Columbia County is weighing three zoning variances for new data centers, with growth-minded officials on one side and rural residents pushing back hard on the other.
The projects are framed around rising demand for data processing and AI workloads, but local debate centers on noise, light, traffic, and broader environmental impact rather than GPU density or facility design.
Officials argue that state and local regulations will keep operational disruption in check, implying tight constraints on power, cooling, and noise envelopes typical of modern data center builds.
The county is selling these sites as tax-base engines, promising data center revenue will offset residential property taxes, which is a common playbook for landing large-scale infrastructure.
No specific vendors, hyperscalers, or energy arrangements are disclosed, so power sourcing, grid impact, and potential GPU-heavy AI clusters remain unknown.
The outcome of this planning commission vote will signal how far this community is willing to bend on industrial-scale digital infrastructure in a rural context.
Worth reading in full for the local regulatory and community context around siting new data centers.
Source: Columbia County Planning Commission to vote on disputed data centers
