Developers of a 1.8M-square-foot hyperscale data center near the Arden community in Palm Beach County agreed to a four-month zoning delay after intense neighborhood backlash over noise, safety, and proximity to homes and a new school.
Residents are focused on 24/7 cooling noise, unknown power draw, and water use, while the developer still has not committed to a specific cooling design or disclosed power requirements, despite a binding power service agreement with FPL and explicit references to AI workloads.
This site sits next to an FPL natural gas plant and rock-mining pits, underscoring how AI-era data centers are being pushed into already industrialized corridors but still collide with residential growth at the edges.
Commissioners are questioning whether today’s AI-scale facilities are materially different from legacy “data storage” approved under older zoning, highlighting a regulatory gap between traditional colocation and GPU-heavy, high-density AI builds.
The postponement forces more upfront clarity on noise abatement, cooling strategy, and water consumption instead of deferring them to staff after zoning, and it gives FPL and the unnamed hyperscale end user (likely Big Tech) time to stay in the background.
Local operators are signaling that siting a massive AI-capable data center this close to homes is a nonstarter from an industry best-practice perspective, even as utilities like NextEra/FPL chase multi-gigawatt AI power deals with firms like Google.
The piece is worth reading to see how community pressure, siting risk, and outdated zoning collide with real-world AI data center buildout.
Source: Neighborhood outrage knocks data center off fast track – Stet News
