Durham County is one of the latest local governments in the Triangle to wrestle with the question of how to manage the proliferation of data centers, but unlike neighboring municipalities, Durham is home to one of the largest technology hubs in the country—Research Triangle Park—which hosts nearly 400 companies that heavily rely on data processing.
During a tense meeting on August 24, Durham’s Board of County Commissioners voted 4-1 to impose a nine-month moratorium on the development of data centers with four exemptions intended to accommodate the local research economy, of which RTP is a major driver.
Those in favor of the exemptions—which include a carveout for data centers under 100,000 square feet—argued they are designed for a narrow set of companies who are already in the process of developing new campuses locally. Commissioners Michelle Burton, Wendy Jacobs, Stephen Valentine, and board chair Mike Lee, who works for agentic AI company Avalara, voted in favor; Commissioner Nida Allam voted against.
About 60 members of the public, concerned about the costs and environmental impacts associated with data centers, signed up to speak against the exemptions, saying they dilute the purpose of the moratorium, which is to give county staff time to develop regulations for the facilities.
The final version allows for construction or expansion of data centers up to 100,000 square feet that use a closed-loop cooling system and non-diesel backup power during the nine-month moratorium. The county’s moratorium follows one passed by the City of Durham which includes narrower carveouts for “small server rooms and data processing equipment incidental and subordinate to a permitted principal use.”
City and county officials have expressed a desire to align their moratoriums; the two governments share an interlocal planning department. But most data center construction to-date in Durham has happened outside the city limits—a majority are in RTP—presenting the county board with a problem specific to its jurisdiction.
“Most of the communities that have passed moratoriums to date are communities that do not have an active data center project in the pipeline,” said Frank Muraca, an analyst and policy researcher with a background in urban planning who has been tracking the moratorium discussions across the state. Muraca has identified 46 different local governments in North Carolina that have passed a data center moratorium, many with exemptions for projects already in the construction or permitting process, or excluding smaller facilities.
On Thursday, the Town of Cary passed its own 18-month moratorium. Apex passed a 12-month moratorium in April. Orange and Chatham counties passed their own temporary bans in April and February. Wake County and Raleigh, Durham’s municipal partners in RTP, have yet to pass a moratorium.
Other municipalities have skipped the moratorium step entirely, instead making direct changes to their development code on the use of data centers. In many cases, these are preemptive measures that give local governments more time to survey the impact of data centers on the economy and the environment.
Durham County, on the other hand, already has 14 confirmed data centers, according to a list given to the county commissioners by the tax administrator’s office. A majority of them—all but one—were built before 2000, when the computing power that now fits in your pocket took up an entire room, though most were renovated in the early 2010s. Only three are above the 100,000 square-foot threshold used by the county’s moratorium, the largest belonging to Dell at approximately 293,000 square feet.
CyrusOne, a global data center developer, has a 242,000 square foot facility near RTP. On the smaller end, Syngenta, an agriculture technology company, and Measurement Inc., a Durham-based educational products company, operate data centers around 3,000 and 5,500 square feet, respectively.
At the August 24 meeting, Sara Young, director of the joint city-county planning department told commissioners that data centers do not currently have their own use type in Durham’s land use regulations, making it more difficult for planning staff to assess whether a project is going to become a data center.
“A lot of these sites that have been previously approved did not even come in as data centers because that’s not a use category in the ordinance,” Young said, noting they may instead be designated as industrial light, flex office, or flex warehouse space. “Some of them we didn’t even have records that they had been turned into data centers.”
Allam, the sole vote against adding exemptions to the county’s moratorium, raised concerns that developers could mask data centers under general industrial use during the moratorium period. She requested an amendment to the moratorium that would ask companies building data centers to disclose certain functions like water usage, fuel consumption, and their source of fuel. While there is some uncertainty about how enforceable that request is, Allam hopes that it will add transparency to the process, and alleviate some residents’ concerns. The amendment received universal support from the county board.
“One of the things that we implemented after the city passed their moratorium is we changed our administrative applications to require a disclosure about whether the property will be used as a data center through this approval,” Young said. “Granted, people could still fib or leave that conveniently out, but we are asking for that information upfront. If someone were to convert something to a data center, there is the possibility of an enforcement action in the future depending on what the regulations are.”
The term “data center” can include a variety of facility types, ranging from server rooms—the kind being hacked with a USB drive in every heist movie—to the resource-demanding hyperscale data centers that international tech giants like Amazon and Google are pushing onto communities to power the expansion of their generative artificial intelligence models.
The data center backlash has proliferated rapidly across the country, largely targeted at the hyperscale facilities. Some state and local governments have offered massive tax incentives for companies to build in their backyard, fueling the outrage from residents who feel they aren’t receiving any of the economic benefits. Political analysts anticipate the issue to galvanize voters during the midterm elections. The concerns raised by communities aren’t one-size-fits-all, but there are commonalities: energy costs and the environment.
Data centers are resource intensive, and require substantial amounts of power. The average data center—between 20,000 and 100,000 square feet—uses about 100 megawatts of electricity, about the same as 80,000 homes, while hyperscale facilities can use more power than entire cities.
That increased demand and the updates to the power grid it requires can send nearby customers’ power bills skyrocketing; A Bloomberg analysis found costs had jumped by more than 267% percent “in areas located near significant data center activity.”
Pablo Friedman, a Durham resident and former city council candidate, said at the August 24 meeting that the growth of data centers is “burdening the residential ratepayer” and their electricity costs because of the overall increased demands on the power grid.
Duke Energy of the Carolinas is currently in a legal dispute with the state attorney general’s office over their request to raise rates, which is largely driven by the current and future needs of data centers, according to a report from the North Carolina Energy Policy Task Force.
Cooling the technology inside the data centers also requires large amounts of water, even in “closed loop” facilities that cycle the same water through.
“Closed loop does not mean zero waste,” said Samantha Krop, Neuse Riverkeeper and Sound Rivers’ Director of Advocacy. “Even when functioning properly, closed-loop systems require high-quality water and often use chemicals to prevent corrosion and bacterial growth.”
Scott Levitan, outgoing president for the Research Triangle Foundation, was one of two speakers at the August 24 meeting—Ramsay Ritchie, vice president of public policy and strategic initiatives for the Durham Chamber of Commerce, being the other—who spoke in favor of the moratorium’s exemptions. Similar to Lee, they make the case that companies in RTP rely on data centers to function.
“The Chamber supports a moratorium on hyperscale data centers in Durham County,” Ritche said at the meeting. “We also support modest exceptions to that moratorium. We do not want to be Loudon County, but that doesn’t mean that every data center presents the same risk.”
Levitan said there’s no intention to bring massive hyperscale data centers, which house upwards of 5,000 servers, to the region.
“I do hope that through this process we can actually sit around a table and come to some reasonable expectations because, you know, I live on Earth too,” Levitan told the INDY after commissioners voted on the moratorium. “The concerns that were raised by the 62 speakers who were there … I have the same concerns that the residents of Durham have. Our outcome is aligned. Our vision is aligned, but the process for getting there, it just doesn’t need to be so contentious.”
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