Palm Beach County commissioners voted 6-0 on Thursday to impose a one-year moratorium on new data center applications, pausing planning and construction while officials study the projects’ effects on electricity bills, noise and the environment.
The county, home to President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and the town of Palm Beach’s 65 billionaires, is among the wealthiest in the nation. The vote comes weeks after Trump warned that communities rejecting data centers would “end up being backwards and poor.”
“If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don’t approve of data centers,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Sept. 4.
The moratorium is not a permanent ban. It gives commissioners time to complete environmental impact reviews before updating zoning rules that determine where data centers can be located. It applies to any new applications for facilities with an anticipated peak electrical load of at least 50 megawatts.
A Palm Beach County resident summed up the tension at Thursday’s meeting:
“Many communities want the economic benefits a data center brings, but we all fear the higher power bills, the negative environmental impact, disruptive noise, the depletion of water resources.”
Trump has made expanding data centers and speeding up artificial intelligence development a central part of his agenda, arguing the U.S. cannot afford to fall behind China in the AI race and that resistance to data centers only helps Beijing. Data centers house the computing hardware that stores and processes information for AI systems.
The county approved construction of Project Tango, a proposed 202-acre AI data center about 20 miles from Mar-a-Lago, in 2016. The site sits near an elementary school and residential homes. In July, commissioners voted 6-1 to reject a proposal to expand Project Tango by roughly 1.67 million square feet, though existing approvals for two 100,000-square-foot buildings remain in place.
Residents said Project Tango was the main driver behind the push for a moratorium, with several calling for no further data center construction at all.
“I think the best good neighbor data center is no data center,” resident Sergei Kelly said. “We have the Everglades to our South and to our West. The coast to our East. I don’t think data centers, especially large data centers they want to build desperately should be here at all.”
The White House and Palm Beach County Commissioners have not yet responded to requests for comment.
