DeSoto County, FL commissioners direct moratorium on new data centers — but carve out pending 4GW DCIP gas hyperscale campus

After hours of emotional public testimony, DeSoto County, Florida commissioners on June 25, 2026 unanimously directed county attorneys to draft a one-year moratorium on new data center applications — but explicitly carved out an already-pending 800-acre, gas-turbine-powered hyperscale campus proposed by DCIP Group on a decommissioned power plant site that could reach 4 gigawatts. The carve-out means the moratorium protects residents from future projects while the single project residents actually mobilized to fight continues through the approval pipeline. The final moratorium vote remains pending; whether the carve-out survives is the open question (4GW figure from tier-2 MySuncoast, consistent with tier-1 Suncoast Searchlight’s scale reporting).

This is the documented local-community-resistance pattern: cities and counties enacting moratoria against fast-tracked data center expansion as ratepayer and water/power anxieties surface. It sits alongside the New York statewide S10642 moratorium, Arizona and Illinois tax moratoriums, and the Monterey Park municipal ban — a barn-door-after-the-horse dynamic where local pauses arrive only once a flagship hyperscale project is already entrenched.