jain.com — data centers, connectivity and security, analyzed daily

Tag: Data Center Moratorium

  • Everyone Watches NY’s 50 MW Data Center Pause. The Lasting Risk Is Local Zoning.

    Everyone Watches NY’s 50 MW Data Center Pause. The Lasting Risk Is Local Zoning.

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    A small town on Cayuga Lake in upstate New York is preparing a law that would ban data centers, the warehouse-sized buildings full of computers that run websites, apps and artificial intelligence.

    The trigger is a company called TeraWulf, which wants to build one on the grounds of an old coal power plant. About 200 people packed a town meeting, and most asked for a ban, citing noise, water and electricity bills.

    New York has temporarily paused some state permits for large data centers. A town ban would be different: it would stay in place until a future town board chose to reverse it.

    The Town of Lansing, New York, has moved toward an outright prohibition on data centers, Fingerlakes1.com reported. At a September 29 special meeting attended by roughly 200 people, the Town Board directed town attorney Megan Doherty to draft a local law banning data centers, so board members can review the language before deciding whether to formally introduce it and schedule a public hearing. No ban has been enacted and the town’s zoning has not changed.

    The debate centers on TeraWulf’s Lake Hawkeye proposal to redevelop the former Milliken power plant site, which has been under town review for nearly a year. Town Supervisor Ruth Groff said she favors a total ban, and several other board members said they want to see prohibition language drafted rather than pursue another temporary moratorium. TeraWulf asked the town to keep its existing review process open.

    Executive Summary

    Lansing’s board has not rejected TeraWulf’s project, but it has shifted the question from how to regulate data centers to whether to allow them at all. The catalyst was New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s Executive Order 62, issued July 14, which bars the state Department of Environmental Conservation from issuing discretionary permits for data centers of 50 megawatts or more until the state Department of Public Service completes a broader environmental review. That state pause does not halt local reviews, leaving Lansing to spend money and staff time on a project whose state requirements may later change.

    The significance reaches beyond one proposal. Town officials said nearly 40 New York municipalities have adopted data center moratoriums since the start of 2026. A moratorium buys time; a zoning prohibition closes a town to every developer until it is amended. If Lansing follows through, a former power plant site with concentrated high-voltage transmission lines, the kind of grid access large facilities seek, would be off the table regardless of who proposes to build there.

    For developers, utilities and landowners holding retired generation sites, the episode shows that grid access and a willing seller do not settle siting. Local land-use law, set by a handful of elected board members, can decide the outcome before any state standard is written.

    A Temporary State Pause, a Potentially Lasting Local Ban

    Executive Order 62 is, by design, a holding pattern. It stops one state agency from issuing discretionary permits for data centers of 50 megawatts or more (a megawatt is a unit of electrical capacity; facilities at that scale draw power comparable to a sizable town) until regulators study electricity demand, water use and quality, air quality, noise and effects on disadvantaged communities. In parallel, Empire State Development has been told to build a framework to help municipalities negotiate economic benefits and mitigate harms. Both tracks point toward data centers being permitted under higher standards, not excluded.

    Lansing’s draft points somewhere else. A zoning prohibition does not wait for state standards and does not depend on project size unless the town writes it that way. Doherty told the board a future board could amend the zoning if technology, circumstances or state law change, so the ban would not be permanent in a legal sense. In practice, though, reversing a ban requires a new political decision, while a moratorium expires on its own. That asymmetry is why the local layer now carries more durable risk for developers than the state pause that drew the headlines.

    The figure town officials cited, nearly 40 New York municipalities adopting moratoriums this year, shows how many local governments are already using land-use tools to respond. Lansing does not by itself establish that those towns will move on to bans. It does show the path exists, and that a board can travel it in a single meeting once the cost of continued review looks higher than the cost of saying no.

    Why Regulating Looked More Expensive Than Prohibiting

    The board’s reasoning was largely practical. Members discussed allowing smaller facilities while barring hyperscale ones, the very large campuses typically built for major cloud and computing tenants, with a 10-megawatt threshold raised as one possible dividing line. Groff was skeptical, citing concern that permitting smaller facilities could give developers an opening to seek variances for larger ones. Other members questioned whether an elaborate regulatory structure would invite years of enforcement disputes and legal bills.

    Councilmember Judy Drake, who spent much of the meeting weighing economic development and the town’s tax pressures, framed the cost question directly: if most of the board ultimately supports a ban, paying attorneys to draft a moratorium and regulations first may only spend more town money before arriving at the same result. Councilmember Joseph Wetmore said he had spent about a year looking for regulations that could make a data center compatible with Lansing and found that balance increasingly remote.

    That logic matters for the industry because it does not turn on any single project’s merits. A small town weighing enforcement capacity and litigation exposure may conclude that a bright-line prohibition is cheaper to administer than performance standards for noise, light and water, especially while state rules are still being written.

    The Grid-Ready Brownfield Problem

    The Milliken property illustrates the trade-off. Town planning staff described it as a significant brownfield, meaning previously industrial land with contamination of varying degrees. A large coal ash pile remains a state-regulated landfill regardless of what happens elsewhere on the parcel, and other areas may need remediation before reuse. What the site has in its favor is infrastructure: high-voltage transmission lines are concentrated in northern Lansing around the former plant, which is why energy-related developers find it attractive.

    Planning staff said parts of the site could potentially host solar, with state brownfield programs helping fund cleanup. Tompkins County Legislator Mike Sigler argued that TeraWulf’s project had been anticipated to generate about $10 million in taxes and other community funding, much of it benefiting the Lansing school district, and that the site could stay dormant without an industrial developer willing to take on the brownfield. Town officials did not adopt those estimates, so the economic case on both sides remains unquantified on the public record.

    TeraWulf’s position is a process argument. Pace Rally, its vice president of project development, said the company has done substantial additional technical work and is making meaningful changes to the site plan, and asked that the project be evaluated on the facts. A ban would end that evaluation. The release also notes the prospect of a legal fight over a project already under review for nearly a year, which is the clearest near-term risk for both the town and the company.

    Background

    Lansing is a town in Tompkins County on the east shore of Cayuga Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region. The former Milliken Station, a coal-fired power plant, has sat dormant since it closed, leaving behind contaminated land, a regulated coal ash landfill and a concentration of high-voltage transmission infrastructure in the town’s north end.

    TeraWulf is a publicly traded digital infrastructure company that operates in New York and has been associated with bitcoin mining and computing facilities that depend on large, low-cost power supplies. Statewide, data centers have come under heavier scrutiny in 2026: dozens of municipalities have adopted moratoriums, and Governor Hochul’s Executive Order 62 paused certain state permits for large facilities while New York develops higher standards for the industry.

    Sources

    Source: Lansing moves toward data center ban as TeraWulf debate reaches turning point (Fingerlakes1.com), reporting on the Lansing Town Board’s September 29 special meeting on TeraWulf’s Lake Hawkeye proposal.

  • Core Scientific’s 391 MW Shows Denton’s AI-Era Leverage Is Land and Power, Not Zoning

    Core Scientific’s 391 MW Shows Denton’s AI-Era Leverage Is Land and Power, Not Zoning

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Denton, a Texas city north of Dallas, is weighing a 90-day pause on new data centers. These are giant buildings full of computers that run online services and artificial intelligence.

    The surprise: the pause may not reach the biggest one already there. Core Scientific’s site is built to handle 391 megawatts, about as much electricity as a sizable city uses. Its growth depends more on the city-owned power company, which sells it electricity and owns the land it wants to rent.

    Residents are split between worries about the power grid and a $3 billion rise in the value of local taxable property.

    Denton City Council held the first of two required public hearings on a proposed moratorium on new data center development during its Sept. 22 meeting, Community Impact reported. The moratorium would halt all new data center development and permitting in city limits for 90 days, with an option to extend for another 90. A second hearing is set for Oct. 27, and the council could vote as early as Dec. 2.

