Cumberland County leaders will again on Thursday consider imposing a moratorium on the construction of data centers. They meet at 3 p.m. in the County Courthouse.
This comes as the City of Fayetteville moves closer to enacting regulations that would set the conditions under which data centers may be built within the city—and out of reach of any county moratorium.
County leaders since March have been considering a moratorium to prevent data center construction while the county staff develops regulations for the projects.
Meanwhile, until a moratorium or regulations are put into place, data center developers are allowed to build them with no constraints other than existing zoning and other local regulations. These regulations generally don’t take into account the effects data centers have had on their communities in terms of noise from their cooling systems, high water consumption in their cooling systems, their potential for polluting the water they use, and their high electricity consumption.
While data centers power modern life, from storing records to operating artificial intelligence services, their rapid spread in recent years has stirred concern among the general public. Cities and counties around the state have enacted moratoriums, and the North Carolina House has advanced a bill to regulate them.
Protesters picketed about data centers outside Fayetteville City Hall on Monday, then loudly voiced their concerns during the City Council meeting as council members debated and then voted to regulate these projects instead of imposing a temporary ban.
At least two data centers are reported to be under consideration for Cumberland County. Also, Fort Bragg has asked the private sector to submit proposals for a data center to be built on post.
County commissioners previously considered a moratorium in April and May, then directed county staff to work on it further following a public hearing on May 18.
A memo from County Attorney Rick Moorefield advised commissioners to consider the latest proposed moratorium, to pick a duration for the moratorium, and schedule it for a vote at their June 15 meeting.
Some provisions of the proposed county data center moratorium:
- It defines a data center as a facility or facilities that houses critical information technology infrastructure. This includes computer equipment and systems that “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 include businesses with data processing equipment whose use is “incidental and subordinate” to their primary operations, and merely support the operations.
- During the moratorium, the county is to work with electric utilities to discuss their capacity to supply data centers and how electricity rates may be affected. Also, county staff and officials may visit data centers to learn more about them, and the county will continue to draft an ordinance to regulate data centers.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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