The Data Center Freezes Didn't Stop the Boom. They Set Its Price.

In August 2025, the city council of St. Charles, Missouri, banned new data centers for a year. The vote came after residents discovered that the developers' agreements with the city included nondisclosure agreements hiding the client's name — a Fortune 100 company, still unidentified — and that Mayor Dan Borgmeyer was related to the site's owner ^[1]. He defended the year as a test of the project's own sales pitch.

This is probably a good step on the part of the council just to let everybody step back and take a breath. If the project is as great as it is supposed to be, then a year won’t make any difference. — Dan Borgmeyer

In the thirteen months since, at least a dozen jurisdictions have passed freezes of their own ^[2]. Indianapolis halted new data centers through 2027 and set aside $150,000 to study them. Calvert County froze for six months after Amazon withdrew a $22 billion proposal. Mississauga's council voted unanimously for a one-year halt that stopped a 40-megawatt project in its tracks ^[3]. The freeze is now an ordinary instrument of local government, and the officials passing it have been frank about what it is for. In Kalamazoo, the city attorney, Aaron Leal, has been precise about what the freeze is.

a moratorium is just a delay, it’s not a ban on such developments. — Aaron Leal

Kalamazoo's city manager, Malcolm Hankins, has described it as the start of a rewrite of city policy ^[4]. Roanoke's mayor, Adam Melton, describes the same instrument as a study period.

During that year, what it does is it gives you time basically to research it and see if it’s good or bad for the community. — Adam Melton

Dorchester County paired its one-year freeze with consultants hired to write permanent zoning ^[4]. That is not the language of a wall. It is the language of a deadline, and the deadlines have been met. Jerome Township, Ohio, used the time exactly as billed. Its nine-month ban, passed in September 2025 over four planned projects, was spent moving data centers from a use allowed by right to a conditional one — a reclassification that means every future project now needs a case-by-case hearing, with conditions, instead of arriving automatically. Trustee Wezlynn Davis argued the centers bring few jobs and little tax return, after county abatements had already cut the township's commercial tax revenue; Amazon, which operates two centers there, said it was surprised ^[5]. Wisconsin went after the tool that set off St. Charles: the nondisclosure agreement. In March, a state senate committee approved a bill barring local governments from signing NDAs with data center developers, after at least five communities had used one (in Beloit, a project code-named "Project Corn Maze" stayed secret for more than a year), and a similar ban is pending in Minnesota. The mayor of Port Washington, who refused to sign NDAs for the $15 billion campus Vantage is building with OpenAI and Oracle, had already run the experiment without one ^[6].

If you’ve got the courage and you push back and say, ‘Listen, we’re just not going to do it,’ (the data center developers) will find a way to operate without having to sign an NDA. — Ted Neitzke IV

By August, Volusia County, Florida, had stopped pausing altogether. Its council directed staff to draft a permanent ban on large data centers (anything drawing 50 megawatts or more at peak) in unincorporated areas, citing noise, infrastructure and water ^[7]. The scaffolding keeps falling away: a pause to write rules, a law to end the secrecy, now no pause at all. The industry spent those thirteen months drafting too, though what it wrote were offers. In August 2025, the same month St. Charles voted, Google signed the country's first demand-response deals for AI data centers, with Indiana Michigan Power and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Demand response is what it sounds like: a big user agrees to shift or curb its power use when the grid is most strained, and Google's version moves non-urgent computing off peak hours ^[8]. The company has been plain about what the flexibility buys.

It allows large electricity loads like data centers to be interconnected more quickly, helps reduce the need to build new transmission and power plants, and helps grid operators more effectively and efficiently manage power grids. — Google

By March, Nvidia and the startup Emerald AI had built the same idea into hardware, launching flexible-grid AI factories with six energy companies, designed to feed power back to the grid at peak and pitched as freeing up to 100 gigawatts of capacity ^[9]. This week the bargain acquired an institution: the AI Energy Management Alliance, founded by Emerald AI, Google and Nvidia, with 18 members including Anthropic, National Grid, AES and NRG, formally offering peak-time demand reduction to state and federal regulators in exchange for larger and faster grid connections, starting with a 100-megawatt power-flexible AI factory in Virginia ^[10]. The offer is aimed past the county boards, at terms that federal regulators and regional grid operators have spent the same year drafting from above ^[11][12]. In public, the industry still contests the bans; its trade group, the Data Center Coalition, has spent the year arguing that the freezes scare investment away ^[2].

Rather than enacting moratoriums which will discourage investment and send a signal to the industry that the community is closed for business, the community and its local leaders should work with the industry and all stakeholders to establish reasonable regulatory frameworks that meet the needs of the community without deterring the industry and the benefits it can bring. — Data Center Coalition

But even the industry's own anti-freeze brief ends by asking for rules, which was the counties' conclusion, not the industry's old one. Now the freeze wave has reached the boom's own capital. Loudoun County, Virginia — the center of Data Center Alley, the server-farm belt west of Washington — has watched employment rise 17.4 percent since early 2020, with construction jobs up 63 percent ^[13]. This week its board of supervisors voted 7 to 1, with one abstention, to draft a 12-month pause on new data center applications. Two supervisors are moving to eliminate the county's grandfather clause, the provision that lets projects already in the pipeline skip the public hearings newer ones must face. And the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers is fighting the pause, warning it could jeopardize more than 1,000 jobs ^[14]. The boom's own coalition is no longer arguing about whether there will be terms. It is arguing about the terms — the union over more than a thousand jobs, the supervisors over which projects must face a public hearing. Nor is Loudoun alone at this end of the arc: New Kent County's board chairman opposes new data centers outright, and next door in King William, supervisors shelved a pro-development ordinance indefinitely after residents pushed back ^[15]. The boom is still finding open ground: Meta's project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, has lifted private employment 41 percent and average weekly wages 61 percent since the first quarter of 2025 ^[13]. Richland Parish kept its door open; where a door stays shut, the industry has shown it can open one in court. The $16 billion Stargate consortium sued Saline Township, Michigan, over its rezoning denial and settled last October into a consent judgment (a settlement carrying a court's authority) that lets construction proceed in exchange for $14 million in community benefits ^[16]. And on the same days other cities were freezing, some councils kept approving, on terms of their own: Franklin County, Missouri, approved two campuses with new noise standards and $20,000-a-day fines for violations, and New Morgan, Pennsylvania, unanimously created a data center overlay district (a mapped zone carrying extra rules for one kind of building) over the objection of more than 200 residents ^[17]. The boom routes around closed counties, and its landings now carry a locally written price. Thirteen months have graded Borgmeyer's test. The boom is not stopping; it is landing, in parishes that kept the door open and in townships it beat in court. The year made no difference to whether the boom lands, and all the difference to what it lands with.