Jackson data center rezoning hearing postponed
By Katherine Lin | Originally published by Mississippi Today
A rezoning hearing for a potential data center in Jackson has been postponed until June.
The applicant, Saxum Investment Company, asked to delay the hearing until a city Planning Board meeting on June 24. Robert Ireland, an attorney with Watkins and Eager representing Saxum, said the company wants more time to engage with the community and city.
Because the request was made less than five business days before Wednesday’s meeting, Saxum had to go before the Planning Board on Wednesday to ask for the postponement.
“The city has committed to presenting data center specific standards to address the city’s concerns about noise, emissions, utility burdens and other issues. Saxum encourages the adoption of these standards and wants to pursue a project that meets the concerns of Jackson citizens and its city leaders,” Ireland said to the board.
Saxum is asking to rezone about 190 acres of mostly undeveloped land in northwest Jackson from residential and commercial to heavy industrial use. There is currently a horse track on the proposed site, which is close to the Presidential Hills neighborhood.
In a packed conference room, residents from the surrounding area and across Jackson loudly voiced opposition to the project or any data center in Jackson.
“Even if we wanted a data center here, even if we decided to do something like that as a city, this process has not been transparent,” said Matt Casteel, whose 2-acre family farm, WurmWorks, sits in the middle of the proposed site.
Council considers data center regulations
This comes as the City Council debates a six-month moratorium on new data center projects in Jackson. Last week, the council voted to table a proposed ordinance until members have a clearer picture of the moratorium’s impact.
According to the city attorney’s office, such a moratorium impacts city zoning ordinances, and passing it without the proper public notice process could create a due-process violation. Council President Brian Grizzell, who introduced the measure, disagreed, arguing the idea was just to study the impact of data centers ahead of time.
“This is a six-month cooling period to give us time to put our heads together, figure this out, to work with zoning, work with planning,” Grizell said at last week’s City Council meeting.
At the meeting, Ireland pointed out that if the data center is the size of one proposed for Clinton, it would bring in about $60 million to the city and over $80 million to the school district over 10 years. But he warned that there is a “finite window of opportunity” for Jackson to attract a data center project.
Data centers in Mississippi
Tech companies are racing against one another to build more data centers. According to Pew Research, there are currently 3,000 operational data centers and an additional 1,500 in development in the United States. There are around 750 planned data centers in the South.
Data centers vary in size but the advent of artificial intelligence has accelerated the need for large data centers, called hyperscalers. These centers, such as Amazon in Madison and xAI in Southaven, can meet the large computational power needed to train and run AI models.
In Mississippi, there are seven confirmed data centers in various stages of development. While some have welcomed the data centers and their historic investment, others have pushed back against them citing their high energy usage and concerns over water consumption and noise and air pollution.
There will be a public hearing at 6 p.m. on June 22 in City Council chambers to discuss data centers and a zoning ordinance. Members of the crowd on Wednesday promised that they’d be there.
This article was originally published by Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Source: Original Article
