The Coffee County Commission unanimously passed a resolution on Tuesday imposing a one-year moratorium on data centers.
According to the resolution, the one-year ban will allow the county’s planning commission to propose zoning regulations regarding data centers.
The resolution defines a data center as a “building or buildings that are occupied primarily by computers and/or telecommunications and related equipment where digital information is processed, transferred, and/or stored, primarily to and from off-site locations.”
The resolution will remain in effect until June 9th, 2027.
At the hearing, Commissioner Dowe Jones thanked Coffee County residents for coming forward and expressing their concerns about data centers.
“They are being heard with wide open ears,” Jones said.
Coffee County Mayor Dennis Hunt, a Republican, said in a social media video in May that data centers “are legal” in the county.
“We can’t ban them. We have to make a place for every single legal activity in our county,” he said.
However, the mayor said Coffee County can use zoning to make the county an “undesirable” place for data centers.
“The counties that are not lucky enough to have adopted county-wide zoning are going to be seeing the construction of data centers in their county,” Hunt said.
He added that Coffee County is one of 48 counties in Tennessee with countywide zoning.
Coffee County’s current zoning regulations allow for data centers to be built in its jurisdiction, Hunt said.
Coffee County, which has around 65,000 residents, is not the only part of Tennessee that is pushing back against data centers.
McMinnville approved an 18-month ban on new data center construction last week. This comes as a nearly 100,000-square-foot data center was announced in May for the rural town of around 15,000 people.
This week, the Nashville Metro Council passed a resolution on first reading to temporarily ban data center development while the county works on zoning regulations.
Furthermore, Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon said this week she will propose a one-year moratorium on large data centers in the city. Knox County Commission, which includes Knoxville, will also discuss a ban on data center construction until June 30th, 2027.
Hawkins County, in northeast Tennessee, is facing a lawsuit from a Kentucky-based cryptocurrency mining company after the county banned data centers. The county is represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, a left-wing legal organization currently suing Elon Musk and the Trump administration.
At the national level, House Energy and Commerce Republicans sent a letter to the Trump administration last week, urging it to investigate how China and other foreign adversaries are influencing anti-data-center sentiment in America.
“The U.S. is in a global race for technological superiority that has significantly raised the stakes for economic and national security if our nation falls behind. It is critical that this Administration takes any effort to undermine this objective—particularly from foreign adversaries—with a great deal of seriousness,” the letter said.
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Zachery Schmidt is the digital editor of The Star News Network. Email tips to Zachery at [email protected].
