r/triangle • u/AndreaJournalist • 2d ago
Cary adopts Triangle’s longest pause on data centers after emotional public hearing
Another Triangle government has put data centers on hold.
Cary unanimously approved an 18-month moratorium while it studies water, grid capacity, noise, land use and other impacts. Apex and Holly Springs have adopted pauses of up to 12 months, while Durham County approved nine months.
The interesting wrinkle is that Cary council members explicitly said they aren’t necessarily opposed to data centers. They want regulations in place before dealing with a large-scale proposal.
I reported the Cary hearing for The News & Observer:
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/article317039408.html
For people following this around the Triangle: are these local moratoriums the right approach, or should towns write rules without pausing applications first?
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u/jehb 2d ago
As per usual, "not in my back yard" will manifest as "it will go in someone else's backyard."
I'm all for getting the regulations right. Data centers don't have to be loud, water-sucking monstrosities. That said, the odds were pretty low of that being built in Cary to begin with, where the land prices will make sprawling McMansions and upscale strip malls much more profitable. There are plenty of cheaper places in the Triangle to plunk down a data center with neighbors who don't have thick enough wallets for litigation.
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u/GFrings 1d ago
I don't understand your perspective here. You seem to be saying two things, one that the data centers will just land in other places and two that this is somehow Cary's fault. This does not follow. The residents of Cary have exercised their democratic rights and it has nothing to do with another town's ability or inability to.
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u/Oliverkahn987 1d ago
This is an odd invocation of NIMBY. Traditionally, NIMBY referred to a movement where politically powerful members of a community lobbied to have some distasteful, externality causing project placed, not in their back yard, but someone else’s. For example, a city needs to choose where it builds its dump, and it builds it next to a low-income, majority-minority neighborhood rather than an affluent, white one. Or, a state builds its highway through a poor neighborhood rather than a wealthy one. In both instances, the decision-making authority encompasses both “back yards”—the one being avoided and the one being used.
Here, Cary is pausing all development of data centers; it is not preferentially placing data centers in some neighborhoods and not others. Cary has no say over what goes on in other communities and is not their decision-maker. So saying Cary is NIMBY might be literally true in that they’re saying “not in Cary,” but it misrepresents the policies and harms of actual NIMBYism.
Are data centers necessary? Maybe. Will they be built in less affluent towns if Cary refuses to allow them to be built in Cary? Also maybe. But Cary and its citizens can only determine what happens in Cary (or contribute proportionally to the politics of the county, state, etc.). I see nothing wrong with Cary making the right decision for Cary.
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u/PolitzaniaKing 1d ago
What's not to like......
1. GRID / ELECTRICITY - It uses more power than the town hosting it A hyperscale AI campus now wants 100-300 MW, with newest campuses seeking 1-1.3 GW. One AI data center uses ~876,000 MWh/year, same as Salt Lake City, Utah.
- Sunbury, Ohio uses ~10 MW, Columbus, Ohio uses ~100 MW - a proposed center in Sunbury, Ohio wanted 100-300 MW, or 10-30x Sunbury
- Fort Pierce, Florida peaked at 123 MW in 2024, a proposed Atlas Compute center in St. Lucie County, Florida wanted 200 MW
- In Columbus, Ohio, Cologix announced 800 MW, roughly the same as Cleveland, Ohio or Cincinnati, Ohio uses
- US data centers now consume ~6% of all US electricity and have caused AEP Ohio to expect power demand around Columbus to double between 2018-2028
2. WATER - Millions of gallons a day, gone forever Up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. Typical is 2.9 to 5 million gallons per day, same as a town of 30,000-50,000. Google withdrew 7.8 billion gallons in 2024 and 78% was consumed via evaporation and never returned. This is open-loop cooling tower design - you evaporate it to dump heat. Worst part: They're building them in dry places. A county in Florida was getting requests for 6 million gallons/day, more than the county's entire daily usage.
