Every GridPermit post tagged “Zoning & Entitlement.” Back to the full blog.
Platte County commissioners unanimously zoned 5,344 acres of ranchland for a $26 billion data center campus -- then attached four conditions that keep the real decision for later.
Nashville is trying to seize DC Blox's zoo-adjacent data center site by eminent domain even though the city's own zoning administrator says the project's permits are already vested under state law.
Swatara Township, PA locked in $120.3 million from two Corscale data centers for a new police and fire headquarters -- residents asked for a week to review the agreement first, and commissioners voted it through anyway.
Meta hid behind NDAs in rural Kentucky for more than a year. The $115 million water deal it revealed on October 13th is real, and so is the 90-day clock now running on 28 mobile-home families next door.
South Carolina ruled Valara's 11-turbine gas plant isn't a "utility facility," so the one board that vets big power plants never saw it. A judge just threw out neighbors' last lawsuit over the project.
Eagle Rock Partners says it won't ask Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi for a single tax break on its $6 billion campus. The county couldn't grant one if it wanted to — it has no zoning ordinance at all.
TerraWatt's $3 billion Armory data center comes with $15.7 million in enforceable penalties if its tax-revenue promise falls short. Its own leadership is now suing to strike the conditions that make the penalty stick.
The site sat in unincorporated Williamson County, outside Taylor's zoning reach entirely. The city annexed it anyway on October 8th — and a 1,400-signature petition to stop the project just got ruled off the ballot.
Iowa's Duane Arnold nuclear plant shut in 2020. Now a county has rezoned the site for nuclear, Google has signed a 25-year power contract, and the DOE has closed a loan of up to $1.9 billion to bring it back. Here's what the approvals actually show, and what's still open.
Loudoun County ended by-right data center permitting in 2025, but let the projects already in line keep the old rules. On October 6th, supervisors vote on whether roughly 17 of them still get to use those rules. Data centers already bring in 38 to 42 percent of the county's local tax revenue.
Utilities won't study a large load on a hunch. Before you submit, you need site control, a credible load ramp, a site plan, and a clear picture of who will pay for what. Here is the checklist we use to see whether a project is ready to be studied.
Memphis's zoning code has no category for a hyperscale data center, so xAI's Colossus got built as ordinary industrial use. On October 6th, the City Council takes a final vote on a 12-month moratorium meant to fix that gap — at the same meeting it spends $3.2 million in tax revenue xAI already generated.
Project Jupiter was designed to skip the interconnection queue entirely by running on-site gas fuel cells instead of grid power. The gas still needs a pipeline New Mexico's land office has refused twice, a hearing officer just recused himself over bias claims, and on September 24th Oracle hedged its own lease rather than naming a new power plan.
Project Beehive would lease more than 9,000 acres of Carbon County, Utah to a startup proposing 456 helium-cooled microreactors generating 9.6 gigawatts — nearly matching the state's entire peak grid capacity. Valar Atomics has raised more than $1.5 billion since 2023. Its reactor design has not cleared the one agency that can actually let it operate.
In December, the developer pledged to run its 330-megawatt AI complex on recycled wastewater. By June it was suing the Imperial Irrigation District for Colorado River water instead — and September brought the project a CEQA reversal and a power-curtailment policy that puts it last in line during a shortage.
Governor Hochul's one-year pause on data center permits is two and a half months old. On September 30th, Buffalo's Common Council voted for a two-year local moratorium on top of it — proof a state-level pause doesn't settle anything at the municipal level.