Dozens of residents packed into the Locust Grove pavilion Tuesday night to talk about an issue that’s quickly becoming a hot-button topic in cities across America: data centers.
The United States’ AI boom has created a demand for new, large-scale data centers, but tech companies and developers are often running into vocal opposition. A majority of Americans don’t want data centers near them, as they worry about rising energy costs, water usage and noise pollution.
Attendees at the recent meeting at Locust Grove, hosted by Louisville Metro’s Office of Planning, reflected that sentiment.
“We don’t want this,” one resident said. “In my limited understanding, it’s going to take value out of our community and we’re going to have much, much higher costs and people are already having a hard time.”
Many attendees also expressed frustration with a hyperscale data center that’s planned for an industrial area in west Louisville known as Rubbertown.
The city approved the project on Campground Road under its existing land use regulations, which classify it as a “telecommunication hotel.” The classification is a holdover from an era where data centers were much smaller and didn’t use as much water and electricity.
Pam, who lives near Hikes Point and declined to provide her last name, said she was dismayed to learn from city planners that there was nothing they could do about that data center at this point. She said she found that baffling.
“I still don’t understand how that happened without input from the public,” Pam said. “I know I wasn’t aware of it.”
She said what worries her the most is the potential environmental impacts, as well as the impacts to electricity rates.
“This summer it was so hot and they’re on the news telling us to turn our air conditioners off because there’s not enough power,” she said. “So there’s not enough power to run our air conditioners but we can build this giant data center that’s going to take God knows how much power and then charge us for it?”
LG&E/KU recently got approval from state regulators to spend $3 billion to bring two new gas power plants online to meet the need of future data centers in Kentucky.
Louisville looks to modernize regulations
The meeting at Locust Grove was the first in a series of town halls the city is hosting to get input from residents on regulating data centers.
While many residents were focused on electricity and water usage, Louisville Metro’s authority is mostly around zoning and land use.
Planning Manager Joe Haberman explained that is just one piece of the regulation puzzle.
“It's about, if these are allowed, where they're allowed and how they're allowed,” Haberman said. “There are bigger questions about energy usage and water consumption and all these things, but that's not necessarily our part in this.”
What city officials want to know is whether residents believe Louisville Metro should allow data centers to be built in Jefferson County. And if they are, what zoning districts should they be in and what restrictions should there be on aspects such as building size, separation from residential areas and the exterior design of the buildings?
There’s also the question of whether building new data centers will require a conditional use permit. That would add an extra layer of vetting by the Planning Commission and require developers to host public meetings about their projects.
Residents can respond to these questions in an online survey.
Planning officials will host more public comment opportunities at South Central Regional Library on Nov. 3 and Parkland Library on Nov. 4. Both meetings start at 5:30 p.m.
There will also be an online forum on Nov. 10 at 11 a.m. Residents can join the WebEx meeting on their phone or computer.
Haberman said city planners will take this initial input and use it to draft a new set of zoning and land-use regulations for data centers. They’ll then host more public meetings to discuss the draft before submitting it to the Planning Commission for review by the end of the year. Ultimately, any changes will require Louisville Metro Council approval.
Until the city’s Land Development Code is updated, data centers will continue to fall under that “telecommunication hotel” classification, Haberman said. That means new data centers, including hyperscale data centers, may be built in downtown commercial and industrial areas with few restrictions.
Some residents who attended the Locust Grove meeting asked whether the city could put a pause on new data center approvals until new regulations are in place to make sure no one was “getting in under the wire.”
Data center moratorium on hold indefinitely
A moratorium on new data centers is something Metro Council members have explored, but the effort recently stalled.
District 17 Council Member Markus Winkler, a Democrat, filed an ordinance on Sept. 11 that proposed a six-month ban on data center approvals. The goal, he said, was to give city planners time to work on regulations that make sense in 2025.
“The idea of the moratorium was that we didn’t want a whole bunch to be proposed while we were reviewing the land development code,” he said.
Winkler’s moratorium proposal has since been tabled in Metro Council’s Planning and Zoning Committee.
At the Sept. 16 committee meeting, Winkler asked to hold the ordinance for two weeks while he made sure there wouldn’t be any “unintended consequences.” Then last week, Winkler told the committee he planned to table the ordinance indefinitely.
Winkler said in an interview with LPM News that he put the ordinance on hold for a couple of reasons. He said that, after discussing the moratorium with city planners, he doesn’t believe there are any new data centers in the pipeline.
“The development timeline to even propose a hyperscale data center is very, very long, given the utility approvals that are needed outside of Metro Government,” he said. “So, you’d be introducing a moratorium that doesn’t really impact anything because there are none scheduled.”
Other council members also expressed concern that the moratorium could do more harm than good.
District 19 Council Member Anthony Piagentini, who heads the Republican Caucus, said he and his colleagues were not in favor of the moratorium. Piagentini said it could send the wrong message.
“My caucus has been extremely careful on whether we do [moratoriums] because once you set the precedent that any changes are accompanied with moratoriums, now you’re sending the signal that your city is closed for business and we do not want to send that signal,” he said.
Piagentini said he’s heard residents’ concerns about data centers’ potential impacts on the surrounding neighborhood and on electricity bills. He said he shares those concerns, but he’s not entirely opposed to the revenue and jobs they could bring to Louisville.
“When you look at some of the fastest-growing cities that have high-paying jobs in the tech sector, these cities have data centers,” Piagentini said. “So, I’m open to having them be a part of the community with some guardrails.”
For now, a majority of Metro Council members appear content to let the proposed moratorium sit in committee.
If a new project is proposed, Winkler said, having the moratorium tabled at committee level will allow Metro Council to be “ready to pull the trigger,” to move quickly on debating and potentially passing it. Piagentini said the Republican Caucus could also rethink their opposition if a developer tried to “fly under the radar.”
The ordinance will fail and fall off the agenda on March 11, 2026, if Metro Council doesn’t take any action on it.
