Palm Beach County commissioners voted 7-0 today to enact a one-year moratorium on massive artificial intelligence data centers, buying time to draft stricter and permanent land-use standards for high-density tech projects.
Under the county’s new definition, any facility expected to use 50 megawatts of electricity or more at peak demand is classified as “large-scale.” And to stop developers from dodging regulations by splitting projects, the county will evaluate power usage across an entire property site rather than parcel by parcel.
The county is rewriting zoning codes to control exactly where data centers are allowed to operate, how close they can be to homes and schools, and how much noise or environmental disruption they can create…