    At the same meeting, city officials said Core Scientific, which operates a 391-megawatt (MW) data center in Denton, had asked Denton Municipal Electric (DME), the city-owned utility, to lease additional public land south of its facility. A second project, Qumulus AI’s 20 MW data center, is planned to start operating in 2028 but has not begun construction.

    Executive Summary

    Denton is moving through the legal steps to pause new data center development, a process the council started with a unanimous vote on Aug. 18. The city attorney, Mack Reinwand, told the council that “a moratorium being passed does not necessarily stop an existing project from being built out.” Whether the pause would apply to an operator expanding or needing more land to meet its agreement with the city will depend on what that project’s original submission included.

    That distinction matters because Denton is not only a zoning authority. Through DME, it sells electricity to its largest data center under a power purchase agreement (PPA, a long-term contract for electricity) and owns the land that operator wants to lease. The hearing also landed days after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state environmental regulators to stop issuing new data center permits while ERCOT, the state grid operator, audits proposed projects.

    For data center operators, including bitcoin miners repositioning as hosts for AI and high-performance computing, Denton shows how local, state and grid-level controls now stack on the same site. For an existing operator, the most precise controls sit with the utility, not the moratorium.

    What a Moratorium Can and Cannot Reach

    A moratorium is a temporary pause on accepting or processing new development applications. Denton’s version would stop new data center development and permitting in city limits as soon as it passed. That is a blunt tool aimed at what has not been built yet. The city attorney’s caution that it “does not necessarily stop an existing project from being built out” means the pause bites hardest on projects that have not yet secured approvals.

    That puts the two projects in different positions. Core Scientific’s 391 MW facility is operating. Qumulus AI’s 20 MW data center has a 2028 target, according to Charlie Rosendahl, Denton’s director of development services, but has not started construction. Whether Qumulus falls under the pause depends on the same question Mayor Chris Watts raised: what was submitted, and what the city already approved. Until the council answers that, the moratorium’s practical reach is unclear at both ends.

    The Utility Is Also the Landlord

    The headline point rests on what DME officials said about Core Scientific. DME Assistant General Manager Chris Lutrick said Core Scientific’s PPA limits how many megawatts it can consume. Those limits are controlled by ERCOT. He also said the company “ha[s] not got there” and has not asked for more power than the contract allows. So the operator’s electrical ceiling is already set by a contract with the city’s utility and by the state grid operator, whatever the council decides on the moratorium.

    Land is the second lever. Lutrick said Core Scientific asked three to four months earlier to lease public land just south of its facility. He said the company did not say how it would use that land, and that it had been renting space at a private residence to park contractor vehicles. He added that the company “never mentioned another data center.” Rosendahl said the city is not discussing future data center development while the moratorium process continues. Interim City Manager Cassey Ogden said Core Scientific had not contacted the city about leasing more land, which does not match the utility’s account.

    Taken together, the city’s decisions on whether to lease that parcel and how to administer the PPA will shape the 391 MW site more precisely than a pause on new applications. For operators on municipal utilities, the city can be regulator, power supplier and landlord at once. Each role gives it a separate point of leverage.

    State and Grid Controls Stack on Top

    Denton’s process does not run alone. According to the same reporting, Gov. Abbott said on Sept. 21 that state environmental regulators must stop issuing new data center permits. His order expands an existing state pause while ERCOT audits proposed data center projects. Rosendahl told the council that any interconnection, meaning the physical and contractual hookup to the grid, requires a study. Loads over 75 MW also need ERCOT approval, and that category is now under closer review at the governor’s direction.

    The grid itself is the backdrop. Rosendahl said recent studies show Denton’s transmission system was already running near its limits before the large data center developments came online. That gives the moratorium’s supporters a concrete argument. It also suggests that any large new load would face capacity questions even without a local pause. For developers, the practical result is three layers of review: city permitting, state permits and ERCOT interconnection approval. Any one of them can set the schedule.

    A $3 Billion Tax Base Against Unanswered Questions

    The trade-off residents described is real on both sides. Denton saw a $3 billion increase in property tax value from data center development, according to earlier reporting. That is a direct fiscal benefit to the city and other local taxing bodies. Opponents cited long-term community effects and grid strain. Council Member George Ferrie said the city lacks long-term data on questions such as air quality because data centers “haven’t been this dense, this present for two decades.”

    Neither side’s case is settled by what was presented at the hearing. The tax figure is a documented gain, but the grid concerns are backed by the city’s own transmission findings. A 90-day pause, extendable once, is a way to buy time for those studies rather than a final verdict. For AI infrastructure investors, the signal is that Texas sites near constrained municipal grids now carry local political review as a scheduling risk alongside power and equipment lead times.

    Background

    Denton, a fast-growing city in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, runs its own public power utility, Denton Municipal Electric. It currently has two data center operators: Core Scientific, with a 391 MW facility already operating, and Qumulus AI, with a 20 MW project planned for 2028. The moratorium effort began with a two-minute pitch from Mayor Pro Tem Nick Stevens on May 14. The council approved the pitch June 2 and voted unanimously on Aug. 18 to start the legal process.

    Core Scientific built its business on bitcoin mining and has been repositioning toward hosting AI and high-performance computing workloads, part of a wider shift among miners with large power allocations. Most of Texas is served by the ERCOT grid, which has become a central gatekeeper for large new electricity loads such as data centers.

    Sources

    Source: Denton officials weigh data center moratorium during first public hearing (Community Impact). Coverage of Denton City Council’s Sept. 22 hearing on a 90-day data center moratorium and Core Scientific’s request for more utility land.

  • Digital Realty Wins 50 MW on Jurong Island as Singapore Reopens DC Capacity

    Digital Realty Wins 50 MW on Jurong Island as Singapore Reopens DC Capacity

    Digital Realty Trust (NYSE: DLR), one of the world’s largest data center operators, announced it has been selected to develop 50 megawatts of new data center capacity in Singapore, sited on Jurong Island and aimed at AI workloads. The announcement was distributed via GlobeNewswire and picked up across financial wires on August 25, 2026.

    The word “selected” is doing real work here: in Singapore, new data center capacity is not simply built — it is allocated by the government under a tightly controlled regime. Winning an allocation is itself the news.

    Executive Summary

    Singapore is arguably the most supply-constrained major data center market on Earth. The city-state halted new data center approvals in 2019 over concerns about land and electricity consumption, and only resumed approvals in 2022 through a government-run application process that awards capacity sparingly and attaches efficiency and sustainability conditions. Against that backdrop, a 50-megawatt grant — modest by the standards of the gigawatt-scale AI campuses being announced in the United States — represents a meaningful expansion of one of Asia’s most important connectivity hubs.

    For Digital Realty, the award deepens an existing Singapore footprint and positions the company to serve AI demand in a market where capacity commands premium pricing precisely because it is rationed. For the market, it signals that Singapore’s measured reopening is continuing, and that the government is willing to place new capacity on Jurong Island — an industrial energy-and-chemicals hub — rather than only in traditional data center districts.

    What the announcement does not yet establish is equally important: construction timeline, capital cost, power sourcing arrangements, and customer commitments are not detailed in the release. We flag those gaps below.

    Why 50 Megawatts Is a Big Number in Singapore

    A megawatt, in data center terms, measures how much IT equipment a facility can power — and it has become the industry’s core unit of scarcity. In Northern Virginia or Texas, 50 MW is a routine building. In Singapore, it is a strategic asset. The government’s 2019 moratorium froze new supply for roughly three years, and the pilot application round that reopened the market in 2022–2023 awarded only about 80 MW across four operators. Authorities have since indicated a further tranche of at least 300 MW, with additional headroom tied to green energy use. In that context, a single 50 MW allocation to one operator is a large slice of a deliberately small pie.

    Scarcity has consequences for economics. Singapore vacancy rates are among the lowest of any major market, and colocation pricing — the rent tenants pay to house their servers in someone else’s facility — is correspondingly among the highest. Operators who hold allocated capacity in Singapore are holding an asset whose supply is capped by policy, not just by market forces. That is a structurally favorable position, and it explains why every allocation round is fiercely contested.

