemicals. This is no different than any other industry-standard cooling tower. [It is very typical] for that. And that’s something that we’ve worked with the [Spartanburg Sanitary Sewer District] on very closely. And they agree. It’s very, you know, they’ve looked at it. They had no concerns. We worked through submitting our surveys with them and, you know, working through how this is going to work. And because they treat that, they are working to issue what is going to be a permit.

And that would require us to do monthly sampling to make sure we meet their standards before it gets discharged to them so it doesn’t affect their system. So then, so that answers the chemical portion. So then, Joe, your other question was, how is it tested? Okay, so I just answered that about monthly. We do test that. And then the third part of the question was, how will residents know if there’s an issue? [Unclear opening phrase about sewer lines and discharge avenues.] So once it’s online and we’re moving with the district, everything’s closed and monitored. There should be no issue and nothing happening with wastewater that would impact residents to warrant a notification. Now, us as a site, let’s say we have a discharge of some sort or maybe the pH is a little high, we would have to notify the district per law and then let them know what’s going on so they can assess on their side. And then at that point, it’s on the district. And if they deem something unsafe, then they would probably go the route of needing to notify the public. But that’s where we play the part in wastewater and chemicals. But I was really excited that, I’m so excited you asked that question because I was like, please ask wastewater because I really wanted to talk about it a little bit more because I kind of, I lost that opportunity on the last — on the last [tele town hall], so thank you so much.

Sarah Knox: Thank you. We have just a few more minutes left, so we’re going to try to run through some of these other pre-submitted questions. I have a pre-submitted question here that is pulling it up now. Sorry. It’s about, let me, your designs that have been made public show you using simple cycle energy generation. Why would you use this and not [combined cycle]? Thank you to whoever submitted that last night on text. Brian, do you want to answer that?

Brian: Yeah, of course. This is a really good question. I’ve seen this a lot. A lot of folks talk about this, combined cycle. They’re more efficient when you’re talking about gas turbine generation. [Let me] kind of explain this a little bit. Traditional combined cycle is not just a plug-and-play solution, unfortunately. It’s a lot of engineering that has to go into it. And there’s a lot of things that we’re up against on the project, if you just talk about a traditional combined cycle, right? One is it takes up more space. So you take up more space, you have a larger footprint, and for us, that puts our power generation closer to our site boundaries, right? It reduces that buffer between our equipment and those of us off-site. And also, a traditional combined cycle would recover the heat through a heat recovery steam generator. Generate steam, go to a steam turbine. It requires a lot more water use. It also requires on-site water treatment plant for us for the grade A water to feed the boilers, right? So now you’re talking about more water use and even more land size. So unfortunately, it’s just not plug-and-play. It’s not just something we can just swap on the fly. Also, all the additional cooling infrastructure that has to be installed. Now, with that being said, that’s for just a generic… combined cycle. There are other things we can do with heat recovery. It actually benefits us as well as the environment. It makes us more efficient. We have to burn less fuel.

There are things that we are looking into and doing some of the engineering calculations on, whether it’s waste heat recovery paired with absorption chillers, right, so we can take that waste heat using some newer technology. Actually, it’s really old technology. I know older U.S. submarines [unclear verb] these lithium bromide plants on them for absorption chillers. They can use that heat for those absorption chillers, and we can use that instead of the other normal chillers to cool our data halls. So there’s opportunities we are looking at, but again, it’s not just a plug and play. There’s a lot of give and take on these things. Some create more noise, some need more water, and we’re trying to stay within the bounds of all the things that we’re permitted for and the laws we have to meet to find what fits our design the best.

Sarah Knox: Yeah. Thank you, Brian, and thank you to whoever submitted that question last night. I’m going to get through as many of these as I can. The next one we’ll go to is a pre-submitted question about air monitoring stations. So it reads, according to the information we heard at the last public safety committee from DES, Spartanburg County has only two air monitoring stations. If this is accurate, how will we know what pollution you specifically are adding to the air? Stephanie, do you want to take that question?

Stephanie: Yeah, absolutely. So one way is that the facility will include CEMS for the turbine stacks to monitor NOx emissions. So CEMS — that’s C-E-M-S — those are continuous emissions monitoring systems for the determination of a gas emission rate using pollutant analyzer measurements. So there will actually be a probe located in the exhaust stacks themselves that extracts a sample of the exhaust gas and sends it to the analyzer equipment on site. The analyzer will make measurements and provide, uh, you know, real-time feedback on stack concentrations. Emission rates will be available on a dashboard in the facility’s control room. Alarms will sound when rates are close to permitted values, so operators can, you know, take real-time action and adjust either combustion parameters or control-technology parameters to make sure that emissions stay below permitted rates. Another way is that the facility is required to conduct stack testing right there on site to demonstrate compliance with permitted emission rates. The stack testing will be completed by a third-party stack-test contractor, with reports submitted to the South Carolina Department of Environmental Services as well as the U.S. EPA. And all of these reports and emissions data will be publicly available. So this data is going to tell you exactly what [the] facility is emitting from the stacks themselves, versus the monitoring stations, which are going to pick up emissions from, you know, all emission sources in the area. So other manufacturing facilities, mobile sources, you know, anything that’s emitting, um, you know, pollutants around the area, not just the NorthMark site. So these ways of monitoring emissions and reports will — will let everyone know exactly what the facility is emitting.

