CHARLOTTE — Charlotte City Council voted Monday night unanimously in favor of a 150-day moratorium on data centers.
This will not impact any data centers currently under construction.
“We’re not part of that moratorium that was just passed,” resident Antoinette Mingo said. “That is a 2.5 million square feet data center. We have to suffer the consequences.”
And councilmembers say work must be done.
“We need to do our homework,” Dimple Ajmera said. “These facilities can be large, consume significant energy,” Kimberly Owens said.
Members of the tech industry worry a five-month moratorium on data center development could hinder future projects at a time when there is growing demand for artificial intelligence.
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Despite that, several members of Charlotte’s city council have been outspoken about their support for a 150-day pause.
That includes Councilwoman Victoria Watlington.
In a video she posted on Facebook Sunday, she explained why she fully supports a moratorium: to gather evidence that shows whether hyperscale data centers pose an imminent threat to public health and safety.
However, she said she does not support what some of her colleagues on council would rather see happen: going a big step further by also freezing projects that are already permitted.
She said stopping projects already in the pipeline could put the city at serious risk of legal consequences, which would be at the taxpayers’ expense.
“I know what some people will say, and I promise you I get it. We know these pending projects will cause harm, so why wait for that to happen? That makes sense, it does on paper,” Watlington said in the video. “But anticipated harm is the reason we need the 150 days, to build evidence, project by project and create standards that hold. It is not, however, the legal bar for revoking a vested right. Those are two different things and law treats them differently.”
In the video, she went on to say the city council should parity what the state legislature is doing.
Last week, Channel 9 reported the House passed the Rate Payer Protections Act, which requires data centers to recycle water, pay for power grid updates, and more.