    Jurong Island: Siting as a Power Statement

    The location deserves attention. Jurong Island is Singapore’s purpose-built energy and petrochemicals hub, home to refineries, power generation, and heavy industry — not, historically, to data centers, which have clustered in areas like Loyang, Jurong West, and Tanjong Kling. Placing AI capacity on an industrial island suggests the calculus has shifted: for power-dense AI facilities, proximity to generation and industrial-grade utility infrastructure may now outweigh proximity to traditional carrier hotels.

    AI workloads sharpen this logic. Training and serving large AI models requires racks that draw several times the power of conventional cloud computing, which strains both electrical supply and cooling. Singapore’s tropical climate already makes cooling expensive, and its Green Data Centre Roadmap pushes operators toward aggressive efficiency standards. An industrial site with robust power infrastructure gives an operator more room to engineer around those constraints — though the release does not specify how the facility will be powered or cooled, which is a material omission for a project marketed around AI.

    What the Award Means for Digital Realty and Its Rivals

    Digital Realty is an incumbent in Singapore, with multiple existing facilities, so this award extends a position rather than establishing one. That matters for customers: enterprises and cloud providers generally prefer to expand within an operator’s existing campus ecosystem, where their networks already interconnect. A new allocation lets Digital Realty offer growth to customers who have been capacity-starved in the market for years.

    The competitive read-through is straightforward. Singapore’s allocation model creates discrete winners each round; operators who miss out must serve regional demand from Johor in Malaysia or Batam in Indonesia — both booming precisely because Singapore is constrained. Those overflow markets offer cheaper land and power but cannot fully replicate Singapore’s subsea cable density, legal environment, and enterprise base. An allocation in Singapore proper is therefore not interchangeable with capacity 30 kilometers away, and investors tend to value it accordingly. The caveat: allocations typically come with obligations — efficiency targets, deployment timelines, possibly green energy commitments — and the cost of meeting them in a high-cost market will shape the project’s actual returns.

    A Measured Reopening, Not a Floodgate

    It would be a misreading to see this announcement as Singapore abandoning restraint. The government’s stated approach is to grow capacity selectively while pushing the industry toward better energy efficiency and greener power. Fifty megawatts is consistent with that posture: enough to matter, not enough to change the market’s fundamental scarcity. For buyers of data center services in Singapore, the practical implication is that relief will arrive in increments, on the government’s schedule, and likely at premium prices — planning multi-market strategies that include Johor and Batam remains prudent.

    For the broader industry, Singapore is a preview of a world other jurisdictions are edging toward: one where governments treat data center capacity as a managed resource, allocated against grid capacity and climate goals rather than granted on demand. How operators perform under those conditions — and whether allocated projects deliver on time and on efficiency targets — will influence how other power-constrained markets, from Dublin to Amsterdam, design their own regimes.

    Background

    Singapore is Southeast Asia’s principal connectivity hub — dense with subsea cable landings, cloud regions, and regional corporate headquarters — which made it one of Asia’s first great data center markets. Concerned about the industry’s land and electricity footprint, the government stopped approving new facilities in 2019. It reopened the market in 2022 through a competitive application process that awarded roughly 80 MW to four operators, and has since outlined at least 300 MW of further growth tied to energy efficiency and greener power under its Green Data Centre Roadmap. The squeeze redirected billions in investment to neighboring Johor, Malaysia, and Batam, Indonesia.

    Digital Realty, a US-listed data center REIT with a global portfolio spanning hundreds of facilities, has operated in Singapore for over a decade with multiple existing sites. This 50 MW Jurong Island award adds AI-oriented growth capacity to that footprint in one of the few major markets where new supply must be won rather than simply built.

    Source: Digital Realty Selected to Develop 50 Megawatts of New Data Center Capacity in Singapore — company announcement, distributed via GlobeNewswire and financial news wires, of a 50 MW AI-workload data center development on Jurong Island.

  • Salem Data Center’s 3M-Gallon Hot-Day Peak Shows Why Annual Water Totals Mislead

    Salem Data Center’s 3M-Gallon Hot-Day Peak Shows Why Annual Water Totals Mislead

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    A company wants to build a data center, a large building full of computers, in Salem, Oregon. On the hottest days, its design lets it use up to 3 million gallons of water, about four and a half Olympic swimming pools, mostly to keep those computers cool.

    Over a full year it expects to use far less, about 39 million gallons. The catch is timing: its thirstiest days are the same hot days when everyone else in town is also using the most water.

    Salem’s city council is now discussing whether to pause projects like this.

    A data center proposed for Salem, Oregon, is designed to use up to 3 million gallons of water a day on the city’s hottest days and roughly 39 million gallons over a full year, the Salem Reporter reported on August 5, 2026. The figures describe the first phase of a proposed multi-phase project from developer Verrus.

    The numbers arrive as local opposition grows. Residents holding signs against the project attended a Salem City Council meeting this summer, where the council heard public comment and discussed the process for a possible moratorium on the project.

    Executive Summary

    The two water figures attached to Salem’s proposed data center describe very different things. Roughly 39 million gallons a year works out to an average of about 107,000 gallons a day. The design peak of 3 million gallons on the hottest days is roughly 28 times that average. The annual number describes volume; the peak number describes how much capacity the city’s water system must be able to deliver on a single day.

    That distinction matters because water systems are sized, and water is rationed, around the highest-demand days of the year. A facility whose use spikes during heat waves asks for the most water precisely when residential and irrigation demand is also at its maximum and western Oregon is in its dry season.

    For the wider data center industry, Salem is a preview of the question operators will increasingly face: not how much water a campus uses in a year, but how much it needs on the worst day, and who gets priority when the two collide.

    The Number That Matters Is the Peak Day

    An annual figure of 39 million gallons sounds modest next to a city’s total water use, and that is the figure most likely to appear in a sustainability report. But the arithmetic behind the two disclosed numbers tells a different story. Spread evenly, 39 million gallons is about 107,000 gallons a day. The 3-million-gallon design peak is roughly 28 times that. Put another way, just 13 days at full peak would consume the entire annual total. The facility’s water demand is not a steady trickle; it is a low baseline with sharp spikes tied to temperature.

    Water utilities plan around those spikes. Treatment plants, pumps, pipes and storage reservoirs are built to meet the maximum-day demand, not the yearly average, because running short on one hot afternoon is the failure that matters. A large user whose demand concentrates in heat waves therefore consumes a disproportionate share of the system’s capacity, even if its annual share looks small. That is why the annual figure understates the strain, and why the peak figure is the one city engineers and councils need to evaluate.

    The people most affected are the ones already competing for water on those days: households watering lawns and gardens, farms irrigating crops, and the rivers that carry less water in late summer. A data center’s peak does not create that summer squeeze, but it lands directly on top of it.

    Why Cooling Demand Tracks the Thermometer

    Data centers turn nearly all the electricity they use into heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. One of the most energy-efficient ways to move it out is evaporation: warm water passes through cooling towers, some of it evaporates, and the evaporation carries heat away, much as sweat cools a person. The hotter and drier the outside air, the more water that approach consumes. A design that uses little water most of the year but spikes on hot days is the typical signature of cooling that leans on evaporation when outside air alone is not enough.

    The alternative, often described as closed-loop or dry cooling, recirculates the same water and rejects heat through fans and chillers, much like a car radiator. It uses far less water but more electricity, and its electricity demand also rises on hot days, when the regional power grid is under its own peak load. Neither choice is free. The design decision determines whether a facility leans on the water system or the power system during a heat wave, and on the hottest days both are stretched.

    A First Phase, and a Council Weighing a Pause

    The disclosed figures cover only the first phase of a multi-phase project. Whether later phases would add proportionally to peak water demand, use a different cooling design, or rely on another water source has a direct bearing on how the city should read the first-phase numbers. A peak figure that is manageable for one building could look different across a full campus.

