Energy and commodity trading firm Vitol, through its renewable energy arm VC Renewables (VCR), has acquired a 600 MW data center campus in South Carolina from Meridian Gridworks, a data center, edge computing, and renewable energy firm, for an undisclosed sum.
While Vitol assists data center owners in securing power, including grid access, this is its first acquisition of a data center campus. According to a press release, the acquisition aligns with the Vitol’s powered land model in which energy generation and storage are paired with a data center. Given the questions surrounding delivery of power to data center facilities, this model may help speed up time delivery timelines for data centers which are waiting months, sometimes years for a connection to the grid.
“The rapid growth of digital infrastructure is creating significant demand for reliable, flexible and increasingly sustainable power. We look forward to working with the Meridian team to develop a resilient, integrated energy solution for the South Carolina campus,” said Andrew De Pass, Vitol Head of Energy Transition Investments.
The data center campus will house energy generation and storage to meet its power needs alongside traditional grid connections to create a hub for power and digital infrastructure.
In line with the transaction, Meridian Gridworks will continue to oversee development of the South Carolina campus. Vitol and VC Renewables will contribute expertise in natural gas, solar, and energy storage to help further develop the site. Meridian Gridworks was established in 2025 and, per its website, already has 150 clean energy projects that have been financed or are being developed and 1 GW of compute capacity under development.
Together with Meridian Gridworks, Vitol believes that it can meet the power demands of digital infrastructure developments along the eastern seaboard of the US. At the very least, it showcases the type of projects Vitol can deliver on that demand integrated energy and digital infrastructure.
Vitol sits among a growing contingent of commodity traders that are placing their bets behind data centers. For an energy firm like Vitol, investing into the data center industry makes sense given that power is now one of the binding constraints holding buildouts back together with public pushback and land.
While securing power is critical, land is perhaps the most important part of the equation and it’s in short supply of late. Last week Fairfield County Council in South Carolina approved a 12-month moratorium on new data center construction. The moratorium prohibits the construction of data centers on county-owned property and the sale of county property for new data centers.
These moratoriums are springing up across the US although most happen at a county level. The exception to this is New York state which established a statewide, year-long moratorium on new hyperscale data center builds as w.media reported in June.