Oops... guess the CDATA tag is removed from the HTML... let's try that again:

DECLARE @xml nvarchar(4000)
DECLARE @h int
SET @xml = '<root><row id="1"><![CDATA[   THIS IS THE DATA  ]]> </row></root>'

EXECUTE sp_xml_preparedocument @h output, @xml

SELECT * FROM OPENXML(@h, '//row') WITH (id int '@id', note nvarchar(2000)
'text()')

execute sp_xml_removedocument @h