Starke County has put a one-year moratorium on large hyperscale data centers at a time when developers are looking to invest billions of dollars to build them in Northwest Indiana.
The Starke County Board of Commissioners voted unanimously 3-0 Monday to place a one-year moratorium on any data centers of more 5,000 square feet. Amazon just built a $11 billion data center in New Carlisle to train artificial intelligence models and is now looking to invest another $15 billion to build 2.4 GW of data center capacity in the seven-county Northwest Indiana region.
Other major data center projects are being pursued in LaPorte, Michigan City, Hobart, Hammond and Merrillville.
Data centers often have proven to be controversial with residents, who have voiced concerns about energy usage, electricity bills, water use, noise, light, diesel backup generation pollution and other issues.
In downstate Indiana, White, Putnam and Marshall counties have put similar moratoriums into place.
Starke County's moratorium would still allow businesses to build data centers under 5,000 square feet. County officials said the goal is to block large data center projects that typically exceed 100,000 square feet from coming to town while they review guidelines for such development and consider an outright ban, which they could not statutorily do until after putting a moratorium in place.
The Plan Commission had unanimously recommended a data center moratorium after an hours-long public hearing in which dozens of residents spoke out against data centers, saying they feared what they would mean for the environment, public health and rural character of the area.
The commissioners had little discussion Monday, saying a public hearing was not needed after all the people who spoke out at the plan commission meeting.
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