    The council’s discussion of a possible moratorium reflects how quickly the conversation shifts once peak-day figures are public. Communities elsewhere have used tools short of an outright pause: caps on peak-day withdrawals, contracts requiring a facility to curtail water use during declared shortages, requirements to use recycled rather than drinking water, and on-site storage that fills during cool periods. Which of these, if any, are on the table in Salem is not yet clear, but they show that the peak problem has engineering and contractual answers, not only yes-or-no ones.

    Background

    Salem is Oregon’s capital, and Oregon has long been a data center destination, with large campuses in Hillsboro west of Portland and along the Columbia River in The Dalles and in Central Oregon at Prineville. Cool climates, available land and access to power have drawn operators, and water has become a recurring point of friction: in The Dalles, the scale of Google’s water use became public only after a public-records dispute.

    Across the industry, water disclosure has lagged behind energy disclosure. Operators often report annual totals or efficiency ratios in sustainability reports, but peak-day demand, the figure that determines how much capacity a municipal system must provide, is rarely published. As data center demand grows, local governments are increasingly asking for that number before approving new campuses.

    Sources

    Source: Data center designed to use up to 3 million gallons on Salem’s hottest days — Salem Reporter coverage of the proposed data center’s peak and annual water use.

  • Amazon’s 2.4M Sq Ft Calvert Cliffs Exit Shows a Nuclear Plant Can’t Shortcut Zoning

    Amazon’s 2.4M Sq Ft Calvert Cliffs Exit Shows a Nuclear Plant Can’t Shortcut Zoning

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Amazon has dropped plans to build a large group of data centers on the grounds of a nuclear power plant in southern Maryland. Data centers are warehouse-sized buildings full of computers that run apps, websites and artificial intelligence. This one would have covered roughly 40 football fields of floor space.

    Having a giant power plant next door was not enough. Local voters removed three county leaders who had resisted pausing these projects, and the county is now considering a six-month freeze. Amazon calls it a business decision. Either way, local approval proved as important as electricity.

    Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud computing arm, has abandoned its proposal to build data centers on the campus of the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant near Lusby, Maryland, Maryland Matters reported on August 4, 2026, citing a Calvert County government news release. The proposal, submitted to the county in early May, called for “multiple data center campuses” covering 2.4 million square feet.

    The withdrawal follows the June 23 primary election, in which all three Calvert County commissioners who had voted against a pause on data centers lost their races. The county has scheduled an August 18 public meeting on a temporary six-month moratorium on site plan approvals for data center projects. Amazon described the move as a business decision; plant owner Constellation Energy said the opportunity at the site continues.

    Executive Summary

    AWS has walked away from what was, on paper, one of the most attractive data center sites in the Mid-Atlantic: land beside a nuclear plant that Constellation calls Maryland’s largest source of clean, reliable energy. Co-locating a data center with a power plant is the siting strategy much of the industry has pursued to secure the large, round-the-clock electricity that AI and cloud computing demand.

    The Calvert Cliffs outcome shows the limit of that strategy. Power next door does not remove the need for local land-use approval, and in Calvert County the politics of that approval shifted sharply between Amazon’s May filing and its August exit. Amazon’s own statement names development timelines as a deciding factor — the variable a county moratorium directly controls.

    For developers, utilities and investors, the lesson extends well beyond one county. Much of Maryland’s population now lives under some form of data center moratorium, according to a regional climate advocacy group, and state lawmakers may take up statewide proposals in 2027.

    Power Next Door Did Not Replace the Permit

    Data center developers have spent the past two years chasing power, not land. Large facilities that train and run AI models draw electricity continuously, and securing that supply through a crowded regional grid can take years. Building beside a nuclear plant — often called co-location — is attractive because the plant produces large amounts of steady, carbon-free power on site. Calvert Cliffs, with Units 1 and 2 near Lusby, offered exactly that.

    But a site plan still has to be approved by the county. Amazon filed its 2.4 million-square-foot proposal in early May. On June 23, voters removed commission president Todd Ireland, vice president Mark C. Cox Sr. and commissioner Earl F. “Buddy” Hance, the three commissioners who had voted against a data center pause, in favor of candidates critical of the county’s data center trajectory. On August 4, the county announced both Amazon’s withdrawal and a hearing on a six-month moratorium on data center site plan approvals, intended to allow time for new zoning rules and studies.

    Amazon says the decision was a business one, and nothing public contradicts that. Its statement, however, lists the factors it weighs: “development timelines, operational requirements, and our ability to deliver quickly for customers.” A six-month pause followed by a zoning rewrite is a timeline risk that no amount of nearby generation can offset. The mechanism is straightforward: the power advantage of a nuclear site is realized only after the building exists, while the permitting clock starts first. For hyperscalers — the largest cloud operators — that measure value in speed to capacity, an uncertain local calendar can outweigh a favorable power position.

    Maryland’s Moratorium Map Is Now a Siting Input

    Calvert County is not an isolated case. The Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), an advocacy group that supports moratoriums, said in July that nearly 77% of Maryland’s population lives under some kind of data center moratorium. That figure comes from an interested party, but the underlying measures are matters of public record: Prince George’s County enacted a two-year hold in July, Harford County has a ban with no time limit, Montgomery County, Baltimore County and Baltimore City have adopted measures, and Queen Anne’s and Washington counties have one-year pauses.

    The political signal is also visible in Frederick County, where voters ousted council chair Brad Young after the council expanded a data center zone in Adamstown. County Executive Jessica Fitzwater then paused data center development through year-end — while county leaders still intend to proceed with a planned 2,500-acre campus. That combination matters: it suggests the backlash is producing delays and new process rather than blanket rejection everywhere, which is a different risk for developers to price.

    CCAN’s Maryland director expects the General Assembly to consider statewide moratorium bills in 2027. That is a forecast, not a filed bill, but for anyone evaluating Maryland sites it turns a county-by-county patchwork into a possible statewide variable.

    What Constellation and the Next Applicant Are Left Holding

    Constellation, which owns Calvert Cliffs, loses a named tenant but not its thesis. It said the opportunity remains to “create jobs, grow the economy and support in-state federal agencies” and that this can be done “responsibly while protecting and expanding” the plant. Those are claims about future projects that have yet to be specified; the county’s proposed review of zoning and heavy industrial use is where they would be tested.

    Opponents have their own case to make. Petition organizer Melissa Emmal, whose Change.org petition has passed 10,000 signatures, and the nonprofit Save Lusby Inc. are asking for studies and zoning changes before any project proceeds. The June results suggest broad local support for that position, though the scope of the studies and the criteria for lifting a pause remain undefined — questions the county will need to answer if a moratorium is meant to lead to rules rather than indefinite delay.

    Meanwhile, the pipeline has not emptied. Natelli Holdings has proposed a separate data center nearby along Route 4, near Calvert Cliffs State Park, an existing landfill, a wastewater treatment facility and a county-owned gun range. Amazon could also resubmit. Whoever moves next will face the same question Amazon did: not whether the power is there, but how long approval will take.

    Background

    Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant, with Units 1 and 2 near Lusby in Southern Maryland, is owned by Constellation Energy, which describes it as the state’s largest source of clean, reliable energy. Amazon Web Services is one of the hyperscalers — the handful of companies that build and operate the largest cloud and AI data centers — and has been pursuing sites with reliable access to large amounts of electricity.

    Maryland has become a focal point for local resistance to data center development. Through 2026, counties including Prince George’s, Montgomery, Harford, Baltimore County, Queen Anne’s and Washington adopted pauses or bans, and data center policy became a deciding issue in county primaries in Calvert and Frederick counties.

    Sources

    Source: Amazon abandons plans for data center campus at Calvert Cliffs — Maryland Matters on AWS withdrawing its Calvert Cliffs data center proposal after a county primary centered on data centers.

  • Hillsboro’s 120-Day Pause Spares 7 Data Center Sites; AI Builders Face the Rewrite

    Hillsboro’s 120-Day Pause Spares 7 Data Center Sites; AI Builders Face the Rewrite

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Hillsboro, Oregon, a Portland suburb, already has 35 data centers. These are giant warehouse-style buildings full of computers that run the internet and artificial intelligence. The city has now voted to stop accepting new proposals for them for 120 days.

