Residents in the western Palm Beach County communities have been pushing back for months against a controversial AI data center proposed near Arden, and they packed the hearing room on Thursday with over 100 people to make their voices heard.
The crowd, also featuring experts and activists, got a major win. The Palm Beach County Zoning Commission voted unanimously to recommend against the proposal for "Project Tango."
The final decision rests in the hands of the Palm Beach County Commissioners, who will vote on the project on July 15.
The application considered on Thursday is an expansion of an existing approval for a data center inside the Central Park Commerce Center. The developers are trying to significantly bump up the square footage to accommodate a "hyperscale" AI data center campus.
The applicant, PBA Holdings, Inc, was looking to get the green light to bump up the allowed development space within the Central Park Commerce Center site from just over 2 million square feet to 3.6 million square feet.
Local neighbors have rallied against the project, expressing deep concerns over its massive power and water demands and the potential noise it would generate right next to homes and local schools.
Raymond Penuela, an Arden resident who sits on the HOA board, said approving Project Tango would set a dangerous "legal precedent" for similar projects across the county.
"It's very concerning," he said. "It will be used for future decisions. It is your choice to allow that."
Eventually, Board member Susan Kennedy called the motion to deny the project, saying "the project fails to meet the county’s standards, including consistency with the comprehensive plan, consistency with the ULDC [Unified Land Development Code] compatibility with the surrounding uses, design minimizing adverse impact, design minimizing environmental impact in adequate public facilities," she said.
Earlier in the week, the county’s planning staff actually recommended that commissioners approve the project.
That all changed after intense public comments and board discussion. It boiled down, according to Board Chair Christopher Kammerer, to a lack of understanding of the tech and a massive identity crisis for the project: Is a data center light industrial or heavy industrial?
While data centers technically fit some "light industrial" definitions, their massive footprint and impact on the surrounding neighborhood, particularly the Arden community and Saddle View Elementary School, feel a lot more like "heavy industrial," he said.
In 2016, Palm Beach County approved a site plan for roughly 206,000 square feet of data center space, alongside a 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse. So developers can legally build a data it. But the current zoning code treats a standard cloud-storage data center the exact same way it treats a hyperscale AI data center. And that's one of the main sources of contention.
Board member Claudio Mendoza warned that if they allowed this project to slip through, it would open the floodgates to "build the same thing everywhere."
