Birmingham is considering a 270-day pause on new data center builds, expansions, and establishments within city limits.
This comes right after nearby Bessemer greenlit rezoning for a $14 billion data center campus, one of the largest private investments in Alabama.
The city wants time to tighten zoning, land use, and infrastructure rules so large compute campuses, including AI-heavy GPU builds, don’t outpace power, cooling, and neighborhood constraints.
They plan to lean on best practices from other cities, which likely means stricter site-selection criteria, clearer standards on energy and noise, and more predictable review processes for operators.
For AI infra players, this signals that metro areas will increasingly ask for smarter grid integration and community fit before approving dense GPU or cloud expansions.
The public hearing on January 13, 2026, will be an early read on how open Birmingham will be to future high-density data center and AI buildouts.
Worth a click if you care about how secondary markets are rewriting the rulebook for large-scale data center and AI capacity.