    Nothing already running, being built or under review is affected. What changes is the rulebook for whatever comes next.

    The pause also covers big battery sites that store electricity for later. The local power company asked the city to leave those out.

    Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that the Hillsboro City Council unanimously adopted a 120-day moratorium on new land-use applications for data centers and battery energy storage system (BESS) sites at a special meeting on Monday, July 27, 2026. It is the first such moratorium in Oregon. Hillsboro has 35 data centers, according to the website Data Center Maps, which is more than any other city in the state. The city says at least seven more sites are under construction or moving through permitting.

    The pause does not affect existing data centers or projects whose land-use applications were already submitted. The council may extend it once for another 120 days. The city gave one day’s notice of the meeting, which Mayor Beach Pace said was meant to keep companies from rushing applications in before the cutoff.

    Executive Summary

    Hillsboro, the center of the cluster of technology firms around Portland known as Oregon’s Silicon Forest, has temporarily stopped accepting new land-use applications for data centers and grid-scale battery sites. The city says it will use the pause to study the facilities’ impacts and amend its community development code to regulate them.

    The headline word is moratorium, but the practical effect is narrower. Operating campuses and already-filed projects continue, so Hillsboro’s near-term data center pipeline keeps moving. The lasting change will be the zoning rules that emerge from the study. Those rules will govern every new campus proposed in one of the Pacific Northwest’s most established data center markets, at a time when AI computing demand is driving much of the industry’s new capacity.

    The vote also adds to a broader tightening in Oregon. The state has paused new data center tax breaks, approved higher power rates for large users, and set up a governor’s advisory council on data centers.

    What the Pause Actually Freezes

    The moratorium is narrower than the word suggests. It stops Hillsboro from accepting new land-use applications, which are the zoning filings a developer needs before a project can move through local approvals. It does not touch the city’s roughly 35 operating data centers, and it exempts any project whose application was already on file. By the city’s own count, at least seven more sites were under construction or moving through permitting at the time of the vote. Projects at those stages have, in the ordinary course, already passed the point the moratorium blocks.

    Mayor Beach Pace’s reason for calling the meeting on a day’s notice points the same way. The concern was that companies would rush applications in before the cutoff. That suggests the city expected a queue of projects ready to file, and that the pause is aimed at the next round rather than at capacity already committed.

    In the near term, then, Hillsboro’s data center footprint keeps growing. The moratorium does not change the buildings going up now. It changes the terms for whatever comes after them.

    The Code Rewrite Is What AI Builders Should Watch

    The city’s stated goal is to study the impacts of data centers and battery sites and amend its community development code to regulate them. That is the outcome that will last. The moratorium itself expires after 120 days, or 240 if the council uses its single extension. City Attorney Chad Jacobs told the council that state law limits moratoriums to 120 days, and the ordinance allows one renewal. Zoning amendments, by contrast, stay on the books and govern every future application.

    For developers, that moves the main risk from delay to design. A four-to-eight-month pause is an inconvenience on a multi-year data center schedule. New siting standards, depending on what they cover, could change which parcels are viable and what a campus must include to be approved. Across the industry, much of the next wave of capacity is being driven by AI computing demand. That typically means larger, more power-dense campuses, which are the projects most exposed to new local rules on land, power and water.

    The council has not said what the amendments will contain, and the testimony pulled in different directions. That uncertainty, more than the 120 days, is what a company weighing a new Hillsboro site has to factor in.

    Batteries Caught in the Same Net

    The most contested decision was to include battery energy storage systems. These are large banks of batteries that absorb electricity when it is plentiful and release it when demand peaks. Portland General Electric and clean-energy advocates asked the council to exclude them. Adam Capage of Renewable Northwest said the facilities “play a vital role in Oregon’s energy future” and already support resilience and affordable electric service in Hillsboro.

    Councilors Cristian Salgado and Rob Harris acknowledged that battery sites and data centers are different, though they often come together. They argued the city needs to understand both before writing rules. That is a reasonable argument about order of operations, but it has a cost. Storage is one of the tools utilities use to manage demand peaks as large new loads connect. Pausing new battery applications at the same time as the loads leaves an open question for grid planning in the area during the study period.

    A Market Tightening From Several Directions

    Hillsboro’s vote follows several state-level changes. Earlier this year the Oregon Legislature enacted a one-year pause on new data center tax breaks through the Enterprise Zone program. In July the Public Utility Commission approved Portland General Electric’s 29.7% rate increase for large energy users, while residential rates fell 1.3%. Governor Tina Kotek has said the state is a “cheap date” for data centers and suggested more changes are coming.

    Each measure targets a different cost: taxes, power prices and now land use. Together they show that Oregon is renegotiating its terms for large facilities. The Washington County Chamber of Commerce, the Westside Economic Alliance and three building-trades unions argued for letting established planning processes and the governor’s data center advisory council finish first. Most residents who testified supported the pause. Both positions have merit. The chamber’s point about sequencing is reasonable, and so is the city’s view that it cannot write sound rules for facilities whose local impacts it has not studied.

    Background

    Hillsboro, in Washington County west of Portland, is the center of Oregon’s Silicon Forest. The area has long been home to semiconductor manufacturing and has become the state’s densest cluster of data centers. Many large operators have received long-running property tax breaks through Oregon’s Enterprise Zone program. Those breaks became a local flashpoint this spring as residents learned how long they would last.

    State policy has been shifting as well. The Legislature paused new Enterprise Zone tax breaks for data centers for one year. Regulators approved higher electricity rates for large power users such as data centers under a new state law. Governor Tina Kotek has said Oregon is a “cheap date” for the industry and suggested more changes are coming, and her data center advisory council is still working on recommendations.

    Sources

    Source: Hillsboro approves data center moratorium, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s report on the Hillsboro City Council’s July 27, 2026 vote.

  • $19.2B North Carolina Withdrawal Shows County Zoning Is a Gate on AI Capacity

    $19.2B North Carolina Withdrawal Shows County Zoning Is a Gate on AI Capacity

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    A company called Energy Storage Solutions has dropped its plan for a $19.2 billion building full of computers for artificial intelligence in a rural North Carolina county.

    At first it would have used about 300 megawatts of electricity, roughly what a couple of hundred thousand homes use, and possibly three times that later.

    Local officials had already refused it a permit. Now they are considering a two-year ban on any new projects like it. The takeaway: a county vote can stop part of the artificial intelligence boom before a single computer is installed.

    A proposed $19.2 billion AI data center in Edgecombe County, North Carolina, has been withdrawn by its developer, Energy Storage Solutions, Data Center Dynamics reported on July 15, 2026. County Manager Eric Evans told the board of commissioners at its July 6 meeting that the company had pulled the project earlier in the month. The multi-phase campus was planned for the Kingsboro development area near Tarboro, about 70 miles east of Raleigh.

    The county denied the project a special-use permit late last year, when it was described as an eight-phase, 300MW campus on 52 acres. Other accounts put the eventual build-out at 300 acres and 900MW. At the same July 6 meeting, commissioners discussed a 24-month moratorium on new data center developments. A public hearing is scheduled for August.

    Executive Summary

    The Edgecombe withdrawal takes one of North Carolina’s largest announced AI data center proposals off the table, at least for now. The obstacle on the public record was not chips, turbines or transformers. It was a county special-use permit, the discretionary approval a local board can grant or refuse. Commissioners refused it, the developer appealed, and the project has now been withdrawn while that appeal was reported to be ongoing.

    The episode matters beyond one county because two policy layers are tightening at once. Locally, Edgecombe is weighing a two-year pause on all new data center projects. At the state level, the House has passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would make data center developers pay upfront for the grid expansion, transmission upgrades and new generation their facilities require. Together they change both whether a campus can be built and who pays to power it.

    For developers, utilities and the cloud and AI companies that lease capacity, the practical point is that a site’s local approval status now belongs in capacity forecasts alongside land and megawatts.