Sarah Knox: Thank you, Stephanie. We’re going to try to take two more live questions before our call ends at 7. So I apologize for those of you who have pre-submitted questions. We were trying to get as many live callers in as possible, too. So let me take – it looks like I have somebody named Sydney here who’s asking about nonprofit funding. Sydney, you should be live now. Can you hear me?

Sydney: Hello.

Sarah Knox: Hello. We can hear you.

Sydney: Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah, thank you. I’m definitely happy to see that y’all have started kind of planning on contributing to the nonprofits that are around [Spartanburg]. I think with the whole Good Neighbor thing, it makes sense. It’s something that needs to be done. So my question really is there’s several nonprofits that I volunteer with, and I just want them to be able to apply for the funding. But I’m not sure if they fit into funding categories that you might have mentioned. So, like, should they still apply or how would that work?

Sarah Knox: I mean, that’s such a great question. So nice. I’m glad you asked that. And let me just say that what I would encourage all nonprofits who serve Spartanburg or in Spartanburg to do is to check out our website. And to apply if they think it makes sense for them. If I haven’t said it, I want to say it now. We’re consistently looking for ways to invest in Spartanburg County. So, again, I would just encourage any nonprofit who either serves or is in Spartanburg County to check out our website when it launches on September 1st and see if applying for funding makes sense for them. I wouldn’t discourage anybody from applying at this time. So hopefully that answers your question.

Sarah Knox: We’re going to take one more live question before we’re at the end. And Caroline, I have you up next as our next question. Caroline, it looks like you had a question about air permitting. Caroline, can you all hear me?

Caroline: Yes. Okay. Can you just explain, I mean, what’s going to happen if or, I mean, when y’all pollute the air above what your permit allows?

Sarah Knox: Caroline, thanks for that question. Stephanie, can you take that one and then we’ll wrap up the night?

Stephanie: Yeah, definitely. So it sort of depends on the severity and the actual violation, but the agency would issue a notice of deviation or a violation. And then they can issue civil penalties for that violation. So that can range from monetary, you know, penalties — so, you know, fines to the facility — and if it continues or is bad enough, it can be, you know, they can, they can force the facility to discontinue the violation, the violating activity. But if you want some more details on enforcement, there’s a lot of information available on the South Carolina [DES] website. If you just go to their website and type ‘enforcement’ in the search bar, you can find a fact sheet, and it goes through sort of how enforcement works. And there are even — there’s even monthly reports where you can read about enforcement actions throughout the state. So it’s, like, organized by year and month, and even by program areas. So you can look at, you know, what they do about enforcement by, you know, water programs or air programs or, you know, whatever you’re interested in. So definitely, if that’s of interest, you can go to their website and see how they handle those sorts of things.

Sarah Knox: [Thank you], Stephanie. Well, we’re just over the hour, and I want to be respectful of y’all’s time. And so as we’re closing… I want to thank you again for joining us. I know there’s a lot of other things you could have done tonight instead of listening to us sit around a table and answer questions and give updates. So thank you. I know that we did not get to every single question that was asked tonight, and I am sorry for that. If you would like to have your question answered, you can send it through [SouthPineStreet.com], and we will do our best to get to you as soon as we can with answers to your questions. We’re going to be back, as I mentioned, in September and October with more updates, and I hope you’ll join us then. Thank you for your time, and thank you for holding us accountable. We appreciate this opportunity to talk to you. Have a good night. Thank you, guys. Take care, everyone.

—Transcript ends—

About this version

This is a faithful, near-verbatim record of the Aug. 25 Community Tele-Town Hall. Spoken wording is preserved, including filler, repetition, false starts, restarts and short back-and-forth exchanges. Nothing substantive has been removed. Only punctuation, paragraph breaks and speaker labels have been added for readability. The underlying source is an automated transcript, so wording is only as accurate as that machine transcription.

Corrections applied throughout: Company-name variants (“Northmark Computing and Cloud,” “Northmark Computing Cloud,” “Norpark” and similar) → NorthMark Compute & Cloud (NMC²) or NorthMark; “Wayne”/“Elaine” → Lane; “Teletown/Pella Town Hall” and “telecom haul” → tele town hall; “South Pine trees” → South Pine Street; “Spartan Birds” → Spartanburg; “megalot”/“gigalot” → megawatt/gigawatt; “lead-baked paint” → lead-based paint; “World War II-era ordinances” → World War II-era ordnance; “recipient generator yard” → reciprocating generator yard; “defunification program” → beautification program; “hydrology” → hydronic systems; “ZES” → DES; and the final website reference → SouthPineStreet.com.

Square brackets [ ] mark an editorial correction, clarification or uncertain passage. The landscaping vendor’s name and several brief phrases were indistinct in the automated transcript and are identified inline rather than guessed. Product names and spoken figures are left as stated in the source transcript, including differing spoken references to 457 and 458 megawatts.