From Furniture to Fiber, a Town Changed

04/05/23 • 15 min

Lenoir, North Carolina, was once a global furniture manufacturing hub. For Rachel Scercy, the furniture industry was the center of her family life. And then the jobs vanished in the 1990s.

Today, communities like Lenoir are often seen as great sites for data centers because of their strong industrial histories. In 2007, Google built a $1.2 billion data center a mile outside of Lenoir, creating over a thousand jobs to date – hundreds in construction, and hundreds of permanent jobs in operations. Since then, the region has attracted more data centers from other top tech, retail, and entertainment companies.

Intimately experienced with the ups and downs of Lenoir's economic transformation, Rachel is part of Lenoir's new generation of workers who are employed at a data center rather than in the furniture industry.

Learn more

about career opportunities and Google’s investments in communities like Lenoir.

Lenoir, North Carolina, was once a global furniture manufacturing hub. For Rachel Scercy, the furniture industry was the center of her family life. And then the jobs vanished in the 1990s.

Learn more

about career opportunities and Google’s investments in communities like Lenoir.

Previous Episode

Data Center on the Prairie

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In Tennessee, the digital future is merging with the ecological past.

Clarksville, where Google has a data center, is home to a fragile ecosystem that has vanished across America: grasslands. What if we could use large campuses like data centers to transform land back into long-lost prairies – restoring ecological diversity and an important piece of American history? Dwayne Estes of the Southeastern Grasslands Institute is dedicating his life to making that a reality.

After you listen to the episode, watch the documentary about grasslands restoration at Google’s data center.

Next Episode

Data Centers Help Fuel the Solar-Energy Boom

A solar-centric world is coming. Solar generates just over 3% of the world's electricity. By the middle of the century, it could make up nearly 40% of global electricity consumption.

That growth is made possible by sophisticated manufacturing, maturing business models, and fast-dropping costs. It’s also increasingly enabled by artificial intelligence – and the data centers that power it.

Samuel Adeyemo is the co-founder of Aurora Solar, a company using AI to quickly model and execute millions of rooftop solar projects. Aurora partners with Google’s Project Sunroof to integrate vast geospatial data sets into the software.

As the digital tools behind solar get more sophisticated, data centers have the potential to be the backbone of the clean energy economy.

Learn how Project Sunroof is enabling more solar. To discover how data centers are supporting clean energy around the globe, check out Google's 24/7 carbon-free energy mission.