Sunday, 19 July 2026

Palm Beach County commissioners are set to cast a final vote on July 15 on Project Tango, a hyperscale AI campus planned for a 202-acre parcel north of Southern Boulevard, according to Inside Climate News.

The county's zoning commission had already moved against the plan. On July 2, its members voted 6-0 to recommend denial after 39 residents spoke against the project at a hearing, splitting from planning staff who backed approval, Inside Climate News reported.

The amended proposal reshuffles the site's use rather than its size. The data center portion would grow nearly fivefold to 1 million square feet, while the overall footprint holds at roughly 3.6 million square feet, with warehouse space shrinking to make room, according to Inside Climate News.

Project critics put the campus power draw above 600 megawatts, a figure they calculate at more than 17 times the largest traditional data center in Florida, Inside Climate News reported.

The developer says it holds a binding power service agreement with Florida Power & Light, whose 3,750-megawatt West County Energy Center sits across the canal from the parcel, according to Inside Climate News.

Permitting adds another layer. A state law effective July 1 requires the South Florida Water Management District's governing board to hold a hearing before granting a water permit to any data center with peak demand of at least 50 megawatts, a level Project Tango would clear, Inside Climate News reported. No application has been filed, so no such hearing has taken place.

The district said as of July 10 that it had received no consumptive use or environmental resource permit applications tied to the project, according to Inside Climate News.

AI data centers can no longer be treated as passive customers by electric utilities, according to POWER Magazine.

For decades, even very large electric customers fit within a familiar utility planning model, POWER Magazine wrote. In that model, the utility studied the load, identified required facilities, assigned costs, and folded the demand into its planning.

New York announced a data center moratorium on Tuesday, placing a one-year suspension on construction of large-scale data center facilities in the state, according to Semafor Net Zero.

The measure is the first of its kind in the US, Semafor Net Zero reported.

The move lands as a Gallup poll showed Americans' confidence in Big Tech is at a new low, according to Semafor Net Zero.

Data centers in Nebraska will be required to disclose more about their operations, including annual water use and power demand, to the state under a new law passed by the Nebraska Legislature, according to Grist.

Jesse Bradley, director of Nebraska's Department of Water, Energy, and Environment, told Grist the state agency will then assess what information gaps remain. Bradley called the legislation a "great start" that will help with future planning.

The disclosure requirement lands in a state that does not have an official count of how many data centers operate within its borders, according to Grist.

Google's Nebraska data centers consumed about 732 million gallons of water in 2025, according to the company.

From 2020 to 2024, Meta's four million square-foot Sarpy County data center withdrew between 26.7 million and 37.5 million gallons from the local water supply annually, depending on the year, according to Grist. That facility uses a combination of evaporative and closed loop cooling.

Diesel generator backup coverage at new data center projects has fallen to between 15% and 40%, according to Rosendin's Bill Mazzetti. The shift favors battery energy storage systems (BESS) as developers rethink power infrastructure for AI workloads, ESS News reported.

Utility demand-response requirements and regional policy are pushing the change. Texas Senate Bill 6 incentivizes on-site dispatchable power for loads above 50 MVA, helping drive BESS adoption at data centers.

Interconnection delays add pressure. Utility queues for AI training facilities above 100 MW extend up to seven years in some regions, pushing developers toward smaller, localized solutions, according to ESS News.

Cost is a central factor. Data center capital expenditures currently average about USD 13 million per megawatt of build capacity. Developers are simplifying the electrical powertrain to lower that figure. Moving to solid-state transformers and medium-voltage uninterruptible power supply (UPS) solutions can eliminate up to two-thirds of the traditional electrical conversion steps, according to ESS News.

Rosendin projects data center buildout volumes to grow 35% to 40% annually through 2029, before cooling to roughly 15% growth in 2030 as demand aligns with pre-AI cloud levels. Mazzetti views the capital expenditure market as 2.5 years into a projected seven-year cycle.

Retrofits will factor into the near-term buildout. Over the next two to three years, Mazzetti expects legacy data centers of around 12 MW to be retrofitted and doubled in capacity using localized microgrids.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill signed a bill creating a program to incentivize data centers to secure clean capacity by reducing demand elsewhere on the grid, according to Canary Media.

Canary Media reported the program is a first-of-its-kind measure. It offers data centers an unorthodox route to the power they need: by bankrolling home energy upgrades.