Charlotte City Council Leans Toward Extending Data Center Moratorium

The city of Charlotte appears headed toward an extended freeze on data center development.

Charlotte City Council members held a public hearing on Monday to get community input ahead of a vote to extend the city’s 150-day data center moratorium by up to 11 months. Some council members voiced their support for the proposal.

 “I think we need the time, and it’s clear,” Council Member Ed Driggs said at the hearing. “We don’t have any policy right now, and we’re starting from scratch, so we should give ourselves that time.” 

The moratorium is slated to expire on Nov. 5. A vote on whether to extend it will be held on Oct. 26. 

Charlotte enacted its moratorium in June following months of local outcry against data centers, with opponents citing significant water and power usage, noise and light pollution, and potential community displacement as key reasons to protest their build-out. 

“With the demand of artificial intelligence, we are seeing data center demand drastically go up, and we must put protections in place to protect our communities, our pocketbooks and our quality of life,” Council Member Dimple Ajmera said at the hearing.

The catalyst for the heavy opposition in the area was American Tower Corp.’s proposal for a 40K SF facility near Reedy Creek Nature Preserve in East Charlotte, which has now been paused. 

Cristopher Scalise, co-founder of Stop East Charlotte Data Center, said he hoped the council would “do the right thing and go at least another year” because there is still “an enormous, enormous amount of work” left to do. “We’re not ready to move forward as a city on this issue,” he said at the hearing.

Data center moratoriums have spread rapidly across North Carolina in the past several months, with Raleigh enacting one just last week. There are 367 active moratoriums nationwide. North Carolina has been a hot spot for development, with more than 90 data centers, 40 of them in Charlotte, according to Data Center Map. 

When the moratorium began this summer, Driggs told Bisnow that an extension to one year would better prepare the city for future data center development.

Members of local labor unions who attended the Monday hearing said the moratorium should end next month as planned, as construction laborers need work and should be protected by local regulations. But council members indicated that North Carolina is not a pro-union state and would proceed with the vote on the extension as scheduled.

Council Member JD Mazuera Arias said there’s more to be done to protect against the negative impacts of data centers and emphasized the potential for the city to work together to lobby the state legislature.

“There’s a real great potential here for coalition building, to advocate for more than what we can do currently and what we’re limited to do as a local government based on state statute,” he said.

In the meantime, he said, “I do support the extension of a moratorium, and I look forward to voting for it when the time comes.”