Jacksonville has about a dozen smaller-scale data center facilities today, but newly elected City Councilmember Moné Holder says the debate over whether the city should welcome a hyperscale successor is already boiling over — and she wants to get ahead of it before any large-scale project breaks ground. Holder, who represents Group 1 At-Large, says she heard concerns about data centers from voters across the political map during her campaign, from the beaches to Baldwin.
Holder was sworn in on August 31 after winning an August 18 special election with 51.27% of the vote, flipping a seat previously held by Republican Terrance Freeman, according to The Florida Trib. That win replaced a member of the council's former GOP majority just as Jacksonville faces key fiscal decisions, and it now positions Holder to shape one of the most consequential land-use fights facing Duval County. As Action News Jax reports, Holder wants to address data center development directly, saying the concerns she heard on the campaign trail spanned the county's mix of urban and rural communities.
A Region Already Racing to Slow Down Data Centers
Duval County isn't acting in isolation. Clay County Commissioners voted 4-1 in June to enact a one-year moratorium on data center applications, site plans, and rezoning in unincorporated areas, a decision that followed more than an hour of public testimony from residents worried about natural resources, per the same account from Action News Jax's local reporting on the vote. Nassau County's Board of Commissioners unanimously approved its own 12-month pause in June, establishing a Fact-Finding Committee that has since held public workshops and visited existing data centers, according to information published by the Nassau County government.
Putnam County followed suit, unanimously passing an ordinance in September that establishes a temporary moratorium running through August 2027 on facilities with peak monthly electrical loads of 5 megawatts or greater, as reported by the Palatka Daily News. St. Johns County has discussed a similar 12-month pause, with Commissioner Ann Taylor warning that the surrounding wave of bans risks making her county the region's path of least resistance, according to the SJ Citizen.
What Sparked the Regional Alarm
Much of the concern traces back to a September 2025 announcement by Miami-based NextNRG that it had secured a 1,600-acre lease option near Jacksonville International Airport, with 400 acres set aside for a potential data center, according to the Jacksonville Daily Record. Local officials have since noted that no formal permit applications have been filed for that project. Still, the announcement helped ignite an area-wide debate over what a hyperscale facility — far larger than the smaller data centers already scattered around Duval County — could mean for water supplies, electric grids, and neighborhoods that sit close to industrial land.
Data centers serve different purposes and store data, servers, and other computing infrastructure, but hyperscale facilities draw dramatically more power and water than the smaller operations Jacksonville already hosts. Florida had roughly 120 active data centers statewide as of July, historically clustered in the Miami and Jacksonville metro markets before AI computing demand pushed developers to look further inland, Hoodline has reported.
State Law Sets Guardrails — and Creates Legal Tension
Any legislation Holder crafts will have to fit inside a state regulatory framework that shifted dramatically this year. Governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 484 into law in May, requiring large-scale data centers that consume more than 50 megawatts to pay the full cost of their electric service while explicitly preserving local governments' authority to regulate or restrict land use for large-load facilities, according to Carlton Fields. The law, which took effect July 1, also amended public records rules to eliminate a 12-month confidentiality extension for economic development deals involving data centers, meaning developer identities can no longer be shielded as long as before, per Florida TaxWatch.
But local moratoriums and land-use rules could still face legal headwinds. A separate 2025 law, Senate Bill 180, prohibits disaster-declared counties from adopting land-use regulations more restrictive than state standards through October 2027 — a constraint that more than 25 Florida local governments have challenged as unconstitutional, according to a petition tracking the fight on Change.org.
Holder's Next Steps
Holder says she plans to seek feedback from fellow council members and the community before crafting any legislation, and she is weighing options that include a data center moratorium similar to those already in place in Clay, Nassau, and Putnam counties, as well as broader protections for communities near proposed sites. She has scheduled a public meeting on the data center debate for October 7 in Jacksonville, giving residents a formal venue to weigh in before any ordinance takes shape.
The stakes extend beyond zoning maps. Jacksonville's municipal utility, JEA, has already moved to secure new energy capacity to handle surging power demand tied in part to AI data centers, with a gas plant approved by state regulators last month. How Holder and her colleagues balance that growing energy appetite against the demands of residents in a county with both dense urban corridors and rural stretches will likely define the next phase of Jacksonville's data center debate.
