Marshall County IA Supervisors Vote 6-0 for Six-Month Data Center and AI Facility Moratorium

The Marshall County, Iowa Board of Supervisors voted unanimously (6-0) on September 23, 2026 to adopt a six-month moratorium on applications for data centers, AI computing facilities, data mining facilities, and cryptocurrency mining operations, remaining in place until March 23, 2027 unless extended or shortened. The Marshall County Zoning Commission had unanimously recommended the moratorium in early August; supervisors discussed the resolution at a September 9 meeting before voting at the following regular meeting. No hyperscaler project is named in the reporting reviewed as the proximate cause. The city of Marshalltown, within the county, has pursued its own parallel city-level data-center pause.

The vote is part of a broader county-level pattern this timeline has tracked closely — this same week, Pima County, Arizona (2026-09-22–pima-county-az-120-day-data-center-moratorium) and St. Joseph County, Indiana (2026-09-22–st-joseph-county-in-council-votes-6-3-to-begin-data-center-ban-process) each moved on data-center development pauses, following Linn County, Iowa’s earlier 18-month moratorium (2026-07-01–linn-county-ia-18-month-data-center-moratorium-vote). Unlike several of those actions, this one passed unanimously and with no recorded dissent, and unlike Pima County’s water-scarcity framing, no specific environmental trigger is cited in the available reporting — the moratorium reads as a standard pause-for-zoning-review measure rather than a response to a documented local strain.

Status note. Both cited sources are pre-vote (August 1 discussion of the Zoning Commission’s recommendation; September 9 discussion ahead of the vote) — neither directly reports the September 23 vote itself. A WebSearch pass on 2026-09-29 returned corroborating synthesis (quoting County Zoning Administrator Tyler Kelley on a post-vote change removing the extension cap, and describing the vote as unanimous on “Wednesday”) that is consistent with a Times-Republican article reporting the vote, but that article’s URL could not be independently retrieved this pass — the search engine kept resurfacing the two pre-vote pieces. Marked disputed rather than confirmed until a directly-citable post-vote source is added; the underlying claim (unanimous 6-0 passage on September 23) is likely correct but not yet sourced to the letter of this KB’s own standard.