Panic at the Data Center

This nondescript building in Fort Lauderdale is located at 5301 NW 33rd Avenue. It is 64,164 square feet, has only a couple of windows facing a fenced-off parking lot, with a loading dock and some diesel generators out back. The building has a Yelp page and a 4.7 star rating, but there is no restaurant or retail store here. And in spite of what the map says, there isn't a Starlink downlink here either.

Inside this building are about 3.15 megawatts of servers belonging to companies that are not Flexential, which is the name on the building. Mostly what you'd find inside, were you to somehow gain admission and plug in a USB stick before you got chased out, is health data from South Florida medical companies, financial records from public companies subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, card payment histories, and data from financial institutions. This building is mostly about storage and disaster recovery, not active compute. You might find some case data from law firms, or a regional company's ERP records. Maybe a chain of restaurants with payment processing records for a few hundred merchants. Pretty boring stuff.

The building has been a data center since at least 2009, under three different names. Nobody has ever held a public meeting about it. But this is what most data centers look like in Florida: under 20 megawatts, mostly co-located business servers, and not the slightest whiff of AI to be found.

Not counting governments and hospitals, there are 148 operating data centers in Florida, with three more under construction and seventeen planned. Most of them look like this Flexential site. Florida did pass a law this year covering large data centers, but the threshold is 50 megawatts, and local governments keep their zoning authority over anything above it. Nothing in South Florida comes close to that line. There have been bigger proposals elsewhere in the state — a 1,000 megawatt project in St. Lucie County that the developers withdrew in February, and a 200 megawatt project still listed as planned — but not down here.

We should be so lucky. Loudoun County, Virginia has built so many data centers that the residential property tax rate has fallen by about 30% in a decade, from $1.145 per $100 of assessed value in 2016 to $0.805 today. Data centers there generate almost half of the county's property tax revenue while occupying about 4% of its commercial land, and the county says it collects $26 in tax revenue for every $1 it spends serving them.

Loudoun's water utility also built a reclaimed water system specifically for data center cooling, starting back in 2010. It's now 20 miles of dedicated pipeline, and in 2024 it delivered 736 million gallons of treated wastewater to data centers. That's 736 million gallons of drinking water nobody had to use.

Water and power are still live arguments in Loudoun, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. The county went through a drought in 2024 that triggered mandatory water restrictions, and residents there complain about noise, generator testing, and electricity rates. But the places building data centers today have the benefit of watching what came before, including public outcry.

Florida's version of the power question runs through Florida Power and Light, which says new generating capacity for data centers is 100% funded by the data centers themselves. That works through contract: the project pays a surcharge covering the cost of the new generation, and the commitment runs 20 years whether the data center succeeds or not. The catch is that those rate schedules only apply at 50 megawatts and above. Not one data center in South Florida is big enough to trigger them.

Forty miles up the coast, in July of this year, a very different story played out. After public hearings, Palm Beach County commissioners voted 5-1 to kill a data center. This one was much larger: about a million square feet, with another two million square feet of warehouse attached.

So why did that one get a hearing, while others do not?

Intriguingly, the difference is not size. The Palm Beach project, called Project Tango, was bigger, but that isn't why it got a vote and the other one didn't. The reason was that it needed a rezoning.

Flexential’s Fort Lauderdale building didn't need one. Neither did the 150,000 square foot data center that went up in Westview this year, in unincorporated Miami-Dade. That one was classified under county code as a telecommunications hub rather than a data center, which meant it was allowed by right on land already zoned industrial. The required notice went to properties within 500 feet. Most people in the neighborhood found out from a neighbor.

So the loudest fight in South Florida stopped a building nobody was going to live next to. Meanwhile data centers continue to be built in residential neighborhoods without a single hearing. The objection tracks how close the building is to your house, not how big it is or what it does. The little ones don't run AI, which means the thing people are afraid of and the thing they're objecting to are not the same thing.

The biggest data center in South Florida is in Miami, at 50 NE 9th Street. It is MUCH larger than that Flexential building: six stories and 750,000 square feet. It opened in 2001, and is generally called "NAP of the Americas." It's one of the major access points to the Internet, and most of the traffic between the US and Central and South America passes through it.

It has some fun stats. Its exterior panels are seven inches thick. It sits outside the FEMA 500-year flood zone, and the data floors start 32 feet above sea level. It’s designed to withstand Category 5 hurricanes.

Nobody has ever panicked about it. Which is interesting given that it’s sandwiched between two luxury condo high-rises.

Another fun bit of hidden infrastructure: The NAP of the Americas connects more than a dozen undersea data cables. But they’re not the only ones. In Boca Raton there are four cable landing stations, which is where undersea fiber optic cables come out of the ocean and join the land. Two of them face each other across West Rogers Circle, in a business park, near a pest control company. One is the northern terminal for a 25,000 kilometer cable that runs down through Puerto Rico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. The other handles Colombia and the Bahamas.

Those cables went into service around 2000. Twenty-six years, no public meetings.

That's the part I keep coming back to. The infrastructure people are alarmed about is mostly already built, and it went in without anybody noticing. What draws a crowd now is a building down the street, and the buildings down the street are the small ones. Backups. Payment records. A hospital's second copy. What's in the one on Commercial Boulevard is a backup of your dentist's appointment calendar, and it has been sitting there for at least fifteen years. Nobody has ever objected to it, because nobody has ever had a reason to.

The thing people are actually worried about is AI, and it isn't in there.