Property developer Drox Group LLC is looking to build a 129-acre data center near Greensboro, North Carolina.

Drox submitted a request to rezone a land parcel located in the city of Rural Hall at 8084 Glade St from residential to services in order to allow for the construction of four two-story data center buildings totalling 1.3 million sq ft (120,000 sqm) of space.

The Planning Board of Forsyth County is set to review the proposal on April 9, with final approval to be left up to the Board of County Commissioners at a later date.

Opposition to the proposed data center has been mounting, and a petition against its construction has gathered more than 2,100 signatures at the time of writing.

Noise and light pollution, the loss of agricultural land, the impact on property values, and potentially increased utility costs were cited as reasons for opposition.

Comments on a post by the Town of Rural Hall about a public hearing regarding the data center on April 1 are also largely negative.

The Drox Group is a Charlotte-based property developer. It is unclear whether the company has previous experience with building data centers.

Rural Hall is a city located within Forsyth County, itself northwest of Greensboro. Most of North Carolina’s data centers are clustered around the cities of Charlotte and Raleigh.