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by Abigail Hasebroock
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — Palm Beach County officials may soon decide to implement a yearlong moratorium on large-scale data center developments in the county.
This is one of the latest temporary bans of its kind in Florida, where leaders at local and state levels are becoming increasingly focused on regulating data centers.
Palm Beach County could become one of more than a dozen local governments in the state to enact a moratorium. Across Florida, other counties with temporary bans include Bay, Citrus, Clay, Holmes, Jackson, Leon, Nassau, Pasco and Walton, according to a staff analysis by Palm Beach County.
County commissioners are set to review the moratorium language through a first reading Thursday.
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Some local governments followed a path similar to the one Palm Beach County may be on — implementing a moratorium after pushing back against a controversial data center proposal.
The Palm Beach County moratorium proposal came after the rejection of Project Tango, a large-scale data center project proposed west of Loxahatchee. Commissioners shot down the project after citing its incompatibility with the area, concerns about noise and water usage, and outdated county rules.
The demand for data centers housing powerful computers has soared across the nation in recent years, with estimates varying on how many data centers exist in the United States.
Cleanview, a market intelligence company that tracks data center development, states there are nearly 1,300 operating data centers in the U.S. with more than 2,000 planned projects. The Pew Research Center said the U.S. has more than 3,000 operational data centers, while the policy advocacy group, American Edge Project, said there are more than 4,000 active data centers with nearly 2,800 that are announced or under construction.
Though traditional server farms have been around for more than two decades, large-scale artificial intelligence data centers have only popped up in recent years, according to Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law organization.
AI data centers “are entirely different in terms of the equipment and technology within the data center, the services they provide, as well as the impacts they have on our land, energy, water, air and acoustic environment,” Earthjustice Senior Attorney Christina Reichert wrote in a letter to Palm Beach County commissioners in June.
“To put it simply, a traditional data center is like building a single-family home, while a hyperscale AI data center is like compressing multiple industrial sites onto a single plot of land.”
The arrival of these newer, larger data centers have raised questions about impacts that local and state officials can’t always answer, which is why moratoriums have entered the conversation.
Assistant County Attorney Darren Leiser said in an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel that the county’s land-development code does not yet have rules about developing hyperscale, artificial intelligence data centers.
The goal of the moratorium, then, is “fairly straightforward,” he said: It would give county officials time to figure out what data centers should look like.
According to county documents, the code revisions could include requirements for large-scale data centers such as increased landscape buffers and separations, sound studies, development agreements and more.
“Under Florida law, a moratorium, to be legal, needs to be done in conjunction with changes to code. So that’s exactly what’s happening here,” Leiser said.
After county commissioners review the moratorium Thursday, they’ll have an adoption hearing on Sept. 24, where they will vote whether to approve or deny it.
If approved, the yearlong moratorium would mean “we will not accept or process any applications for large-scale data centers during that time period,” Leiser said.
In the meantime, “it’s going to be a pretty intensive undertaking to figure out what changes we’re going to be making to the code,” he said.
During a county zoning commission meeting on Aug. 6, a majority of the zoning commissioners approved adding a large-scale data center definition to the county’s code along with language establishing the moratorium.
The county’s current definition takes guidance from state law, which says a large-load data center is any one that has an “anticipated monthly peak load of 50 megawatts or more.” One megawatt could power anywhere from 600 to 1,000 “average” homes in developed countries, according to energy experts.
Many zoning commissioners were concerned that the broad definition could create issues — what if, for example, a developer wanted to submit an application for a 49 megawatt data center, one zoning commissioner suggested.
“The way that I view this (moratorium) is sort of like a doorstop,” Zoning Commissioner Christopher Kammerer said at the meeting on Aug. 6.
Kammerer’s hope, he said, is that county officials work on a more accurate definition of a hyperscale data center “because my view is it’s not really defined in the Florida statutes.”
During the meeting, Sue Loyzelle, a resident of the Arden community in northern Palm Beach County, urged the county not to “rush the language of this importance.”
