After the City of Durham and Durham County passed moratoriums on new data center construction earlier this year, the Durham Planning Department has brought forth new recommendations for how the city and county should regulate data centers going forward once those moratorium periods have ended.
The proposal suggests requiring all data centers to go through an approval process that would include neighborhood meetings and public hearings. Developers would also be required to report detailed information on water, wastewater, and power usage and associated resource demands like generator power.
Under the proposed regulations, data centers would be restricted to a limited number of zoning districts—industrial, light industrial, university and campus, and science and research park—and a maximum square footage. Data centers would also be required to be a certain distance from residential areas, churches, schools, as well as other data centers. Staff left open the possibility for further limitations based on recommendations from leadership.
On Wednesday, members of the Joint City-County Planning Committee (JCCPC) received a presentation from Robin Schultze, principal planner and arborist with the Durham Planning Department, on Durham’s current land use guidelines and proposals for how to effectively legislate future data center requests. Currently, data centers are not a specific use listed in the Unified Development Ordinance, Durham’s collection of land use laws.
Schultze said the department sought input from a wide range of experts and stakeholders, including the UNC School of Government, Central Pines Regional Council, Durham’s Environmental Affairs Board, and community advocates. Based on those discussions, staff recommended further restrictions like prohibiting data centers from using groundwater, limiting permissible noise levels, and requiring standards for generator use. City Councilmember Matt Kopac applauded the recommendations, which he said were uncommon from what he’s seen in other communities.
“I appreciate that you’re really trying to have this be a leading approach that reflects what you’ve heard from us and folks who have given input into the process,” Kopac said.
The rapid expansion of data centers in the last few years has raised the alarm for residents who view them as harbingers of job loss, increased costs, and environmental degradation. In Durham, residents pushed local officials to implement moratoriums on the development of data centers, following a national trend, until restrictions could be developed with community input.
“These data centers have huge impacts on quality of life,” said mayor pro tem Javiera Caballero.
During Wednesday’s presentation, committee members and staff discussed which metrics to use to distinguish between data centers that should and shouldn’t be allowed. The county’s moratorium allows for construction of data centers under 100,000 square feet.
City Councilmember Nate Baker, chair of the joint committee, noted that using square footage as a measure of a data center’s impact is “imperfect” but that it’s one of the few tools the planning department has to evaluate them.
Hyperscale sites, which tend to be 100,000 square feet or larger, have drawn particular ire from the public. Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI use hyperscale centers for feeding generative AI development. Schultze said that it’s hard to know what a data center is used for from the outside, making it difficult to legislate out specific uses, but that based on recent studies, the correlation between size and generative AI is a fair one to make, likening the comparison to a familiar geometry lesson about squares and rectangles.
“Generally, yes, AI data centers are larger, but not all large data centers are for AI,” Schultze explained.
Schultze offered another metric that could be used, called redundancy, which calculates how much backup power a system has for use during a power outage—ranging from no backup system to a fully independent second power source with its own cooling infrastructure and fuel storage. But data centers with a smaller footprint could consume more resources than larger ones.
These uncertainties about individual data centers are a major reason why advocates pushed local leaders to create a more stringent process for data center construction compared to other developments.
“I feel like we really need to understand, what does the state-of-the-art data center look like today?” said county commissioner Wendy Jacobs. “Like everything else in Durham, we should be striving for what is best practice out there right now,” Jacobs said.
Committee members agreed that the industry is evolving exponentially, and that managing data center growth will likely be an ongoing process, but that shouldn’t stop them from putting together the best possible plan for what they have to deal with right now.
“Right now, data centers is a bad word, and that’s unfortunate because every single company that anybody here works for uses some sort of data retrieval or storage, and we have to make sure that we’re not inadvertently cutting those off,” said county commissioner Mike Lee, who works for agentic AI company Avalara.
As planning staff finalizes its recommended data center ordinances, Baker said the city and county will likely need slightly different guidelines to govern each jurisdiction given the types of industries that operate within each border, and the available land suitable for data center construction.
Most of Durham’s current data centers are in the county’s jurisdiction at Research Triangle Park (RTP). Given the required distances from residences, schools, and churches being proposed, industrial areas like RTP are also the most likely sites for future data center projects. But the park will have to wrestle with its desire to reimagine RTP into a full-fledged multipurpose community through its RTP 3.0 blueprint, which introduces more residential and commercial uses into the park and could complicate where data center construction is allowed.
Planning staff will present a full draft of data center ordinances and guidelines at the next JCCPC meeting in December. The Durham City Council and Board of County Commissioners would vote on final regulations ahead of the moratoriums expiring in May 2027.
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