Fort Worth Advances Data Center Moratorium Unanimously; Louisville Passes Six-Month Freeze 24-1 Two Days Later

Fort Worth City Council voted unanimously on August 11, 2026, after a late-night public hearing, to create a data center committee and advance procedural steps toward a 90-day construction moratorium — a freeze that, following future public hearings, would not take effect until roughly February 2027 and would exempt projects already in the pipeline. The council also moved to establish a data center commission and to require evidence of ERCOT interconnection approval before approving new projects. Two days later, on August 13, Louisville Metro Council voted 24-1 for a six-month moratorium barring city planners from approving new data center proposals until comprehensive zoning rules are adopted, with an amendment closing a loophole that would have allowed existing buildings to be rezoned for data center use. The Louisville vote came days after a developer filed plans to convert a 350,000-square-foot southwest Louisville warehouse into a data center; protesters at the meeting had pushed for a full year.

The distinction between the two votes is worth preserving against the “moratorium wave” framing: Louisville enacted a binding freeze, while Fort Worth started a process whose effective date sits six months out and grandfathers the current pipeline. Both nonetheless register the same underlying shift — Texas is a hyperscaler-friendly state where Governor Abbott had already frozen grid connections pending an ERCOT audit (2026-08-03–abbott-freezes-texas-data-center-grid-connections-ercot-audit), and Kentucky has not enacted large-load tariff protections, making the Louisville moratorium a plausible precursor to a KPSC docket. NBC News reported local opposition had blocked or delayed 75 projects worth $130 billion in 2026. The pattern is now dense across the corpus — Montgomery County MD’s 18-month freeze, Hochul’s statewide EO 62 (2026-07-15–hochul-signs-eo62-first-statewide-hyperscale-moratorium), an 11-county North Carolina wave (2026-08-03–nc-moratorium-wave-11-counties-durham-hearing-aug24), Walker County GA (2026-08-11–walker-county-ga-datacenter-moratorium-180-days-study-committee), and Jeffersonville IN’s 8-0 vote that exempted Meta (2026-08-04–jeffersonville-in-8-0-data-center-moratorium-meta-exempted). The exemption clauses are the tell: the resistance is real, and the largest incumbents keep negotiating their way out of it.