Cumberland County Enacts 6-Month Data Center Moratorium

A moratorium on data center projects is in place for the unincorporated areas of Cumberland County through December 15, after the Board of Commissioners voted 7-0 for the moratorium on Monday.

Spectators in the commissioners chamber applauded and cheered the vote, which has been expected since last week. Some held up signs that said “moratorium now!” on one side and “thank you commissioners!” on the other.

The moratorium is intended to pause new data center construction while county staff and commissioners develop an ordinance to regulate the facilities.

While it is in place, county staff will not review site plans for data centers under Cumberland County’s zoning and subdivision ordinances, and it will not issue zoning and building permits for them.

“I don’t think tonight’s vote is rejecting an investment in our community, but making sure that we do our correct homework, that we’re taking a responsible course of action and try and avoid costly mistakes for the next generation,” Commissioner Pavan Patel said.

Under the moratorium, “data center” is defined as a facility “that houses critical information technology infrastructure, including servers, storage systems, networking equipment and associated components to be used for remote storage, processing, or distribution of massive amounts of data needed for cloud services, internet applications, and artificial intelligence workloads.”

The definition does not apply to data processing equipment that is secondary to a business’s primary activity.

As data center construction has spread across the country, the projects have generated concerns and fears among the public because of their heavy use of electricity, their consumption and potential pollution of water for cooling systems, noise from cooling systems, and discomfort over the growth of artificial intelligence.

Activists filled county commissioner hearings and Fayetteville City Council meetings to urge both governments to enact moratoriums.

Some in the public asked for a pause; some wanted outright bans. A few, including a data center developer and the Timothy Bryant, CEO of the Fayetteville Public Works Commission, argued against Cumberland County’s moratorium.

Commissioners thanked the members of the public who were active and voiced their concerns. Their concerns helped shape the moratorium, commissioners Chair Kirk deViere said.

“What we did tonight was to choose to plan before we take action and before we permit,” he said. “We’re writing the standards first so that when a data center looks at Cumberland County, or if it looks at Cumberland County, they will already know the questions to ask and the answers we require on water, on power, on noise and what sits next to our neighborhoods, our schools, and Fort Bragg.”

Data Centers Coming Anyway?

Cumberland County’s moratorium has no effect inside the Fayetteville city limit. The City Council in April postponed discussion of a moratorium until August 25. In the meantime, the council scheduled a public hearing on August 10 to get public feedback on how data center regulations might be crafted.

And there are signals that one or more data centers are on their way:

Terra Nexus Ventures of Charlotte said on its website and in documents submitted to the city that it plans to build one on Custer Avenue in the Eastover area. The land is outside the city limits, but would be annexed. A site plan includes an area labeled “gas generation facility.”

A consulting firm published a job listing last week for an environmental health safety coordinator to work for a hyperscale data center construction project in Fayetteville, described as an “immediate start project.” The LinkedIn listing, which is no longer accepting applications, does not include details about the employer. A “hyperscale” data center is a “massive data center,” according to IBM, with at least 5,000 computer servers, and it “can easily encompass millions of square feet of space.”

A developer from PRSM Group of Charlotte and Arlington, Virginia, said in May at a county commissioners data center public hearing that his company wants to build a data center in Cumberland County. He declined to specify the exact location, other than it would be in an industrial park.

Fort Bragg is one of four military installations in the U.S. under consideration by the Defense Department to provide a 50-year lease to a developer to build and operate a data center.

Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.

Did you find this story useful or interesting? It was made possible by donations from readers like you to the News Foundation of Greater Fayetteville, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation so CityView can bring you more news and information like this.