The Cheatham County Commission unanimously approved adding data centers to the list of extensive impact facilities defined in the county zoning resolution at its Feb. 2 meeting held at the Cheatham County Courthouse.
At the Jan. 20 commission workshop, attorney Bill Herbert and Preserve Cheatham County leader Tracy O’Neill urged the commission to pass the amendment.
“We’re seeing how these data centers are operating all across the country. We can look to Memphis, the X AI facility as a testing ground to see how fast something can be built, with how little oversight. That is a fiasco down there, and what we’re seeing with these data centers, particularly AI, is they use an enormous amount of resources. I mean gigawatts of power and they often look at communities with little protection or no protection in zoning. Memphis has zoning, and they were still able to exploit those loopholes. So, this is why I feel like this is a necessary first step, but it’s not the last. We need to go further. Defining data centers in the zoning code is just not enough,” O’Neill said…