Google has announced plans to invest $9 billion in expanding its Berkeley County data center campus, a commitment that ranks among the largest economic development deals in South Carolina history.

The expansion will transform the Lowcountry facility into one of the most significant data center operations on the East Coast. Google first arrived in Berkeley County in 2007 and has steadily grown its footprint in the region, attracted by reliable power infrastructure, available land, and a business-friendly regulatory environment.

For Berkeley County, the investment represents a validation of years of infrastructure preparation. Local officials have worked to ensure adequate power capacity and water access to support data-intensive operations that require massive amounts of electricity for servers and cooling systems.

The project will create construction jobs in the near term and permanent technical positions once facilities become operational. Data centers typically employ smaller workforces than manufacturing plants of comparable investment size, but the positions tend to pay well above regional averages.

South Carolina has emerged as a data center destination in recent years, competing with Virginia’s Loudoun County corridor and other established tech hubs. The state’s combination of lower costs, reliable utilities, and strategic location between major population centers has proven attractive to cloud computing providers.

Google operates data centers across the globe to support its search engine, cloud services, YouTube, and other products. The Berkeley County campus handles traffic for users across the eastern United States and provides redundancy for Google’s network infrastructure.

The $9 billion figure includes construction costs, equipment, and supporting infrastructure. Actual spending will occur over multiple years as Google builds out capacity to meet growing demand for cloud computing services.

State and local incentive packages associated with the expansion have not been fully disclosed, though large data center projects typically receive property tax breaks and other considerations in exchange for long-term investment commitments.