Kearney’s City Council voted 5-0 on Tuesday night to write the city’s first zoning rules for data centers and, in the same session, hand a conditional use permit to Tech One Crossing, a 368-megawatt computing campus that will rise on the site of an existing bitcoin mine on the city’s east edge.
The vote does two things at once. It creates a rulebook — noise limits, water reporting, setback and energy standards — and it approves the first project that has to live inside it.
What the council actually approved
The council passed a series of city code amendments targeting the three complaints that have followed data centers into small towns across the country: noise, water use, and load on the grid, according to KSNB Local4’s reporting on Tuesday’s meeting. The same 5-0 vote then cleared a conditional use permit for Tech One Crossing, a multi-phase campus planned to replace a local bitcoin mine on the eastern edge of the city.
The headline number is 368 megawatts of eventual capacity, as the Omaha World-Herald reported. For scale, that is roughly the draw of a mid-sized Nebraska city, dropped onto a single campus, phased in over years rather than switched on at once.
The council said the project is expected to create 59 permanent jobs once fully built, with some revenue flowing back to the local school district and a commitment from the developer to disclose water usage, according to KLKN-TV’s account of the hearings.
Fifty-nine jobs is not a large number. That is the honest arithmetic of modern hyperscale computing: the buildings are enormous, the payrolls are not.
The mayor’s framing, and what it concedes
Mayor Jonathan Nikkila’s public framing at Tuesday’s hearing was unusually candid for a municipal official courting a project this size. Mayor Jonathan Nikkila indicated at Tuesday’s hearing that data center companies have been approaching the city, rather than the other way around, and that the city was working to establish appropriate regulations proactively.
Read carefully, that is a concession. The council is not selling residents on a project it went out and won. It is writing rules for an industry that has already decided Nebraska is where the next wave of compute is going, and trying to set the bar high enough that only serious operators clear it.
Kearney is doing this while other Nebraska towns are moving the opposite direction. Flatwater Free Press has documented the split: several Nebraska communities have pulled back, imposed moratoriums, or tightened their approach as the scale of proposed loads has come into focus. Kearney went the other way.
The bitcoin mine already there
One detail from the record deserves more weight than it has received. Tech One Crossing is not landing on empty ground. It is replacing an existing bitcoin mining operation on the same eastern parcel, per KSNB’s reporting on the permit.
That matters for two reasons.
First, the neighbors already know what a large computing load sounds like. Bitcoin mines are notorious for the constant high-frequency whine of industrial fans, and the new noise ordinance the council passed on the same night reflects concerns that existed before Tech One Crossing was ever proposed.
Second, the land-use conversion — crypto mine to AI data center — is the same swap now happening in dozens of small U.S. towns as operators repurpose sites originally built for one flavor of high-density compute into another. The permits change. The transformers, cooling systems, and grid connections mostly stay.
What the rules do and do not settle
The new ordinance sets standards; it does not by itself answer the harder question of who pays for the infrastructure a 368-megawatt load requires. In Nebraska, retail electricity is delivered through public power districts rather than investor-owned utilities, which means transmission upgrades, generation additions, and any resulting rate pressure move through a different set of governance bodies than the city council that voted Tuesday.
Water is the second open question. The developer has committed to transparency on usage, per KLKN. Transparency is not a cap. It is a reporting standard, and residents will not know for years what a fully phased-in campus actually pulls from the local supply during a summer stretch.
The third is jobs. Fifty-nine permanent positions across a multi-phase build is consistent with what hyperscale operators disclose elsewhere. The larger economic case for a city like Kearney rests on property tax valuation and construction-period activity, not payroll. Whether the school district’s share of that valuation offsets the load the campus places on shared infrastructure is a question that will be answered in budget cycles, not press releases.
Where this fits in a bigger fight
Kearney’s vote lands in the middle of a national argument playing out at the town and county level, where the tax revenue from data centers is being weighed against grid strain, water draw, and neighborhood noise. The pattern is that the fight is rarely ideological. It is arithmetic. Councils are asking whether the revenue arrives on the same timeline as the costs.
In some places, that math has produced last-minute judicial pauses and reversed approvals. In Kearney, it produced a unanimous yes, on the condition that the yes came with rules attached.
The clearest resident-facing reading of Tuesday’s record is this: the council decided the project was coming to Nebraska either way, and chose to be the town that wrote the terms rather than the town that inherited them.
Whether those terms hold up when the second and third phases arrive is the part no ordinance can settle in advance.