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Palm Beach County — home to President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago — passed a one-year moratoriam on the planning and construction of data centers as commissioners seek to conduct a thorough review of data centers’ impacts on the environment, noise pollution, and electric bills.
The moratorium, passed on Thursday, comes just weeks after Trump said that communities that reject data centers would “end up being backwards and poor.” Among the wealthiest counties in the country, Palm Beach County includes the town of Palm Beach, home to 65 billionaires.
“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 Sep. 4.
The Palm Beach County Commissioners’ 6-0 vote doesn’t put a permanent ban on data centers. Instead, it gives county leadership time to conduct environmental impact reviews before updating zoning rules for where data centers can be built.
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The moratorium applies to all new applications for data centers with an anticipated peak electrical load of at least 50 megawatts.
“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,” a Palm Beach County resident shared during Thursday’s meeting.
Trump has made expanding data centers and accelerating artificial intelligence a cornerstone of his agenda, arguing that the United States cannot afford to lose the AI race to China and warning that opposition to data centers only benefits Beijing.
Data centers are the physical backbone of artificial intelligence, housing thousands of powerful computers that store and process digital information while providing the computing power needed to train and run AI systems.
Palm Beach County has already approved in 2016 the construction of “Project Tango” — a proposed 202-acre AI data center, which is located 20 miles from Mar-a-Lago. The data center will also be built near an elementary school and homes.
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In July, commissioners voted 6-1 to reject a proposal to expand Project Tango by roughly 1.67 million square feet. But existing approvals for two 100,000-square-foot data center buildings remain in place.
Residents at the Thursday meeting said Project Tango was the driving factor behind the push to hit pause on data center project approvals, with several residents advocating for no data centers to be built.
“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.”
Fox News Digital reached to the White House and Palm Beach County Commissioners for comment.
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