How Local Governments Are Pausing Data Centers

We looked at nearly 100 communities across more than 30 states that have moved to pause data-center development. Their moratoria tell a strikingly consistent story.

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Across the country, local governments have spent the past year reaching for the same instrument to confront the same problem. A review of nearly 100 local moratoria or similar — drawn from communities in more than 30 states — tells a story of local governments slowing down a rush of data centers and how they are doing it.

The measures were written independently, but they read as though the authors had been comparing notes.

These communities include large cities such as Seattle, Minneapolis, Denver, New Orleans, Detroit, Nashville, Indianapolis, Baltimore, and Cincinnati, and small rural counties such as Mercer and Oliver in North Dakota, Iron County in Utah, and Adair County in Iowa. They come from Democratic strongholds and deep-red jurisdictions alike. What unites them is not politics but a shared judgment that data-center growth arrived faster than local rules could handle it.

The dominant response is the temporary moratorium. Local elected leaders opted for a pause, usually six to eighteen months, on accepting or processing applications and permits for data-center use while the local government writes new rules.

Tulsa’s ordinance declares a 365-day moratorium. New Haven’s runs twelve months. Linn County, Iowa, set its pause to run until January 1, 2028. Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee, tied its moratorium directly to two pending bills that would define and regulate the use.

The pauses run from a month and a half to more than two years, and no two read quite alike.

• Coachella, California — a 45-day emergency moratorium, the shortest of the group, adopted to buy time before applications could arrive.
• Bangor, Maine — a 180-day moratorium the council adopted after finding the city “suddenly experiencing increased development pressure from data centers.”
• Iron County, Utah — a 180-day “temporary land use regulation” halting new data-center applications while the county studies the use.
• Madison, Wisconsin — a twelve-month moratorium its drafters describe as “a planning tool that will give the City time to set responsible rules for a new use.”
• DeSoto County, Florida — a temporary one-year moratorium on the acceptance, processing, or review of data-center applications.
• Dubuque County, Iowa — a one-year moratorium running May 26, 2026 to May 26, 2027, covering “Small, Medium, Large-Scale, and Hyperscale” data centers alike.
• Mercer County, North Dakota — a one-year moratorium, adopted to hold until “zoning ordinances and public policy were better established.”
• Rosemount, Minnesota — a one-year, city-wide moratorium adopted April 21, 2026, to let the city “effectively regulate data centers moving forward.”
• Dane County, Wisconsin — an eighteen-month moratorium on receiving or granting data-center applications, among the longest pauses in the set.
• Miami County, Indiana — an open-ended moratorium that “shall remain in effect until” the county writes rules for the use.

Tulsa’s moratorium requires the planning office to report to the council roughly every sixty days on its progress rewriting the rules, a structure meant to keep a temporary measure from quietly becoming permanent.

Others build in fixed expiration dates, and several allow the governing body to grant case-by-case exemptions “for good cause shown.” The design cuts both ways: the moratorium is a deadline for the local government as much as a constraint on the developer, and the documents are unusually candid about why.

Read More: A Pause Near the Chesapeake Bay—For Data Centers

Electricity is a priority for most. Denver’s moratorium warns that data centers “have the potential to create an unmanageable burden on critical energy and water resources,” and commits the city to advocate that “energy and water ratepayers are billed fairly and costs are not shifted to existing customers.”

Cost-shifting onto existing ratepayers appears again and again.

Read More: What a Hyperscale Data Center Actually Needs: Power, Water, Land

Water is another key concern. Communities cite the volume required for cooling and, in agricultural areas, the risk of aquifer depletion. Noise, vibration, heat, backup-generator fuel storage, lighting, and around-the-clock operation fill out the list. Several of the moratoria note a point that is easy to overlook: data centers employ relatively few people for the land and resources they consume.

Many local codes were written before large-scale data centers existed and never defined them. Nashville’s moratorium notes that without a specific classification, data centers “may be administratively classified under existing use categories that were not written to address the scale, intensity, operational characteristics, or impacts of modern data-center development.” Closing that gap is the stated purpose of most of the pauses.

The pauses are rarely absolute. Tulsa’s moratorium carves out “Project Anthem,” an economic-development project already approved by the council, along with one additional pending data center. The exception is a reminder that local governments are still weighing the incentives — jobs, tax base, prestige projects — that drew the industry in the first place.

Linn County, Iowa, used its moratorium to signal openness to data centers paired with nuclear generation, stating that nothing in it is “intended to preclude” future rules authorizing data centers “as accessory and/or supportive uses to nuclear energy generating facilities.” It is one of the clearer instances of a local government trying to steer the buildout rather than simply resist it.

The clustering is regional as well as national.

New Haven’s moratorium notes that other Connecticut municipalities — Groton, Morris, and West Haven — had already studied or adopted their own pauses, evidence that once one community acts, neighbors follow.

The same pattern shows up in Michigan, where townships including Howell, Meridian, Ypsilanti, and Taylor appear on the list, and across Indiana, Illinois, Georgia, and North Carolina, each represented multiple times.

The procedural footprints vary. Some moratoria are fully enacted with recorded votes; Minneapolis passed its on a divided council in June 2026, with the mayor declining to sign. Others are resolutions urging administrative action, as in Detroit, drafted at a council member’s request. Still others remain motions directing a planning commission to hold hearings, as in New Orleans. Counting them together — passed and merely considered — is what produces the figure of nearly 100.

What the collection does not show is a settled national policy. There is no federal framework in these documents and little state-level uniformity; the action is almost entirely municipal and county. Each jurisdiction is solving the problem on its own timeline, using language borrowed loosely from its neighbors. The result is a patchwork that the data-center industry now has to navigate one county at a time.

For an industry racing to build capacity for artificial intelligence and cloud computing, the moratoria are a source of friction that did not exist two years ago. Most are temporary by design and set to expire once local rules are in place.

Whether they resolve into workable standards or harden into permanent bans will be decided community by community, in the same council chambers that produced this first wave of paper.