“If the language is weak, unclear and incomplete, the consequences will fall on the public, not on the applicants seeking approvals,” she said. “The moratorium period should be used to gather the best experts available, compare approaches, identify weaknesses, close loopholes and develop the strongest enforceable protections possible.”
In a county analysis prepared for the Aug. 6 zoning meeting, county staff identified nine counties in Florida that have adopted moratoriums “with the intent to establish regulations for data centers.”
The duration of the counties’ temporary bans vary. According to Palm Beach County’s staff analysis:
And according to Florida Data Centers, an independent tracker, other local governments also have adopted moratoriums in recent months. Those include Franklin, Flagler, Santa Rosa, Hernando and Sarasota counties along with the city of Zephyrhills.
“What these local governments are doing is setting aside time. They’re giving themselves the time that they need in order to create the regulations for AI data center development because it doesn’t exist yet,” Reichert, Earthjustice’s senior attorney, told the Sun Sentinel.
Some governments have decided to prohibit data centers altogether. Commissioners in Wakulla County in June reportedly passed an ordinance prohibiting the permitting construction and operation of data centers across the entire county.
In Reichert’s letter sent to county commissioners, Reichert also wrote about how other counties have opposed AI data center projects, including the 1,218-acre data center proposal, Project Jarvis, in St. Lucie County. The planning board voted against it, and the project later was withdrawn.
At the state level, Gov. Ron DeSantis in May signed a bill creating the state’s first regulatory framework on large-scale data centers. The law protects Floridians against AI data center development in two key ways, Reichert said.
For one, AI data centers have to “pay their own way” to be part of an electricity grid. This would prevent against burdening residents with higher utility bills.
“One of the things that we’ve seen across the country is incredibly high increases in electricity rates because of AI data center development,” Reichert said.
The other primary piece of the law mandates that large-scale data centers cannot use drinkable water for cooling systems; rather, they have to use gray, or reused, water to prevent the computers from becoming overheated.
“We know that existing AI data centers have a heat problem,” Reichert said. “Most of the time they use a very water-intensive cooling system. We’re talking 5 million to 8 million gallons of water per day, which is an extraordinary amount of water, especially in Florida where we have droughts and we rely on an aquifer system that is already under strain.”
The extent of the law’s intended protections will be put to the test as it’s implemented, Reichert said, but having received “some guidance from the state Legislature on how to approach these kinds of development was very helpful. It’s certainly better than what we had before.”
What the new state law does not do is dictate how municipalities should regulate data centers, according to Leiser, the Palm Beach County attorney.
“I believe it’s going to be up to us,” he said. “It’s leaving it to the local governments to make those determinations.”
Ahead of a possible moratorium adoption, the owner of the proposed Project Tango site, PBA Holdings, is appealing the county’s denial from July.
During the meeting July 15, experts speaking on behalf of Project Tango said it would not adversely affect the surrounding community.
The Project Tango officials said:
Now, though, PBA Holdings is citing the Florida Land Use and Environmental Dispute Resolution Act, which allows the owner an opportunity to appeal a decision that “is unreasonable or unfairly burdens the use of the owner’s real property.”
In a letter sent to county commissioners on Aug. 5, Ethan Loeb, an attorney representing PBA Holdings, wrote the property is “situated in an ideal — if not the best — location in Palm Beach County for a large-scale data center.”
The proposed site sits on about 200 acres of industrial land just north of Southern Boulevard near 20 Mile Bend. To the east is Arden and Saddle View Elementary School. To the west is Florida Power and Light’s energy plant, and to the north is a rock mining site.
In his letter, Loeb argues that the commission’s rejection of the project on July 15 was due to vehement public opposition and “unpromulgated,” or unofficial, county criteria.
“It is readily apparent,” Loeb wrote, that the county commissioners reviewed the Project Tango application based not on preexisting county rules “but measured against what the Board wished those provisions were — namely, a total ban on data centers (as will be effected by the moratorium).”
Loeb requests the county move forward with a special magistrate hearing.
The ultimate relief, Loeb writes, would be approving Project Tango.
2026 Sinclair, Inc.
