The Data Center Freezes Turned Out to Be Drafting Sessions

A grandfather clause is one sentence of boilerplate, and it always says the same thing: anything applied for before the moratorium — the temporary freeze on new approvals — takes effect still gets its hearing. In Marietta, Georgia, that sentence beat a room full of protesters: the city council approved a data center 5-2 in August while its own six-month freeze sat on the books, because the application predated it. In Fairfield, Alabama, a Patmos facility in a former Walmart is exempt from the local freeze for the same reason. ^[1] As blockades, the first year's freezes lost in every fight the record shows. Little Rock's freeze died after the regional Chamber of Commerce president, Jay Chesshir, argued against it, and even he conceded the point underneath. ^[2]

regardless of our opinions about data centers, I hope we can agree that the size, the potential impact, is unlike anything we have seen. — Kathy Webb

The freezes did not stop; their stated purpose changed. In the newest round of moratoriums (Gilroy, California; Bemidji, Minnesota; Pocomoke City, Maryland), officials are stating the purpose plainly: the freeze buys time to write permanent standards, with the community in the room while they're written. ^[3]

Community members have raised important questions and concerns about how Gilroy should evaluate projects of this size and intensity in the future, and we are taking that feedback seriously. — Greg Bozzo

That is the turn the first year's scoreboard missed, and what the recess produced is now arriving as law. On September 11, St. Louis passed its first data-center zoning code unanimously (size classifications, noise and lighting standards, renewable-energy mandates) and in a companion bill banned the city from offering its own tax incentives to future projects. The code's one exemption, for the already-approved $3 billion Armory development, is the grandfather clause learned from rather than repeated: the exemption carries conditions, closed-loop cooling and half the project's power from renewables within five years. Then on Monday, Loudoun County, Virginia — the industry's home turf, the place known as Data Center Alley — moved to pause all new applications and to eliminate the grandfather clause that let projects filed before March 2025 proceed by right, no public hearing, no board vote. Those projects would now face both. ^[4][5] The pause is also hardening into permanence. In late August, four Republican members of the St. Joseph County council in Indiana filed to convert a two-year moratorium into a permanent ban on hyperscale facilities — the largest class of data center — and found themselves aligned with the council's Democrats; Bulloch County, Georgia, is moving the same way. Statehouses have caught up: at least 375 data-center bills have been introduced this year, more than the previous three years combined, most of them aimed at restricting the industry. In Ohio, the House is moving to strip the industry's sales-tax exemption over Governor Mike DeWine's veto, and a separate bill proposes exit fees and minimum capacity commitments for operators. ^[6][7][8] The industry, for its part, has begun pricing this in. In Rapid City, South Dakota, where the planning commission is drafting a ban on hyperscale facilities over 50 megawatts within city limits and a prohibition on evaporative cooling, industry representatives backed the direction of the rules, if not every line — and the commission responded by tabling the item for sixty days of open houses and working sessions. That is the endgame surfacing: not prohibition, but terms, priced into the permit. ^[4] The demand has moved with it, from whether a data center gets built to on what terms. The hinge word surfaced in April, when Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia opened an inquiry at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that oversees the country's power markets, into whether data centers are raising household electricity bills. His demand centered on the tech industry's promises to pay for its own power. ^[9]

Georgians are suffering from sky-high power bills. — Jon Ossoff

The word that matters there is enforceability. A pledge to cover your own power costs means whatever a regulator can compel it to mean, and the second wave is building the compulsion: Ohio's exit-fee proposal is the same instinct written as statute, and the street version arrived this week in Dallas, where a group called Humans First — led by Amy Kremer, a former Tea Party leader — launched a 34-stop "AI Data Center Revolt" bus tour at the Republican National Convention, demanding that officials be barred from signing nondisclosure agreements during project negotiations and that no tax dollars fund construction. ^[10] None of this runs one way everywhere, and the exceptions make the same point. In March, Joliet, Illinois, approved a $20 billion, 1.8-gigawatt campus on 795 acres of farmland by 8-1 — but the deal arrived pre-loaded, with an annexation agreement spelling out infrastructure, services, and community benefits, and the lone dissenter objecting to the risk his district was absorbing, not to the project's existence. ^[11] The map has real gaps, too: San Jose's mayor has approved more than a million square feet of data-center development and partnered with PG&E to secure 2,000 megawatts, and at an energy conference in Bismarck last week North Dakota officials were courting a developer they project will become the state's largest property taxpayer. Some places are still competing to absorb the buildout. But competition is itself a terms fight — the question in those rooms is what the town gets. ^[12][13] In the record, one move still hasn't surfaced: a state preempting its own towns. What has surfaced runs the other way. Pennsylvania is handing its municipalities a model ordinance they can adopt, plus mandatory annual water and electricity reporting backed by $10,000-a-day penalties; Maine's legislature has advanced a permit freeze on the largest facilities until October 2027, and South Carolina has a statewide moratorium bill on the table. ^[14][15] Washington, for its part, shows one accelerator in the record: last year the EPA reinterpreted the Clean Air Act so builders can start non-emissions construction — pads and foundations — before their air permits are issued. ^[16] A real shortcut, aimed at a step this fight has already passed. The decisions now driving it sit with a zoning board, a rate case, and a public utility commission — the state board that sets what households pay for power — and an air permit can reach none of them. It can speed the concrete. Everything that decides this fight is happening in rooms it cannot enter.