From the Arkansas Advocate:
Pulaski County’s top elected official has seven days to decide whether to veto new regulations on data centers approved by the county’s quorum court.
The majority-Democrat panel in Arkansas’ most populous county voted 11-4 Tuesday night in favor of the new rules. County Judge Barry Hyde, a Democrat, has seven days to veto it. The measure was written by Wendell Griffen, a former circuit and appeals court judge and current Democratic nominee for county judge, and sponsored by Justice of the Peace Julie Blackwood, a Democrat.
According to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Hyde did not say whether he planned to sign the measure and appeared skeptical of it during Tuesday’s meeting. The regulations can also become law without Hyde’s signature if he does not sign or veto them after seven days.
The regulations touch on noise, and water and power use, requiring prospective data center projects to submit to the county electrical load analyses, water and wastewater plans, land-use suitability studies and a decommissioning plan, among other requirements. Prospective data center projects are required to demonstrate that the development won’t “materially impair” utilities and other public infrastructure that serve surrounding properties under the new regulations, but do not limit the amount of water or power a project can use.
Since the quorum court first considered data center regulations for Arkansas’ most populous county in May, the opposition to the power-hungry computing hubs has grown, with polling showing increasingly broad unpopularity among Americans.
That unpopularity has pit pro-data center interests such as the Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce against Pulaski County residents opposed to the AVAIO data center project in the unincorporated part of the county.
AVAIO is one of six planned data center projects in the state. Two of those projects, in West Memphis and Clarksville, are already under construction.
The effort to regulate data centers in Pulaski County has seen fits and starts, even as Little Rock passed its own requirements over the summer. Data center opponents rejoiced in June after a temporary moratorium appeared to pass, only for the county clerk to announce days later that there had been a vote miscount.
Debate has also raged over whether to exempt the AVAIO project from the regulations. Blackwood told the Arkansas Times that AVAIO would be required to comply with the new regulations.
The fight over data centers has cut across party lines, with elected officials in other states losing their seats amid the backlash.
The push to build more and more data centers comes as internet giants like Google, Open AI and Meta seek to capitalize on the rapid growth of artificial intelligence models. While data centers have existed for decades, powering everything from email to social media, the AI models created by tech companies require massive amounts of computing power.
