By Jordan Meadows
Staff Writer
A proposed 100,000-square-foot data center in southeast Raleigh will not go before the City Council after all, after the project's developer withdrew its annexation application over the weekend, city leaders confirmed.
The project, known in city annexation filings as Radius DC Raleigh I, sought to annex roughly 13.65 acres at 3101 Jones Sausage Road into the city so it could connect to Raleigh's water and sewer systems, clearing the way for a data center estimated at $180 million once built out.
The site sits directly across from the Parrish Meadows residential neighborhood in the Garner area of southeast Raleigh, and had been earmarked for a smaller industrial building under a previous proposal from Stephens Center Inc. before the data center plan emerged.
More than 100 people had signed up to speak against the project at Tuesday's City Council meeting, and critics said the proposal bypassed the city's Planning Commission and skipped a neighborhood meeting they considered a critical step in the review process. Everyone who had signed up to speak has since been notified the item is off Tuesday's Aug. 18 agenda, according to the city.
Mayor Janet Cowell confirmed the withdrawal, which came Saturday, days ahead of the scheduled vote.
Charlotte-based Beacon Partners, which had developed a substantial industrial footprint along the Jones Sausage Road corridor and was widely identified with the project, said in a statement that it sold the parcel under contract back in November 2025 and is "not involved in the prospective project in any capacity," adding that it was aware the purchaser had withdrawn its annexation application.
The property is held by an entity called B3-SFRE JSR LLC; the Radius DC Raleigh I name in the annexation filing points to RadiusDC, a U.S. edge data center operator, as the developer actually behind the project. Beacon has not otherwise commented.
Raleigh has not adopted a moratorium on data center development, unlike several nearby jurisdictions; Orange and Chatham counties have paused new data center approvals in some form. North Carolina is now home to nearly 100 data center facilities statewide, anchored by large hyperscale operations including Apple's campus in Maiden, Google's in Lenoir and Meta's in Forest City, along with newer projects from Amazon in Richmond County and Microsoft in Person County.
The debate over the Jones Sausage Road site echoes a broader national reckoning over data center growth near residential areas; in Loudoun County, Virginia—home to more than 250 operational data centers and an estimated 70% of the world's daily internet traffic—county leaders took their first step toward pausing new data center development within the past month.
