Volusia County is weighing a permanent prohibition on large-scale data center development in its unincorporated areas, a move that would put one of Florida’s fastest-growing coastal counties among the strictest jurisdictions in the state on hyperscale computing infrastructure.
The County Council had already directed staff to draft a six-month moratorium on AI data centers. At its August 17 meeting, with that draft in hand, the council went further and directed staff to prepare an outright ban instead. It arrives as Edgewater, a city inside the same county, has advanced a permanent voter ban to the November ballot. What began as a study pause is now edging toward a hard ceiling on an industry that, statewide, has become one of the loudest fights of the 2026 election cycle.
What the county is actually considering
The measure under discussion is a permanent ordinance, not a temporary moratorium. A moratorium pauses permitting while staff study impacts. A permanent ban writes the prohibition into county code and requires a future council vote to undo.
That distinction matters. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 484 at Florida Polytechnic University in Lakeland on May 7, 2026, directing the Florida Public Service Commission to keep the costs of new hyperscale facilities off residential electric bills and confirming that local governments keep the authority to reject these projects. The law took effect July 1 and defines a large-scale data center as a single site with an anticipated monthly peak load of 50 megawatts or more.
Volusia would be exercising that authority at its ceiling, not its floor. One limit is worth stating plainly: the ordinance would apply only to unincorporated Volusia County. Land inside city limits is governed by each municipality’s own rules, which is why Ormond Beach passed its own 18-month moratorium in July and why Edgewater is going to its voters separately.
More than a dozen Florida counties and cities have already adopted or advanced moratoriums and bans, most of them temporary and expiring within a year. Volusia’s earlier direction to draft a six-month pause fit that pattern. A permanent ban would not.
Why Volusia is moving now
The pressure is arithmetic. Worldwide data center power demand is projected to rise 27% in 2026 and reach 133 gigawatts, up from 105 GW in 2025, according to Gartner figures reported in July 2026. AI-optimized servers are driving nearly all of the growth, while conventional server power consumption barely moves — Gartner puts that side of the ledger at roughly 1% growth for the year.
That growth curve has to land somewhere. Florida, with cheap land, established fiber, and a business-friendly tax code, has been on the shortlist. So has the pushback.
The industry’s utility footprint is what has changed the local political math. A single hyperscale AI campus can request interconnection at loads comparable to a small city. Utilities pass those infrastructure costs — new substations, transmission upgrades, generation capacity — through to the broader ratepayer base unless a state carves out a rule to prevent it. Florida’s SB 484 attempts that carveout. Whether it holds in practice is a separate question, and one Volusia council members appear unwilling to wait on.
The state fight the county is stepping into
Data centers have become a defining issue in Florida politics heading into the November election. DeSantis, who is term-limited, has spent the past year arguing that ordinary Floridians should not subsidize the facilities’ power and water demands — a position he repeated at the SB 484 signing.
That framing has traveled quickly downstream. Public opinion on data centers has soured in almost every state where the buildout has become visible. Volusia’s move is not an outlier. It is a regional echo of a national pattern DMNews has tracked from Mount Vernon, Washington to Memphis, where local governments are drawing lines before facilities arrive rather than after.
What residents gain, and what they give up
A permanent ban forecloses two things: the tax base a hyperscale campus generates, and the risk it imposes on grid capacity and water supply. Neither side of that ledger is small.
On the risk side, water is becoming a bigger part of the story than power. Cooling loads at large AI facilities can run to millions of gallons a day at the top end of the scale. Reporting on communities near AI data centers has documented a campus in Fayetteville, Georgia drawing 30 million gallons from the local water supply before it was ever billed for the usage, and Google’s facilities in The Dalles, Oregon accounting for close to 40% of that city’s total water consumption in 2025. Florida’s aquifer system is already under stress from population growth and saltwater intrusion along the coast. Volusia sits directly on that geography.
On the tax side, the pitch data center developers make to counties is familiar: capital investment in the hundreds of millions, sales tax exemptions notwithstanding, plus property tax revenue and a small number of high-wage operational jobs. The facilities do arrive, but the revenue-to-strain ratio can shift quickly once the buildout hits scale.
Volusia is choosing a different route: don’t collect the revenue, don’t absorb the load.
What happens next
The proposal is at the drafting stage. Staff had come to the August meeting with the six-month ordinance already written and must now start over on ban language, which will require a public hearing process and a final council vote. In the meantime the county is not defenceless: under the Pending Ordinance Doctrine, no large-scale data center can be permitted in the county while the draft is live. The parallel Edgewater ballot measure, if approved by voters on November 3, would apply only within Edgewater city limits but would create a political and legal marker inside the county that a countywide ordinance could lean on.
Legal exposure is the other variable. Hill County, Texas — the first Texas county to pass a data center moratorium — adopted a one-year pause in May and rescinded it three weeks later after developer RCM Hill sued in federal court, arguing Texas counties have no statutory authority to halt development. The county replaced the pause with a disclosure checklist and, when the case was dismissed in July, agreed to pay up to $100,000 of the developer’s attorney’s fees. Florida’s SB 484 gives counties a firmer statutory footing than Texas law did, which changes the litigation calculus — but does not eliminate it.
The near-term test is whether Volusia converts the August direction into an adopted ordinance, and whether the language survives contact with the industry’s legal response. DMNews has previously tracked the split between the county’s temporary pause and Edgewater’s permanent ballot approach, and a permanent county ordinance would close that gap in one direction.
For Volusia ratepayers, the practical read is that the county is signaling it would rather forfeit a tax base it has not yet collected than accept infrastructure costs it has not yet been asked to absorb. That is a defensible position, and a reversible one. What it is not is a study pause.