Three Southern Cities Let Their Data Center Moratoriums End. Here Is What They Wrote Instead.

A moratorium is a clock, not a decision. It stops applications for a set period so a town can write rules, and when the clock runs out, the rules written in the meantime are what a developer will actually face. This month three Southern cities reached the end of that clock, and each one replaced its pause with a permanent ordinance.

If your town is partway through a pause right now, these three are worth reading closely. They show how much a set of rules can vary, how close the final vote can be, and which projects were never covered by the pause in the first place.

Augusta, Georgia: 6-5, and the pause is over

Augusta's commission voted 6-5 on Tuesday, September 15 to adopt data center rules, ending what The Augusta Press called "an almost three-month moratorium." The paper reports that some commissioners said that wasn't long enough.

The pause had already been extended once. On July 21, when it was set to expire, WRDW reported that a motion to extend it by 90 days or more failed on a 5-5 tie. Commissioners then unanimously approved a 60-day extension on the condition that three public hearings be held at community centers first. The same report notes that the moratorium never applied to two projects already under construction: a data center near the Haynes Station neighborhood and the QTS campus on Gordon Highway.

WRDW's summary of the 29-page final draft, released on September 9, says it would:

• bar data centers from residential and agricultural areas, and allow them in heavy industrial, light industrial, general business and mixed-use zones only after a public hearing and Augusta Commission approval;
• sort facilities into five size classes, ranging from accessory rooms under 2,000 square feet to campuses of 500,000 square feet or more;
• require a 500-foot buffer from homes and farmland, reduced to 300 feet if the developer builds a berm that blocks the view, and at least 100 feet from roads;
• cap noise at the property line at 65 decibels by day and 60 at night;
• require closed-loop cooling and prohibit private wells as a water source;
• encourage, but not require, community benefits agreements.

Those figures come from the draft as WRDW described it. We could not confirm from an open source whether commissioners amended any of them before the vote, so check the adopted text with the clerk before you cite one of these numbers as Augusta law.

The five no votes were not a formality. Commissioner Jordan Johnson told Augusta CEO that the ordinance "lacks additional protections from communities where these data centers will call home."

Birmingham, Alabama: the rules were passed three months early

Birmingham handled the timing differently. The council voted on March 3 to stop accepting applications for data centers over 20 megawatts for six months, according to WBRC. Nebius had filed its application for an AI facility before that vote, so its project was exempt.

On April 28, the council delayed its vote on the draft rules after residents asked for more. Ryan Anderson of the Southern Environmental Law Center told the council the group supported a 1,000-foot setback over the proposed 500 feet, and neighbors pressed for tighter lighting rules. Six weeks later, on June 9, the council passed the regulations 6-3 after a public hearing that ran nearly three hours, the Birmingham Times reported. The rules took effect when the moratorium lifted. The paper lists these requirements:

• a 500-foot setback from residential and urban neighborhood districts (the 1,000 feet residents asked for was not adopted), and 1,000 feet from high-capacity transit facilities;
• a five-acre minimum lot;
• closed-loop cooling, with water use limited to what a similarly sized office building would use;
• no onsite gas turbines and no diesel generators running around the clock; solar, fuel cells and batteries are allowed;
• acoustical walls, plus noise studies before and after construction;
• notice by certified mail to every property owner within 500 feet.

Birmingham's approach avoided what happened in Augusta, where the rules were voted on in the final days of an extension. Birmingham finished its rules with three months of the pause still left. The trade-off is that the rules were locked in before anyone could see how they worked in practice.

Roswell, Georgia: unanimous, with less on the public record

Roswell adopted an emergency moratorium unanimously on January 12. It was extended twice, first to June 26 and then to September 20, while staff wrote a 27-page white paper and the Planning Commission held a public hearing. On August 10 the council approved the resulting code amendment 5-0, according to the city's own recap. The amendment defines "data centers" and sets standards for noise, water and energy consumption.

That recap does not list the actual numbers, and we could not find an open source that does. Roswell shows a common gap. The vote gets covered, but the numbers a resident would need to hold a developer to are only in the adopted ordinance itself. We found no report of a further extension after September 20.

The other way a moratorium ends

Letting a pause expire into permanent rules is one option. The other is to extend it. On September 9, trustees in Pierce Township, Ohio extended their zoning moratorium on data center uses until May 31, 2027, FOX19 reported. FOX19 also reported the trustees' statement: "We are not considering a data center at any site in Pierce Township." Their zoning commission is reviewing the code in the meantime.

Neither approach is automatically better. An extension buys time, but Augusta shows that commissions can split on how much time they are willing to add. A permanent ordinance ends the uncertainty, but it also sets a standard the next applicant only has to meet.

What to take from this if your town is mid-pause

• Find the expiry date and put it on a calendar. Our moratorium tracker lists the end date for every row that has one and marks the rows where no date has been recorded.
• Ask which projects the pause excluded. Augusta's excluded two projects already under construction, and Birmingham's excluded Nebius. A pause can sound citywide and still leave out the project you are worried about.
• Get the draft and track each number in it. Setback distances, decibel limits, water caps and generator rules are where these ordinances differ. Birmingham residents asked for 1,000 feet, and the council adopted 500.
• Watch the hearing schedule. Augusta's extension came with a condition: three public hearings in community centers before a permanent ordinance. Conditions like that are worth asking for whenever an extension is on the agenda.
• Read the adopted text, not the recap. A news story or a city newsletter will tell you a rule passed. Only the ordinance tells you what it requires.

See also

• Augusta, GA community briefing
• Birmingham, AL community briefing
• Roswell, GA community briefing
• Pierce Township, OH community briefing
• Model CBA clauses, for the protections these ordinances only encourage
• Moratorium tracker