Palm Beach County — home to President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago — passed a one-year moratoriam on the planning and construction of data centers as commissioners seek to conduct a thorough review of data centers’ impacts on the environment, noise pollution, and electric bills.The moratorium, passed on Thursday, comes just weeks after Trump said that communities that reject data centers would "end up being backwards and poor." Among the wealthiest counties in the country, Palm Beach County includes the town of Palm Beach, home to 65 billionaires."If you want to go through poverty, crime and squalor, I would say don’t approve of data centers," Trump said from the Oval Office on Sep.4.The Palm Beach County Commissioners’ 6-0 vote doesn’t put a permanent ban on data centers.
Instead, it gives county leadership time to conduct environmental impact reviews before updating zoning rules for where data centers can be built.U.S.President Donald Trump holds up a picture of a data center as he holds a cabinet meeting with members of his administration in the Cabinet Room of the White House on August 26, 2025 in Washington, DC.
This is the seventh cabinet meeting of Trump's second term.Seated next to President Trump was Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)TRUMP’S DATA CENTER PUSH FRACTURES CONGRESS AS LOCAL ANGER EXPLODES: 'GRASPING AT STRAWS'The moratorium applies to all new applications for data centers with an anticipated peak electrical load of at least 50 megawatts."Many communities want the economic benefits a data center brings, but we all fear the higher power bills, the negative environmental impact, disruptive noise, the depletion of water resources," a Palm Beach County resident shared during Thursday’s meeting.Trump has made expanding data centers and accelerating artificial intelligence a cornerstone of his agenda, arguing that the United States cannot afford to lose the AI race to China and warning that opposition to...