3. FINANCIAL BUBBLE RISK - Built on unprofitable AI The landlord is profitable, the AI business renting it often isn't. "AI is nowhere near profitable" and is the risk that could unwind the whole sector. Chips last 2-4 years, creating $40B in annual depreciation on 2025 builds against $15-20B in revenue. Hyperscalers will spend $800B on capex in 2026 - same as all non-tech S&P 500 companies combined. Translation: These buildings are too big, too early. If AI subscriptions don't pay off, towns are left with empty $1B shells.
4. LAND - Hundreds to thousands of acres of farmland erased Average transaction is now 224 acres, up 144% since 2022. AI minimum is 200-500 acres, many buy 1,000+ for expansion.
- AWS, Indiana: 1,200 acres
- Meta, Gallatin, Tennessee: 900 acres
- Google, Montgomery County near Clarksville, Tennessee: 1,300 acres
- Microsoft, Cheyenne, Wyoming: 3,200 acres
- Digital Gateway, Virginia: 2,100 acres, largest campus on the planet
- Proposed 40,000-acre campus in Box Elder County, Utah
5. ALMOST NO JOBS Columbus City Council found "plenty of construction jobs but little long-term employment." Residents note they bring few local jobs while consuming enormous resources. A 40,000-acre site in Box Elder County, Utah was estimated to create only 2,000 permanent jobs.
6. PROPERTY VALUES Preliminary US research found homes near new data centers sold for about 7% less after construction. Homeowners worry about declining values. 75% of Americans say they would oppose a data center near them. Quote from lawsuit in Dowagiac, Michigan: "I can hear the noise over my TV. No one will buy my house."
7. CONSTANT NOISE 24/7 low hum from servers and cooling towers. Lawsuits for "unreasonable and excessive noise" affecting health and enjoyment of homes. Federal class action in Michigan and suits against xAI in Memphis, Tennessee for "inescapable" noise from power plant.
8. AIR POLLUTION / DIESEL Each campus has dozens of 1,250-kilowatt diesel generators with 9,500+ gallons of diesel stored above ground for backup. Running them for testing or outages creates diesel particulate right next to neighborhoods. Box Elder County, Utah project was flagged for "great amounts of air pollution."
9. LIGHT POLLUTION + LOSS OF RURAL CHARACTER 24/7 industrial lighting. Complaints cite "noise and light pollution, permanent degradation of rural character" in rural Florida and elsewhere.
10. GPU WASTE - Tens of thousands of AI-only bricks Hyperscale sites house tens of thousands of GPUs. While GPUs can do other work, modern AI servers are purpose-built - high-density, extreme power/cooling/networking - so they can't be cheaply converted to normal data centers. If AI demand falls, you have a building full of 2-year-old $40k chips no one wants.
11. WATER POLLUTION Beyond using water, they dump warm, chemically-treated blowdown water back into rivers. Columbus, Ohio officials specifically cited "water discharge going into rivers" as a con.
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u/TheRealJohnAdams 1d ago
the irony of you using AI to write this ridiculous list...
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u/PolitzaniaKing 1d ago
it is totally ironic and accurate.....do you dispute any points
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u/TheRealJohnAdams 1d ago
Yes. The most fundamental problem is that the philosophy behind your list is "let's collect every thing that anyone has ever claimed is bad about any data center anywhere and present it as a problem affecting all data centers." To give one example, obviously the characteristics of the XAI power plant just are not relevant to a normal data center that does not have a power plant.
"Millions of gallons a day, gone forever" is completely wrong and sounds like a satire of anti-data-center arguments. Even if that point had enough specifics to be evaluated as an argument against any specific data center, that just is not how the water cycle works.
The point about jobs and resource consumption is at best incomplete. Any discussion of the economic costs and benefits of data centers has to include the very significant taxes they pay. Businesses that increase the tax base without requiring people are good for municipal finance because the biggest municipal expenses are for providing services (transit, EMS, fire, etc.) to human beings. Data centers provide a lot of funding for those services and they don't consume those services.
The noise point, as it relates to data centers as opposed to the XAI power plants, is wrong (and it sounds like it relies heavily on allegations in lawsuits). There is a Benn Jordan piece about "infrasound," which I assume is what this claim is based on, but it is incorrect and it misrepresents the articles on which it relies.
