RALEIGH – Raleigh City Council has directed the city attorney to draft a proposed six-month moratorium on new data center applications for consideration at the council’s Oct. 6 meeting.
Mayor Janet Cowell announced the direction after the council returned from closed session during its Sept. 15 afternoon meeting. The city’s official City Council meeting archive provides access to the Sept. 15 session. The council has not enacted a moratorium, and the ordinance language has not been released.
The proposed pause would give city staff time to update Raleigh’s Unified Development Ordinance standards for data centers. Cowell told Axios Raleigh that the work would focus on noise and vibration limits and water use while accounting for changes in data center technology.
Raleigh currently has eight data centers, most of them smaller facilities under 10,000 square feet, according to city information reported by Axios. A proposal for a roughly 100,000-square-foot facility earlier this summer helped bring the issue before the council.
WUNC reported that the developer later withdrew an annexation request for a nearly 14-acre site near Jones Sausage and Rock Quarry roads in southeast Raleigh. Residents continued urging city officials to pause new projects during public comments at the council’s Sept. 8 meeting.
If enacted, Raleigh’s proposal would add the state’s second-largest city to a growing group of North Carolina municipalities and counties that have temporarily paused data center development while reviewing land-use, utility and environmental standards. Cary adopted an 18-month moratorium in August, while other pauses are in effect in Durham, Orange and Chatham counties and several additional communities.
The current milestone is the council’s direction to prepare an ordinance. It is not a moratorium approval, development denial or change to an existing data center’s operating status.