NC farm family explains decision to sell their vast acreage for a data center
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- The Stamey family sold 340 acres for a Compass Datacenters facility in Statesville.
- Project includes five 270,000-square-foot buildings and 140 acres of open space.
- City planners support rezoning, citing lower traffic vs. retail or distribution use.
Selling hundreds of his family’s lush-green acres to a Texas developer is the right move for the area’s economic future, longtime Iredell County cattle farmer David Stamey said Thursday.
Dallas-based Compass Datacenters filed rezoning plans with the city of Statesville recently for a five-building center spanning 340 acres off the Stamey Farm Road exit on Interstate 40 in rural west Iredell.
The Stamey family and their land- and farm-related companies own the eight parcels that form the proposed data center site, Iredell County public tax records show. The parcels have a total assessed value of $3.46 million, including land and buildings.
“My grandfather was a true economic developer at heart, and my dad wanted the land to be used wisely,” Stamey said in an email to The Charlotte Observer. “We know they’d be proud of this innovative development.”
The plan calls for each building to stretch about 270,000 square feet, or roughly the size of nearly five NFL football fields. Each would include 40 backup generators in case of outages, the developer’s application shows.
Two large Duke Energy transmission lines run through the property south of the proposed buildings. A new substation would be built on the north side of the site, beside I-40.
Stamey Cattle Co. was established in 1951, nine years before I-40 was built through the Statesville area.
The farm is about 49 miles northwest of Charlotte.
For 50 years, Stamey Cattle’s “real business has been exporting cattle, and it’s almost entirely done around the country,” Stamey said. “When I-40 came through in the 1960s, the fundamentals of the property changed.”
‘Discussions with all types of developers’
In 1970, Stamey’s grandfather sold the land on Stamey Farm Road where yogurt producer Origin Food Group operates, to help finance his children’s education, David Stamey said.
For at least 15 years, the Stamey father and son team worked on development opportunities for their landholdings bordered by I-40 to the north; U.S. Highway 70 and Statesville Regional Airport to the south; and manufacturers to the east and west.
Because Statesville’s land development plan and Iredell County’s Horizon 2045 Plan call for industrial uses of the property, “we had a lot of discussions with all types of developers,” Stamey said.
Those included a global distribution company “promising 2,000 jobs, but also 1,000-plus trucks in and out every day,” he said; an industrial park covering the entire property; and “large-scale housing.”
“None of them were the right fit for the land or the community,” Stamey said.
“After long consideration, my dad made the decision to stop milking cows about four years ago, a year before he passed away unexpectedly,” Stamey said. “Since he died, we’ve done our best to keep the land up and in good shape.”
Stamey described data as “the fastest growing commodity and a huge part of all of our lives.”
And his family believes Compass Datacenters is “the right developer — thoughtful, experienced and aligned with what’s best for the city, county and region,” he said.
“This project will generate long-term revenue for the city and county, without the disruption that some other proposals would have brought,” Stamey said.
“We really like everyone we’ve met and everything we’ve learned about Compass,” he added. “They don’t use water to cool. Their campus plans to leave 140 acres of open space, including all along Hickory Highway.”
Compass, he said, has “a lot of really great sustainability efforts built in and won’t be a burden on city services. The large tax base will support city and county services, schools and community organizations for future generations.”
Stamey said he and his family “all grew up here and love Statesville and Iredell County. My sister and I live in Statesville, and my brother has a home here. It’s never been about turning our backs on the past — it’s about making a responsible decision for the future.”
Approval recommended
In a report filed with the Compass rezoning application, city of Statesville planners recommend the rezoning be approved, if lanes are added to Stamey Farm Road and U.S. 70 at the site.
The property is not within a more-restrictive farmland preservation district, according to the planning staff report.
The primary entrance is near the I-40 Stamey Farm Road interchange, and a data center “is a less intensive use regarding traffic than a distribution center or retail development,” planners wrote.
The data center plan also shows large vegetative buffers and “an expanse of undeveloped land” between the buildings and neighbors, planning staff members said.
Data center plan in Mooresville defeated
The Stamey Farm Road site is the second location pitched by a developer for a data farm in Iredell County this year, the Observer previously reported.
JLL, a global commercial real estate developer based in Chicago, Illinois, has begun marketing the property as a data farm site.
Lynne Taylor, a lead opponent to Teresa Earnhardt’s defeated rezoning request for a $30 billion data center in east Mooresville, is helping muster opposition to the Stamey Farm Road plans.
Teresa Earnhardt is the widow of NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt.
Colorado developer Tract pulled its rezoning request for Earnhardt’s project after Mooresville Mayor Chris Carney told the company that neither he nor the Town Board would vote in favor of the rezoning, Carney said on Aug. 13.
At least 200 neighbors packed Mooresville Town Board meetings to oppose the project.
“In less than 48 hours, we learn that Iredell County is spared of a data center in Mooresville that would have destroyed our ecosystem, only to find that a much larger and more harmful data center in Statesville will destroy existing farmlands and homes,” Taylor told the Observer on Aug. 15.
Compass Datacenters and the Stamey Farm site “share no relation to the developer” of the rejected Mooresville data center, Dillon Callaham, project manager for Thomas & Hutton Engineering Co. of Greenville, South Carolina, wrote on Monday to Statesville Planning Director Sherry Ashley.
“Compass comes to the Statesville site with a planned development in mind and (is) not pursuing the requested rezoning for speculative purposes,” Callaham wrote.
The Statesville Planning Board is scheduled to hear from Compass Datacenters at 6 p.m. Tuesday at City Hall, 301 S. Center St.
The City Council will consider the rezoning at 6 p.m. Monday, Sept. 15, and again at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 6, and the developer’s annexation request on Oct. 6 and Oct. 20.
This story was originally published August 22, 2025 at 5:00 AM.