Four days. That's the window separating American Tower's plan to expand its West Raleigh data center from Raleigh's new six-month moratorium on data center development — and it may be enough to let the project skip the very review process the city just created. The Massachusetts-based company wants to add about 10,000 square feet to its existing roughly 15,000-square-foot facility on Chapel Hill Road, and because the paperwork landed before the pause took effect, the expansion appears positioned to move forward under the old rules.
Timing That Raised Eyebrows at City Hall
According to the Raleigh News & Observer, American Tower submitted its expansion plans just four days before the Raleigh City Council passed its data center moratorium on October 6. The council approved the six-month pause by a 7-1 vote, with the measure intended to give the city time to study the impacts of data centers and craft new regulations before more large-scale projects move forward. Because American Tower's application predates the moratorium, the expansion is being treated as exempt from it, though the newspaper reports it remains unclear whether city staff or a city board will ultimately decide whether to approve the project.
American Tower contends the expansion is permitted by right and doesn't require a special use permit at all, the News & Observer reports. At the same time, the company submitted its special use permit application under protest, reserving the right to challenge the city's interpretation of its own rules — a hedge that suggests even American Tower isn't fully certain which path its project will take through city government. The Raleigh Board of Adjustment is the body that typically grants special use permits for data centers after quasi-judicial proceedings and approves new projects filed under pre-moratorium rules, according to the same report.
A Threshold That Depends on Who's Describing It
Just how big a data center has to be before it triggers the moratorium is itself a point of inconsistency in the public record. The News & Observer's report on American Tower's expansion describes the moratorium as applying to facilities 10,000 square feet or larger, while the paper's earlier coverage of the moratorium's passage described it as prohibiting city approvals for data centers larger than 10,000 square feet or with peak electricity demand above 5 megawatts. A draft ordinance document posted by the City of Raleigh separately defines exempt minor-utility data centers as those with a combined building and land footprint of 10,000 square feet or less and peak electricity demand of five megawatts or less. The city has not clarified which description governs American Tower's case.
City Council member Jane Harrison told the News & Observer that the existing data center was built under the old rules and that the approval process for American Tower's expansion can't simply be changed at this point. She said the facility is expanding in an already industrial area that's separated from residential neighborhoods, and that she personally had not heard constituent concerns about the project. Harrison also said the council passed the moratorium when it did partly to head off the possibility that other developers might rush in additional applications if the city waited any longer. She told the paper she plans to discuss the project with attorneys in a closed session Wednesday.
One Council Member Pushed for a Longer Pause
Council member Christina Jones, who was the lone vote against the six-month moratorium, had wanted a longer pause from the outset. Jones told the News & Observer she learned about the American Tower proposal only after seeing it on social media recently, and said she was frustrated she hadn't been informed sooner, criticizing what she described as a lack of information reaching council members and the public alike.
Jones's frustration echoes an earlier fight over a much larger proposed data center near southeast Raleigh. That 100,000-square-foot, $180 million project at 3101 Jones Sausage Road would have required the city to annex nearly 14 acres of property to connect it to water and sewer service, according to WUNC. The developer withdrew that proposal in August after public opposition, the station reported — a episode that helped fuel momentum for the moratorium Raleigh eventually passed two months later.
Raleigh Isn't Alone in Hitting Pause
Raleigh's six-month moratorium runs through April 6, 2027, unless the council adopts new code amendments sooner, per the city's own ordinance document. The city had expected to release draft data center regulations for public feedback by November 16. Other Triangle-area governments have moved on similar timelines or further: Cary approved an 18-month data center moratorium in August, WUNC reported, nearly three times the length of Raleigh's pause.
Not every local moratorium has survived legal challenge intact. In Chatham County, Sanford-based developer Eco TIP West sued after the county adopted its own 12-month data center moratorium, and the resulting court ruling has become a point of dispute in itself — the developer's attorney told the News & Observer the moratorium was struck down, while the county's attorney maintained the judge never specifically declared it void. That unresolved fight could shape how confidently other Triangle cities, including Raleigh, defend their own pauses if challenged.
What American Tower Says It's Building
American Tower has described the Raleigh project in its own materials as a second data hall being built next to the existing facility, which the company said it expected to be tenant-ready in the fourth quarter of 2026. According to American Tower, the addition is meant to bring the site's total capacity to two megawatts of IT power, and the company has framed the expansion as a response to growing demand for low-latency data infrastructure collocation in the Research Triangle area.
The News & Observer reported that it attempted to contact American Tower directly on Monday but received no response. A city spokesperson, Julia Milstead, told the paper that Raleigh would try to provide a timeline for the expansion along with answers to other outstanding questions, though she cautioned that compiling that information could take about a day. For now, the City Council itself is not weighing in on building expansion plans like American Tower's, and no public deliberation meetings on the project have been scheduled, leaving the question of who ultimately signs off on the Chapel Hill Road expansion unresolved.
