COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. (WINK)\u2014 Collier County leaders are taking preemptive action against potential AI data centers, even though no large-scale facilities are currently planned for the area.<\/p>\n
At Tuesday’s Collier County Commissioners’ meeting, an unexpected topic dominated public comment. Several speakers urged county leaders to put a one-year moratorium in place for data centers.<\/p>\n
Data centers were not on the agenda, but Commissioner William McDaniel wanted to start a conversation. The current regulations on data centers in Collier County were created nearly 40 years ago.<\/p>\n
“A version of 1987, these mega-centers were never contemplated then,” McDaniel said.<\/p>\n
County leaders say current regulations would not prevent an AI data center from being built in the county, prompting them to act now.<\/p>\n
County leaders say they have not been approached by anyone trying to build a large-scale data center.<\/p>\n
However, Commissioner Burt Saunders expressed concern about being caught off guard.<\/p>\n
“We don’t want to have to worry about someone popping up tomorrow with an application,” Saunders said.<\/p>\n
The board stopped short of implementing a one-year moratorium. Instead, the county attorney suggested declaring what’s called a \u201czoning in progress,\u201d which would allow the county to deny applications for data centers until details are figured out.<\/p>\n
Dr. Kate Stoll with the American Association for the Advancement of Science says local leaders across the country are trying to figure out how to handle an oncoming data center boom.<\/p>\n
“State and local leaders are balancing the pros and the cons of data center growth, which, as we know, is moving really fast these days,” Stoll said.<\/p>\n
The county attorney will present that plan to commissioners at their next meeting on July 28. WINK News will continue following this story for the latest developments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COLLIER COUNTY, Fla. (WINK)\u2014 Collier County leaders are taking preemptive action against potential AI data centers, even though…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":107680,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,86,25,55705,39,1085,1183],"class_list":["post-107679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-data-center","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-collier-county","tag-data-centers","tag-data-science","tag-florida"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}