    The Gate on This 300MW Campus Was a County Vote

    Most public discussion of AI infrastructure constraints centres on chips, power supply and electrical equipment. In Edgecombe County, the documented obstacle came earlier than any of those. Late last year, the board of commissioners denied a special-use permit for an eight-phase, 300MW data center campus on 52 acres. A special-use permit is discretionary. Even where land is zoned for industrial use, a county board can attach conditions or say no. Energy Storage Solutions appealed and said it would proceed. By early July, the county manager was telling commissioners the project had been withdrawn.

    The moratorium under discussion would turn one project’s rejection into a countywide freeze. For 24 months, no developer could bring a new data center through the county’s approval process. Campuses like this one are planned in phases across several years, so a two-year stop at the approval stage delays the first phase, and every phase behind it, by at least that long. That delay holds whether or not power, financing and tenants are ready.

    Several groups absorb that risk. Developers and landowners assemble parcels on the expectation of approval. Utilities plan transmission and generation around announced loads. Tenants, usually cloud and AI companies, need capacity delivered on a specific date. For all of them, entitlement status, meaning whether a site actually holds the local approvals needed to build, is as material as the megawatt figure in the announcement. A single county vote removed a planned 300MW from the pipeline here, and possibly 900MW.

    A $19.2 Billion Figure Without a Fixed Size

    The $19.2 billion headline is the project’s most quoted number and its least anchored one. The permit application the county reviewed described 300MW on 52 acres. Other reports described a 300-acre campus reaching 900MW. Divided across 900MW, the figure works out to about $21 million per megawatt. Divided across 300MW, it is about $64 million per megawatt. A threefold gap makes it impossible to benchmark the proposal against other campuses or to tell whether the figure includes the servers and AI chips inside the buildings, which often cost more than the buildings themselves.

    Headline figures for multi-phase campuses tend to describe a full build-out rather than a first phase. That makes them useful as a measure of ambition and weak as a measure of what is financed or contracted. For readers tracking AI capacity announcements, the useful distinction is between the capacity a regulator has actually reviewed, here 300MW, and the capacity that appears in the eventual vision, here up to 900MW.

    North Carolina Moves the Grid Bill Toward Developers

    The state-level change could matter more than any single county’s decision. The Ratepayer Protection Act, passed by the North Carolina House and awaiting Senate approval, would require data center developers to cover the upfront costs of grid expansion, transmission upgrades and new power generation for their facilities. The practical effect is to shift those costs away from a utility’s general customer base and onto the project. That raises the capital a developer needs before a site produces revenue, and it makes locations near existing grid capacity relatively more valuable.

    The bill also includes a coal plant moratorium. Public utilities could not retire coal-fired plants until regulators approve new large-scale nuclear facilities. That provision would keep existing generation on the system while new supply is planned. Its cost and environmental trade-offs will be argued on their merits in the Senate.

    Taken together, the local and state layers raise the bar for projects that lack committed customers and deep financing. Developers with signed tenants and capital to fund grid upgrades are better placed under these rules than those seeking approvals first and backers later. Counties and ratepayers gain more leverage over terms. The open question for the industry is how many other North Carolina counties adopt similar tools. The state has seen resident opposition to data center proposals in several places.

    Background

    North Carolina has become a hotspot for data center development, with some local residents opposing new projects in several parts of the state. Edgecombe County, whose seat is Tarboro, about 70 miles east of Raleigh, became one focal point when Energy Storage Solutions proposed a multi-phase AI data center campus in the Kingsboro development area.

    The county board of commissioners denied the project a special-use permit late last year. The developer appealed and said it would proceed, before withdrawing the project in early July 2026. State lawmakers are meanwhile debating the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would make data center developers pay upfront for the grid infrastructure and generation their facilities require.

    Sources

    Source: North Carolina AI data center proposal withdrawn as county officials mull moratorium, Data Center Dynamics’ report on the withdrawal of Energy Storage Solutions’ $19.2 billion Edgecombe County project and the county’s proposed 24-month moratorium.

  • Montgomery’s 6-Month Pause Shows a Retired Power Plant Won’t Fast-Track a Data Center

    Montgomery’s 6-Month Pause Shows a Retired Power Plant Won’t Fast-Track a Data Center

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Montgomery County, Maryland, a large suburb just outside Washington, has stopped accepting building applications for new data centers for six months. Data centers are the huge warehouses of computers that run apps, online storage and artificial intelligence.

    The surprise is that the pause also covers a project already proposed on the site of an old, shut-down power plant. Builders often like those sites because they are already wired into the electric grid.

    Local leaders say they want rules on electricity, water and noise written before anything gets built.

    On June 12, 2026, Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich signed an executive order directing the county’s Department of Permitting Services to stop accepting, processing and considering permit applications for new data centers. Montgomery County announced that the order takes effect immediately and sets a six-month moratorium, which can end sooner if the County Council adopts permanent zoning rules for data centers.

    The pause applies to projects already proposed, including a potential data center at the site of the decommissioned power plant in Dickerson, in the county’s western reaches along the Potomac River. Council Vice President Marilyn Balcombe and Councilmembers Will Jawando and Kristin Mink backed the order.

    Executive Summary

    Montgomery County has frozen data center permitting for six months so its County Council can write a legal framework for the industry. The county said the order responds to concerns about data centers’ energy consumption, water use for cooling, and noise near homes. It is a pause, not a ban: officials described it as time to set rules before applications move forward.

    What makes the order consequential is its scope. Elrich said his approach differs from an earlier proposal by Council Member Glass that would have exempted the Dickerson site and let it keep moving through permitting. His order does not exempt it. A project on a retired power plant parcel, which is the kind of site developers typically prize for its existing grid ties, now waits in the same line as everything else.

    For developers and investors, the signal is that in Montgomery County, a site’s power-plant legacy is not a substitute for local approval. The rules that emerge on clean energy, water, noise and labor will determine whether the county remains a practical option next to one of the world’s densest data center markets.

    Why a Retired Power Plant Didn’t Earn a Head Start

    For data center developers, a decommissioned power plant is often one of the most attractive parcels available. Such sites are usually already used for heavy industry, and they sit where high-voltage transmission lines once carried the plant’s output to the grid. That matters because the scarce input for today’s AI-driven data center buildout is electricity, not land. Connecting a large new electricity customer can take years, and a site with an existing grid footprint is widely seen as a way to shorten that wait.

    Montgomery County’s order removes that advantage for Dickerson. Elrich explicitly contrasted his order with Council Member Glass’s earlier proposal, which exempted the Dickerson site. Councilmember Mink said a large data center is in the permitting process now and that the order covers it “and all others,” calling that an important distinction. Councilmember Jawando said the moratorium bill he introduced in May was the only one that covered the Dickerson project. The county’s elected leadership treated the site’s history as no reason to let it proceed ahead of the rules.

    The reasoning is visible in the concerns officials named: grid strain, brownouts, water for cooling, noise, and watershed protection. An existing transmission connection addresses whether power can physically reach a site. It does not answer whether the county wants that load on its local system, where cooling water comes from, or how loud cooling equipment will be near homes. The Dickerson developer is the first party affected. The same logic applies to any developer or landowner that has valued retired generating sites on the assumption that local approval follows the grid connection. In Montgomery County, at least, it does not.

    What Six Months Is Meant to Produce

    The moratorium is scheduled to expire in six months, around mid-December 2026. It ends earlier if the County Council adopts Zoning Text Amendments, which are changes to the written zoning code that define where a use is allowed and under what conditions. In practice, the pause gives the Council a deadline. If permanent rules arrive first, the freeze lifts on them.

    Officials have already sketched what they want those rules to cover. Jawando listed “clean energy, no subsidies, union labor, and a safe watershed.” Mink wants the County Noise Ordinance updated and watershed protections established. Climate Change Officer Sarah Kogel-Smucker said the goal is to align data center development with the county’s climate goals through best practices for clean energy and efficient cooling. Each of these would raise a project’s costs or narrow its design choices. Clean-energy requirements affect how a facility buys power. Water limits push operators toward cooling systems that use less water, which can mean more electricity. A no-subsidy stance removes the tax incentives many jurisdictions use to compete for these projects.

