Plans for a 205-acre data campus in Okeechobee County, about 60 miles west of West Palm Beach, was scrapped last week by its county commission, with funding also pulled by the state.
The recent decision reflects growing opposition to data center proposals in South Florida, mirroring grassroots efforts by vocal critics in Palm Beach County who are advocating to end their unrelated “Project Tango” in the western part of the county.
Opposition is also happening nationwide as tech companies and developers looking to plunge billions of dollars into ever-bigger data centers to power artificial intelligence and cloud computing are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don’t want to live next to them, or even near them.
Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other’s battles against data center proposals that are fast multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources.
Before the proposal was shut down in Okeechobee County, a petition opposing the 9–10 megawatts "Okee-One” data center project — led by Indian River State College (IRSC) — gathered more than 3,000 signatures, more than tripling its initial goal.
Organizer and long-time Okeechobee County resident Wyatt Deihl, who has a master's degree in public health and social and behavioral science from Yale, told WLRN the response signaled “widespread concern” among residents across social media.
A planned protest over a lack of transparency, as well as fears about rising water and electricity costs, was canceled following the county’s decision.
In the Republican-leaning county of about 40,000 residents, more people signed the petition than actually voted for the county administrators, Deihl said.
Residents who expressed their outage at the commission meeting were applauded in the chamber.
One local resident, Shelly Glazer, a retired civil servant who has lived in the community for about four years, called the controversy a “pivotal moment” to “preserve the character” of the county.
“Let's not be hypocrites and stand here and pass proclamations about water management and then invite these creatures in,” she argued.
Distrust and Nvidia
The project’s scale and growth potential, highlighted during an IRSC presentation in February, fueled opposition.
References to Nvidia, the global leader in AI chips production, became a smoking gun among residents who felt it was a bait-and-switch — initial plans suggested “workforce training” but residents saw it as a secondary goal to building a large-scale AI hub.
Although the land is owned by the state college, the Okeechobee County County commission has regulatory oversight for property zoning.
The years-long Okee-One proposal was effectively shut down after county commissioners voted to remove the “Special Technology Opportunity Centers” designation from their comprehensive economic growth plan.
This amendment eliminated the pathway that would have allowed the development to proceed on the site of the former Florida School for Boys in Okeechobee, an infamous state-run reform school long associated with systemic abuse of children.
Perceived secrecy surrounding project planning increased community anger. IRSC had attempted to use a legal “educational” loophole to bypass public approval to build the industrial data center.
State involvement
And the opposition wasn’t just local.
A year ago, the administration of Gov. Ron DeSantis initially gave $1.5 million in state support from his Rural Infrastructure Fund after the college pitched its “data center campus.” It was to include workforce training. But after fierce public backlash against the scope of the project, the state reversed course and withdrew its support.
The Florida Department of Commerce accused the college of deceiving state officials, creating “falsehoods and pretenses about energy and water,” FDC department spokesperson Emily Hetherington told the Tampa Bay Times.
During the April 23 commission meeting, officials also said IRSC is expected to return nearly half of the state grant following the withdrawal of support.
The DeSantis administration did not respond to WLRN’s request for comment.
“When this was first proposed, there wasn't a lot of knowledge about what data centers actually meant,” Deihl told WLRN. “And public sentiment towards data centers has shifted drastically as we've seen large scale data centers pop up across the country and being proposed in communities like Okeechobee.”
Similar concerns have surfaced in Palm Beach County, where residents in Wellington and Loxahatchee have pushed back against “Project Tango,” another proposed data center they say lacks sufficient public input.
A zoning hearing for that project, originally scheduled for April 23, was postponed — at the applicant’s request — until July 15 .