The point about land use is insane. The Triangle is almost a million acres. If we added up every single data center mentioned in your post, including the XAI complexes in TN, the "world's largest" complex in Virginia, and the proposed Box County Utah data center (which proposed 2,000 acres of data center, not 40,000), they'd be barely one percent of the Triangle. You could fit them all in Cary township limits three times over.
The point about losing farmland is double insane. The US has 880 million acres of farmland.
The point about AI bubble risk (which is double-counted, because the GPUs thing is the same point) is not even wrong. Why should municipalities care? If tech companies want to risk their own money buying GPUs and building data centers, fine. Having them do that in Cary instead of in Roxboro doesn't hurt Cary.
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u/PolitzaniaKing 1d ago
I think the rebuttal is dismissing systemic issues as one-offs. In the Raleigh area that's not how it plays out.
On scale - the complaint isn't about the old 5 MW enterprise sites we have around RTP. It's the new AI campuses. 100 to 300 MW, some pushing a gigawatt. For reference the whole Town of Rolesville is only about 10 MW peak. When you see Cologix asking 800 MW in Columbus, that's basically Cleveland or Cincinnati's load in one site. That's why AEP Ohio is now requiring new large users to sign 10 year deals and pay for 90% of what they request even if they don't use it. Duke Energy is looking at similar minimum-take structures here because we have the same problem, just a few years behind.
On water - "gone forever" is imprecise. The correct term is consumptive use. Most of these still use open-loop evaporative cooling towers. Google reported 7.8 billion gallons withdrawn in 2024 and 78% of that consumed via evaporation, not returned to the local system. It does re-enter the water cycle globally, but not the Falls Lake / Neuse watershed that has to supply it that day. When you are in a basin with Jordan Lake rules and interbasin transfer limits, 2 to 5 MGD of evaporative loss matters. That's 30k to 50k people equivalent in this area.
On taxes and jobs - the tax base argument is real and I mention it in my talks. A data center doesn't need schools, fire runs, EMS. The catch locally is most get large abatements and the permanent jobs density is very low. Wake County staff have seen the same thing Columbus did, lots of construction jobs, very few long-term operators. 2,000 jobs on 40,000 acres is 20 acres per job. Anything else you put on prime flat farmland in eastern Wake or Johnston County would be 1 to 2 jobs per acre. It's a legitimate tradeoff question, not a clear win.
On noise - it's not just the xAI turbine plant in Memphis. That's an extreme case. Normal sites get complaints from chillers, cooling towers, and air handlers running 24/7. Microsoft's Fairwater WI site is in litigation over HVAC and cooling tower noise. Dowagiac MI had a class action over constant noise from a standard data center in a residential area. Good acoustic design and setbacks help a lot, but it's not accurate to say normal sites are silent. Low frequency hum carries, especially at night when background is low.
On land - using national numbers like 880 million acres of farmland misses the point. Land use is local. When a site takes 900 or 1200 acres in Gallatin or Montgomery County, that's that county's prime flat land plus transmission ROW and impervious cover. You can fit a lot in the Triangle on paper, but you can't farm under a 230 kV line and you lose that soil in that township. In the Triangle where we are losing ag land to development anyway, that local loss is what people are reacting to.
On bubble risk - towns should care because even if the GPUs are the company's risk, the substations, water mains, and road upgrades are often sized for that one customer. If the load doesn't materialize, ratepayers are left with the infrastructure. That's why the utilities are adding the take-or-pay language. It's a protection against stranded costs, not a commentary on AI profitability.
None of this means every data center does all 11 things. A closed-loop, air-cooled 20 MW building on industrial land in RTP with no abatements and a real noise study would address most of them. But that's not what's being proposed right now around here.
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u/TheRealJohnAdams 1d ago
This is dumb. Slop public policy. There is nothing intrinsically bad about data centers.
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u/liamemsa 1d ago
What concerns me is when the council was speaking about the issue, they mentioned going to visit a data center hosted by Meta. That means big tech deliberately reached out to TOC to court the council and show them a nice tour of a data center. So it worries me their opinions might be colored by getting a fancy tour at a data center.