    None of these positions has become law yet, and they will not all carry equal weight. How the Council balances them will decide whether Montgomery becomes a place where data centers can be built under strict conditions or one where the conditions make the economics hard to close. Balcombe framed the intent as the former: “The moratorium does not mean we stop; it means we work harder.”

    A Pause on the Doorstep of Data Center Alley

    Montgomery County sits across the Potomac River from Loudoun County, Virginia, whose Ashburn area is known as Data Center Alley and hosts one of the largest concentrations of data centers in the world. Maryland and Northern Virginia are both served by PJM Interconnection, the grid operator for much of the mid-Atlantic. That is why concerns about grid strain and brownouts carry weight on both sides of the river.

    The order should not be read as more than it is. It is one county’s six-month pause, and it does not by itself redirect regional demand. What it does show is that a jurisdiction immediately adjacent to the industry’s busiest cluster has chosen to write rules before approving projects, including one on a site with an energy-industry past. Jawando cast the decision in national terms, saying communities across the country face the same choice. Developers looking for land near Northern Virginia’s network and power infrastructure now have one fewer county where timing is predictable.

    Weighing the Claims on Both Sides

    The order’s stated rationale includes serious claims, notably brownouts. Whether any single facility would contribute to them depends on its size and on the utility’s planning, and officials framed the risks in general terms rather than attaching load or water figures to the Dickerson project. The rules the Council writes will be more durable if they rest on measured impacts rather than on the general reputation of the industry.

    The same scrutiny applies to the other side of the argument. Jawando’s description of “corporate promises of profits that may never come” is a political judgment, not a finding. Kogel-Smucker’s observation that data centers are “critical to our digital economy” is the counterweight. No jobs, tax revenue or investment figures for the Dickerson project were offered at the announcement to test either view. The six months are most useful if both the county and the developer put those numbers on the table.

    Background

    Montgomery County is a large suburban county bordering Washington, D.C., to the northwest, with its western edge on the Potomac River. Across the river lies Loudoun County, Virginia, home to Ashburn’s Data Center Alley, one of the largest concentrations of data centers anywhere. Data center demand across the region has grown with cloud computing and, more recently, artificial intelligence workloads, which require large amounts of electricity and cooling.

    Montgomery County had been working toward data center rules before the order. Its Climate Change Officer co-led a community forum on data centers in February 2026, Council Member Glass had put forward a proposal that exempted the Dickerson site, and Councilmember Jawando introduced a moratorium bill in May that covered Dickerson. Elrich’s June 12 executive order paused permitting while the Council finishes that work.

    Sources

    Source: Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich Signs Executive Order to Temporarily Pause Data Center Permitting — Montgomery County, Maryland’s announcement of a six-month moratorium on data center permit applications, including the proposed Dickerson project.

  • Louisville’s 500,000 Sq Ft Cap Shows Local Zoning Now Gates AI Data Center Scale

    Louisville’s 500,000 Sq Ft Cap Shows Local Zoning Now Gates AI Data Center Scale

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Kentucky’s two biggest cities are drawing lines around the giant computer warehouses being built to run artificial intelligence.

    Louisville proposed a size limit of 500,000 square feet, roughly nine football fields. Only three months earlier, the city approved one about 28 football fields big. Lexington stopped accepting new applications until October 31 after neighbors objected to plans to expand one.

    Why it matters: city halls, not just tech companies, are now deciding how big these buildings can get and where they can go.

    Kentucky’s two largest cities moved on June 9 to rein in hyperscale data centers, the Kentucky Lantern reported. Lexington’s Urban County Council suspended its legislative rules to impose a moratorium on data center applications through Oct. 31 while it writes zoning amendments. The same day, the Louisville Metro Planning Commission released a draft ordinance that would ban any data center larger than 500,000 square feet and restrict facilities over 250,000 square feet to industrial areas.

    Louisville residents have 30 days to comment on the draft before it goes to Louisville Metro Council. In March, the same planning commission approved a 1.6 million-square-foot data center in West Louisville despite local opposition.

    Executive Summary

    Lexington and Louisville took different routes to the same goal on the same afternoon. Lexington hit pause: no new data center applications until Oct. 31, prompted by a developer’s purchase of a local data center property that it intends to expand. Louisville went straight to rules: a draft siting ordinance with a hard size ceiling of 500,000 square feet and industrial-only zoning for anything over 250,000 square feet.

    The significance lies in the numbers. Louisville’s proposed ceiling is less than a third of the size of the facility the city approved three months earlier. For developers planning large AI campuses, that means the maximum scale of a project in Kentucky’s biggest city may be fixed by a planning document, regardless of what the grid or the supply chain could support.

    Both cities cited resident concern. Lexington Mayor Linda Gorton said she supports “very tight controls” and that the city does not support public incentives for the developer seeking to expand.

    A Ceiling Set Below a Third of March’s Approval

    The number that carries this story is the gap between two Louisville decisions made three months apart. In March, the Louisville Metro Planning Commission approved a 1.6 million-square-foot data center in West Louisville over local objections. On June 9, the same commission released a draft ordinance that would ban any data center larger than 500,000 square feet, less than a third of that approved facility, and confine anything over 250,000 square feet to industrial zones.

    This is how local zoning becomes a constraint on the scale of AI buildout. Hyperscale campuses, the very large facilities built for cloud and AI operators, draw much of their economic advantage from concentration: one site, one large electrical connection, one security perimeter, shared cooling infrastructure. A hard floor-area ceiling means a developer who wants that scale in Louisville would have to split it across buildings or sites, if the final ordinance allows that at all, or build somewhere else. In either case, the largest permissible project is being set by the planning code, independent of what power and equipment supply could support.

    The effects fall on specific groups: developers and landowners holding Louisville sites, the local utility planning for large new electrical loads, and residents who opposed the March approval. Brian Davis, director of Louisville’s office of planning, described the goal as “clear, achievable standards that provide transparency and clarity for both residents and potential developers.” Clarity does have value for investors, since a known ceiling is easier to finance around than a case-by-case fight. But the ceiling sits well below the size of the projects that prompted it.

    Two Cities, Two Tools: Pause Versus Rulebook

    Lexington and Louisville used different instruments on the same day. Lexington’s council suspended its legislative rules to impose a moratorium through Oct. 31 while it drafts zoning amendments: pause first, rules later. Louisville, where a separate committee tabled a data center moratorium earlier in June, went straight to draft regulations and opened a 30-day public comment period before the ordinance reaches Metro Council.

    For developers, the difference matters. A moratorium stops the clock entirely and leaves the eventual rules unknown. Lexington’s amendments could end in controls or, potentially, an outright ban. A draft ordinance keeps applications possible and tells the market roughly what it will face. Neither city has final rules today, and Lexington’s pause alone runs for nearly five months.

    Lexington’s action was triggered by a single transaction, a developer buying an existing local data center property with plans to expand it. Council member Emma Curtis called it “a case of an issue being expedited because of constituent concern and advocacy.” That is a direct statement that resident objections, not a staff study, set the timetable. That is a legitimate part of local democracy. It also means the rules will be written with one specific project in view.

    Square Feet Are a Blunt Proxy for the Grid

    Mayor Gorton stated the concern most clearly: data centers “do not produce many jobs, and have the potential to increase utility costs on local residents.” Both points are common in these debates, and both deserve the same scrutiny applied to developers’ promises of economic benefit. Gorton did not attach figures to either claim. Whether a large facility actually raises household bills depends heavily on how the utility and state regulators assign the cost of new generation and transmission, and neither city’s action settles that question.

    That exposes a limit in Louisville’s approach. Floor area is easy to measure and enforce, but it is only an indirect measure of what worries residents most: electricity demand. Servers built for AI draw far more power per rack than conventional cloud equipment, so two buildings of the same size can place very different loads on the grid. A 500,000-square-foot cap controls land use, traffic and physical footprint. It controls power draw only loosely.

