The National Association of REALTORS® just released a report asking a question we’ve started getting from clients, too: is there a “data-center effect” on real estate? It’s a fair question. Data centers have gone from an invisible piece of internet infrastructure to a genuine local news topic in markets across the country, and Horry County data centers are now part of that conversation, even if most residents have never seen one. We dug into both NAR’s national findings and what’s actually happening here in Myrtle Beach to separate the real story from the national headlines.
What Horry County Data Centers Actually Look Like Right Now
Before getting into the national data, it’s worth being specific about what we’re actually talking about locally, because it’s easy to picture the wrong thing. When people hear “data center,” they often imagine the sprawling hyperscale campuses you see in places like Loudoun County, Virginia, which alone has 213 separate facilities. That is not what’s happening in Horry County.
What we have is a single, highly specialized facility operated by DC BLOX, located on more than 21 acres inside the Myrtle Beach International Technology & Aerospace Park. It opened in 2023 as a roughly 40,800-square-foot cable landing station, built on an initial investment of about $31.5 million. A cable landing station is a specific kind of data center: rather than hosting cloud servers for a tech company, it’s the physical point where subsea fiber-optic cables come ashore and connect into the regional network, regenerating the signal and linking it to local and national carriers.
That facility just got considerably more important. In late 2025, DC BLOX announced an expansion, adding about 20 more acres next to the original building and bringing an additional 20 megawatts of power to the site. Combined, the expanded campus is designed to support up to 10 subsea cables, up from its original capacity, with systems including Firmina, Anjana, and Nuvem either already landing there or planned to. The stated goal is to strengthen direct digital connectivity between the United States, Latin America, and Europe, while giving carriers an alternative to the more congested landing points in Miami and Virginia Beach.
That’s a genuinely significant piece of internet infrastructure sitting inside Horry County. It’s also a facility that employs a relatively small number of people directly, which matters a lot when it comes to what kind of local economic or housing impact to actually expect.
What the National Data Actually Shows
NAR’s 2026 Data Center Impact report looked at more than 3,200 U.S. counties and compared housing markets, employment, and electricity costs based on how many data centers each one has. A few findings stand out as directly relevant here.
First, data center activity is extremely concentrated nationally. Of the counties studied, 92% have no mapped data centers at all, and only 34 counties nationwide have 10 or more facilities, the threshold NAR used to define a “high concentration” market. Those 34 counties account for a hugely outsized share of total U.S. data center activity.
Second, and this is the headline finding, counties with more data centers do tend to have higher home values and faster price growth. The median home value was about $174,500 in counties with no data centers, compared with $431,750 in counties with 10 or more. Home values in high-concentration counties also grew faster from 2014 to 2024 than in counties without any data centers at all.
But NAR is explicit about a critical caveat, and it’s the most important part of the whole report: this is a correlation, not proof of causation. The counties that attract the most data centers, places like Loudoun County and Santa Clara County, were already wealthy, highly educated, fast-growing technology markets before data centers arrived in large numbers. Median household income is about $88,700 in high-concentration counties versus $64,100 in counties with none, and the share of adults with a bachelor’s degree is nearly double. Data centers tend to follow strong markets as much as they create them.
On employment, counties with more data centers saw notably stronger job growth from 2014 to 2024 (15.6% in high-concentration counties versus 1.9% in counties with none), though that growth has slowed considerably across the board more recently. On electricity, residential rates did rise somewhat faster in high-concentration counties between 2020 and 2024 (21.4% versus 15.7%), but the increase doesn’t scale consistently with the number of facilities, and rates are tracked at the state level rather than by specific utility territory, which limits how precisely this can be measured locally.
A companion survey of REALTORS® nationally found genuinely mixed opinions on residential impact specifically: 25% reported a positive effect on nearby home values, 22% reported a negative effect, and a full third weren’t sure either way. Commercial property told a clearer story, with 50% of agents reporting a positive impact on nearby commercial values and demand concentrated in industrial space and land.
Where South Carolina Actually Fits In
Here’s the context that matters most for anyone searching “Horry County data centers” to understand their own market: South Carolina is not one of the country’s major data center states. The state has 12 mapped facilities total, about 0.8% of the national count, compared with 319 in Virginia and 127 in Texas. This is a modest, emerging presence, not a concentrated hub.
South Carolina’s underlying numbers also don’t show the kind of dramatic divergence NAR found in the biggest data center markets. Statewide home values grew about 71% from 2014 to 2024, which is a healthy pace but well below the 95% to 98% growth seen in the national high-concentration counties, and it’s a number driven by far more than data center activity across a state this size. Residential electricity rates in South Carolina grew about 9% from 2020 to 2024, meaningfully slower than the 21.4% increase NAR found in the most data-center-dense counties nationally. Employment growth statewide has actually picked up recently rather than slowed, a different pattern than the national cooldown NAR observed in the highest-concentration markets.
What This Means If You’re Buying or Selling Here
Put simply: Horry County data centers are real, strategically significant, and worth knowing about, but they are not yet a force reshaping local home values the way a 213-facility cluster has in Northern Virginia. One cable landing station, even an expanding one, is a fundamentally different scale of activity than the hyperscale campuses driving NAR’s national housing numbers. If a buyer asks us whether a nearby data center should factor into their decision on a specific Horry County property, the honest answer today is that the DC BLOX facility is tucked inside a dedicated technology and aerospace park, not embedded in a residential neighborhood, and its current footprint simply isn’t large enough to show up in county-level housing data the way it would in a market with dozens of comparable facilities.
What is worth watching is the trajectory. The 2025 expansion signals real, continued investment in Horry County’s position as a digital infrastructure hub, and that kind of investment can attract related business activity, additional leasing and land demand near the technology park, and incremental job creation over time, even if it doesn’t move median home prices on its own. NAR’s own report notes that in markets with the most data center activity nationally, real estate businesses and industrial leasing activity tend to be meaningfully more concentrated. That’s the more realistic near-term local impact to watch for here, rather than a direct lift to nearby home values.
It’s also worth separating the residential and commercial pictures, since NAR’s data suggests they behave differently everywhere, including here. The clearer national signal is on commercial and industrial property, where data center development tends to increase nearby demand. For a market like ours, that’s the more plausible channel for any real estate ripple effect from continued investment in facilities like the Myrtle Beach cable landing station, well before it shows up in residential comps.
For now, the most accurate way to think about Horry County data centers is as an emerging piece of the local economic story rather than an established driver of home values. Browsing what’s currently available across Myrtle Beach is a good way to get a feel for current conditions across the market independent of this one still-developing factor. If you’re evaluating a property anywhere near the technology park, or just want to talk through how we’re thinking about infrastructure investment and local real estate trends, reach out to our team and we’ll walk through what we’re actually seeing on the ground.