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 cited a figure — 75 projects, $130 billion in announced/proposed capital value blocked or delayed — that traces to Data Center Watch (10a Labs); [CORRECTED 2026-08-28, applying the correction already logged below in this file’s “$130 billion” section, dated 2026-08-27] it is a Q1 2026 quarterly figure (January-March), not an annual 2026 total, methodology only partially disclosed, with no blocked-vs-delayed split and no Texas breakout — cite it with its period and limits, not as an unqualified annual figure. 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.

The Texas timing constraint (added 2026-08-27)

Fort Worth’s August 11 vote was 10-0 to begin the legal process, not to impose the pause. Under Texas law a commercial-development moratorium cannot activate until the council issues written findings that existing regulations are inadequate to prevent harm to public health, safety, or welfare — which puts the earliest effective date at February 16, 2027. The council also created an eleven-member Data Center and Infrastructure Commission and required new applicants to document PUC and ERCOT approvals; two companion measures passed 10-1.

The distinction matters for reading the moratorium wave: a unanimous vote and an actual construction pause can be six months apart, and the headline count of localities that have “passed a moratorium” conflates jurisdictions where building has stopped with jurisdictions where a process has started.

What actually constrains Texas local action (added 2026-08-27)

Research on the Texas state-versus-municipal question (research-texas-datacenter-state-vs-municipal-levers-2026-08-27) found the intuitive framing is wrong twice over.

Abbott’s directives do not preempt or reinforce the municipal moratoria — they run on a different lever entirely. The June 10 directive and August 3 grid-connection freeze operate through ERCOT interconnection and PUCT ratepayer-cost rulemaking; read directly, neither contains zoning or abatement language. Municipal moratoria and abatement fights sit on separate statutory footing (Local Gov’t Code Ch. 212 and Ch. 312) the directives never touch. Fort Worth in fact now requires applicants to document ERCOT/PUC approval as an input to its own zoning gate — treating the state lever as additive, not a substitute.

The real constraint is Dillon’s Rule plus developer litigation. Texas counties are creatures of statute with no inherent police power. Hill County passed the first Texas county data-center moratorium in about May 2026; developer RCM Hill LLC sued for $100 million (ultra vires, takings, and § 1983 claims); the county rescinded within weeks and paid roughly $100,000 in fees. Tom Green County then dropped its own moratorium plans.

That sequence — not gubernatorial action — is why Bell County and Fort Worth are moving by amendment and process rather than outright bans. It is the most important fact in the Texas thread and is not otherwise in this corpus; it deserves its own timeline entry.

Dallas: a five-member council memo dated August 12, 2026 requested a hearing within 30 days on data-center zoning amendments — process-start stage, not a vote.

On the $130 billion “blocked or delayed projects” figure, which circulates without qualification: it traces to Data Center Watch (10a Labs) and is a Q1 2026 quarterly figure (January-March), not an annual total — 75 projects. Methodology is only partially disclosed (public-source tracking of media, filings, petitions), with no blocked-versus-delayed split, no Texas breakout, and the full report paywalled. Cite it with its period and its limits or not at all.

The grandfather-rush question, tested against primary permit data (added 2026-08-27)

The premise that a moratorium vote produces an immediate filing rush is checkable, not assumed. It does not hold here, at least not yet. Querying Fort Worth’s own live ArcGIS permit dataset (CFW Development Permits Table, confirmed current as of the query date) for every building/mechanical/grading permit whose work description names a data center finds zero filed since the August 11 vote — the most recent, an 488,628 SF/196MW building permit (PB26-11109), was filed August 3, eight days before the vote, and no data-center-flagged permit has followed it through August 27. Citywide commercial-permit volume for August also tracks with June and July’s rate, showing no general surge either. This is a caveat worth carrying forward: the reason there is no rush yet is structural, not an absence of developer interest — the grandfather clause under Texas Local Government Code Ch. 212/245 protects zoning applications filed before the moratorium’s effective date, which is not August 11 but February 16, 2027, per the city’s own adoption schedule (commission recommendations Nov 3; first hearing Nov 10; second hearing Jan 5, 2027; first reading Jan 12; second reading/adoption Feb 16, requiring a three-fourths council supermajority). The real filing-rush window, if one develops, runs into next year, not this one.

A second finding corrects a plausible overclaim: Fort Worth City Council’s 7-4 approval on August 26 of an amended site plan for Black Mountain’s $10 billion, 187-acre-platted data-center campus looks, at a glance, like exactly the kind of deadline-beating vote a rush narrative would want — but the site plan “was twice tabled by the council” and originally scheduled for votes in May and June, i.e., it predates the moratorium proposal entirely. It is evidence of a project moving on its own pre-existing timeline, not evidence of the moratorium accelerating anything.

Two instruments, not the Nashville three. Fort Worth is not running a zoning-cap/moratorium/eminent-domain trio (the Nashville pattern, see research-nashville-dc-blox-eminent-domain-zoo-datacenter-fight-2026-08-27). It is running two: an ERCOT/PUC grid-documentation filing requirement that took effect immediately on August 11 (10-1) and already binds every new application, plus the delayed-effect 90-day moratorium described above. The filing requirement is confirmed to add real friction, not rubber-stamp review — before August 11 a developer could pursue city review and the state interconnection queue in parallel; now the state approval must come first.

Commission: only the chair is publicly named as of August 27 — Dr. Michael Slattery, a TCU environmental-studies professor, appointed 10-0 (council member Macy Hill recused over her seat on TCU’s board of trustees). The other ten of eleven seats, filled through a two-stage council-nominates/chair-selects process, remain unannounced sixteen days after the commission’s creation, roughly five weeks ahead of its November 3 recommendation deadline — an open question for capture-risk assessment once membership is public, not evidence of it yet.

Dallas update: still at the memo stage as of August 27 — no hearing scheduled or held, 15 of the 30 days requested having elapsed. A separate, unrelated Dallas vote in the same window (August 13, 14-0, rejecting a staff proposal to eliminate the $150 zoning-hearing-delay fee under city code §51A-401(e)) should not be conflated with the data-center question.

Full sourcing and method: research-fort-worth-datacenter-moratorium-grandfather-rush-dallas-status-2026-08-27.

Dover, DE confirmed as a separate entry (added 2026-08-28)

A Dover, Delaware data-center moratorium was surfaced buried inside an August 13 daily-capture story about this Fort Worth/Louisville pairing and initially dropped as a duplicate. It is not a duplicate — Dover’s proposal is procedurally two days earlier (Committee of the Whole advanced it August 11, unanimous) and is its own committee-stage action, unconnected to Fort Worth or Louisville. See 2026-08-11–dover-de-committee-advances-18-month-datacenter-moratorium for the confirmed, independently sourced write-up.