‘Cutting-edge’ supercomputing facility, a $2.8B investment, planned for Spartanburg County

A national investment firm has pledged to open a $2.8 billion computing center in South Carolina’s Upstate.

NorthMark Strategies inked a deal with Spartanburg County to bring its supercomputing operations to a former Kohler manufacturing plant and warehouse.

“Of the more than 100 locations across the country we considered, Spartanburg stood out for its strong community, skilled workforce, dynamic economy and strategic advantages,” NorthMark Strategies President Jen Byrne said in a statement. “Our investment in this high-performance computing center solidifies our commitment to building for future growth and being prepared to meet the growing demand for (high performance computing) capabilities.”

The company plans to transform the facility into “one of the most advanced (high performance computing) facilities in the world, leveraging cutting-edge technology to support complex computational tasks in machine learning, data analytics, and complex systems modeling.”

A $2.8B computing center proposed in the Upstate would generate its own electricity

The project, previously referred to publicly as “Project Moc-1” while the deal was negotiated, comes as South Carolina grapples with how to meet the energy needs of a growing population, manufacturing base and an influx of power heavy data centers.

These data centers, housing rows of servers, are focused on the storage of vast amount of data. High performance computing, on the other hand, is about analyzing large amounts of data, which would cause a typical computer to freeze up, at high speeds.

It can do this multiple ways, either with the use of a custom-built supercomputer or a cluster of individual computers all working together, to give the user more computing power than a standard, single computer. North Carolina State University, for example, offers one such cluster.

NorthMark’s clients turn to the company with their complex engineering problems. NorthMark’s computing centers power the company’s various simulation and artificial intelligence tools that its clients can use to design and troubleshoot whatever they need.

“We don’t just fund ideas — we help test, refine, and improve them,” according to NorthMark’s website.

“With NorthMark Strategies establishing operations in Spartanburg County, South Carolina continues to add to its already impressive technology industry. We celebrate this remarkable investment in the Upstate and all it will mean for our state and our people,” Secretary of Commerce Harry Lightsey said in a statement.

NorthMark’s center will be different from massive centers under construction by Google and Facebook parent company Meta in a second way.

Those centers each require hundreds of megawatts to operate.

But NorthMark will connect to a nearby natural gas pipeline and use the fuel to make its own power, County Councilman David Britt previously told the SC Daily Gazette. The center is not expected to use more energy than the site’s former tenant, Kohler, which closed in 2024 after 66 years.

While the reported investment figure is immense — the second largest single investment in state history — the company will employ just 27 full-time workers. NorthMark has not disclosed what these jobs will be or the potential salary for these positions.

$15M effort to train SC students on supercomputers starts at USC

To lure in the company, Spartanburg County offered a reduced property tax rate of 4% for 40 years.

By state law, manufacturers without such an arrangement pay a 6% rate. (Industrial property owners previously paid a 10.5% rate, but state laws passed in 2017 and 2022 effectively lowered it to 6%.)

The county also is offering special credits allowing the company to further buy down its tax bill to a maximum of $2 million annually for each year of the 40-year deal. The value of the credits cannot surpass the company’s total investment.

NorthMark is not seeking any tax incentives or grants from the state, according to a company spokeswoman.

The company is renovating the facility in three phases, starting with a 350,000-square-foot former warehouse on site and ending with the former 500,000-square-foot manufacturing plant.

Editor’s note: This article has been changed to correctly reflect tax credits offered by Spartanburg County to NorthMark Strategies.