    For industry readers, the practical point is that Kentucky’s largest cities are regulating the most visible dimension of data centers first. Site selection now depends on local square-footage thresholds as well as power availability and land cost, and Louisville’s shift between March and June shows those thresholds can move within a single planning cycle.

    Background

    Kentucky has long hosted smaller data centers supporting services such as cloud storage. The wave of investment in artificial intelligence has brought a different class of facility nationwide: hyperscale data centers that can consume as much electricity as an entire power plant and can span millions of square feet.

    Louisville has already experienced that shift. In March its Planning Commission approved a 1.6 million-square-foot data center in West Louisville despite local pushback, and earlier in June a separate city committee tabled a proposed data center moratorium. Lexington’s action followed a developer’s purchase of an existing local data center property with plans to expand it.

    Sources

    Source: Kentucky’s two largest cities take action to address concerns over hyperscale data centers (Kentucky Lantern), on Lexington’s data center moratorium and Louisville’s draft data center siting ordinance.

  • Seattle’s 369 MW Data Center Freeze Shows Why AI Load Needs Ratepayer Buy-In

    Seattle’s 369 MW Data Center Freeze Shows Why AI Load Needs Ratepayer Buy-In

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Seattle’s city council voted unanimously on June 9 to temporarily stop new giant data centers from being built in the city. Data centers are warehouse-sized buildings packed with computers, and the biggest new ones run artificial intelligence.

    Four companies had asked the city’s electric utility to power five of them. Together, those five could draw as much electricity as about 300,000 homes.

    Council members said their main worry is that everyone else’s power bills could rise to cover the cost. The pause gives the city time to study bills, water use and pollution before it makes any permanent decision.

    On June 9, 2026, the Seattle City Council unanimously adopted two measures aimed at large data centers, the council announced on its official blog. Amended Council Bill 121214, sponsored by Councilmember Eddie Lin and Council President Joy Hollingsworth, places an emergency, temporary freeze on siting new data centers while the city conducts impact studies. The freeze covers facilities used primarily for storing and processing digital data that have more than 20 megavolt-amperes (MVA) of power capacity and require uninterruptible power. It can be extended by six months if necessary.

    A companion measure, amended Resolution 32204 sponsored by Councilmember Debora Juarez, sets a policy framework and directs city departments and the Mayor’s Office to analyze how such facilities affect grid capacity, water use, utility rates, land use, local jobs and public health. The votes followed reports in April that four companies had approached Seattle City Light, the city’s electric utility, about five large data centers with a combined maximum demand of 369 megawatts. Mayor Katie B. Wilson said the mayor’s office looks forward to signing the ordinance, which takes effect immediately under its emergency designation. A public hearing is required within 60 days.

    Executive Summary

    Seattle has paused new large data centers after four companies sought 369 megawatts of capacity for five facilities. By the council’s own comparison, that is enough electricity to power about 300,000 homes. The ordinance uses a 20 MVA threshold, which targets large, always-on computing facilities rather than small server rooms. It takes effect immediately, and the council says it can be extended by six months.

    The notable part is the reason. Every official quoted — the two sponsors, the council president and the mayor — cited utility rates or ratepayers. Environmental and water concerns were also named, but the shared argument was cost. The question the council put to developers is not whether the grid can physically deliver the power. It is who pays to deliver it.

    For AI infrastructure developers, the lesson reaches beyond Seattle. Where the people who govern a utility answer to the people who pay its bills, a large new load has to make a persuasive case to those ratepayers. A service request alone may not be enough.

    The Argument That Carried the Vote Was the Power Bill

    The measures passed 9-0, and the officials behind them made a consistent case. Councilmember Lin said large AI data centers are “driving up utility costs for residents and small businesses” and that “Seattleites should not be subsidizing record profits of large corporations from the AI boom.” Council President Hollingsworth said growth must not come “at the expense of residents and ratepayers.” Mayor Wilson cited “the potential impacts of large-load data centers on utility rates.” Air, water and noise concerns appear alongside, but rates are the thread that runs through every statement.

    Here is the mechanism. When a utility has to add substations, transmission lines or new power supply to serve a single very large customer, its rate design decides who pays. If those costs are spread across the whole customer base, households and small businesses carry part of them. If the tariff assigns them to the new load, the developer carries them. Resolution 32204 directs the city to study exactly these questions, grid capacity and utility rates, before any permanent rules are set. In Seattle the utility is City Light. It sits under the same elected council that voted the pause, and Juarez chairs the committee that oversees it. The people deciding whether 369 megawatts gets connected are directly accountable to the people who would share the bill.

    That is why this matters for AI infrastructure. A developer can secure land, chips and a utility service request and still be stopped at the point where the grid-upgrade bill meets ratepayers. The council has not yet shown Seattle-specific evidence that these five projects would raise rates; producing that evidence is the stated purpose of the studies. The vote still establishes the test. A large AI load in this city will have to show residents it will not cost them money. Developers who can answer that question credibly, for example by paying their own grid costs, will be better placed than those who cannot.

    What 369 Megawatts Means for a City Grid

    The five proposed facilities had a combined maximum demand of 369 megawatts, about 74 megawatts each on average. The actual split among them has not been disclosed. Maximum demand is peak draw, not average use. However, large computing facilities tend to run close to their peak around the clock, which makes them attractive customers for utility revenue and demanding ones for utility planning. The council’s comparison to roughly 300,000 homes shows the scale: this is a city-sized block of new demand, requested by four companies in a single round.

    The 20 MVA threshold sets the boundary. Megavolt-amperes measure electrical capacity and, for data center equipment, are close to megawatts. The definition also requires uninterruptible power, meaning battery and backup systems that keep servers running through outages. Together these criteria capture purpose-built, high-density computing sites while leaving smaller office server rooms outside the definition.

    Colocation Stays, Mega-Sites Wait

    Lin drew an explicit line between “mega AI data centers” and the city’s smaller colocation facilities. Colocation facilities are shared buildings where many organizations rent space for their servers, and Lin said Seattle’s support 911 call centers, municipal operations, hospitals, universities and cancer research. The freeze applies to new siting, so existing facilities keep operating. The open question for colocation operators is how the 20 MVA line will apply to any expansion plans.

    Where the demand goes next is uncertain. Lin spoke of developing safeguards “locally and regionally,” which suggests the city expects the issue to extend beyond its borders. Developers could wait out the studies, redesign projects to meet whatever conditions emerge, or pursue sites elsewhere in the region. None has said publicly which it intends.

    What the Pause Does and Does Not Establish

    Juarez described the measure as a pause for accountability and said it “does not stop AI or data centers.” It is temporary, it requires a public hearing within 60 days, and permanent rules depend on studies that have not yet been done. The council cited “tens of thousands” of residents raising concerns and pointed to rate increases elsewhere in the country. Both are statements of position; the studies are what will test them locally. The developers’ side is equally unsubstantiated so far. The four companies have not publicly set out what they would pay for, what jobs or tax revenue they would bring, or how they would limit the impact on existing customers.

    This is one city’s decision, and it should not be read as a nationwide trend. It is notable because Seattle is a major West Coast technology center, and because the council framed the decision in cost terms rather than opposition to the technology itself. That framing can be answered with evidence, which gives both sides a clear question to argue over.

    Background

    Seattle City Light is the city’s electric utility, and the elected City Council oversees it through a committee currently chaired by Councilmember Debora Juarez. That structure puts decisions about serving very large new customers in the hands of officials who answer directly to local voters and ratepayers.

    Large data centers, especially those built for artificial intelligence, need continuous, high-capacity power, and they have become a growing source of new electricity demand for utilities across the United States. Seattle’s action came two months after reports that four companies had approached City Light about five facilities. Seattle’s decision is one of the more prominent local responses to that growth, because the city is a major West Coast technology center.

    Sources

    Source: City Council passes emergency data center moratorium and policy framework, Seattle City Council Blog, June 9, 2026: the council’s announcement of Council Bill 121214 and Resolution 32204.