Elected officials in Santa Fe County unanimously passed a temporary moratorium on data center developments Tuesday evening, becoming the latest New Mexico community to do so.
The pause on issuing development permits for data centers took effect immediately and will run for 18 months while county staffers develop regulations on water, energy, noise and more. While there are no pending data center proposals in Santa Fe, commissioners said they believed it was important to be “proactive” and put guardrails in place before a developer pitches a project in the county.
Data center proposals have cropped up in virtually every corner of the state, from Raton on the Colorado state line to Doña Ana County on the Mexico border.
“When Project Jupiter kind of broke the news, as well as now fast forward to Socorro County, I’ve been looking at…trends around data centers, particularly in rural areas,” Commissioner Lisa Cacari Stone, who co-sponsored the moratorium with Commissioner Hank Hughes, said before the vote. “This is about prevention, not prohibition forever.”
The moratorium specifies that it applies to data centers that would use one or megawatts — enough to power up to 1,000 homes, in some areas. A previous draft of the moratorium put the cutoff at 100 megawatts, but commissioners said that amendment was necessary to prevent a developer from coming to Santa Fe and building a 99-megawatt facility.
Across the state, elected leaders have often taken different approaches to regulating data centers as proposals came in.
Leaders in Socorro County, about an hour south of Albuquerque, recently adopted a yearlong data center moratorium. There, a Canadian tech CEO had been pitching a data center and solar array on 10,000 acres of land in partnership with New Mexico Tech. Source NM found that neither the CEO nor his company had ever successfully built a data center.
And in Raton, a town of about 6,000 just south of the Colorado state line, municipal leaders recently postponed a decision on adopting a data center moratorium after previously signing a memorandum of understanding with a data center developer.
In Santa Fe Tuesday night, supporters said they hoped that the moratorium’s proactive nature would serve as a guidepost for other communities across the state. More than 10 residents spoke in-person during the Tuesday meeting’s public comment period and burst out in applause when commissioners passed the ordinance.
“I want you to know that folks all over the state are watching,” Santa Fe resident and co-director of the environmental advocacy group Earth Care Bianca Sopoci-Belknap told commissioners. “A lot of counties across the state…don’t have the resources we have here in Santa Fe County, so the work you all are doing to develop these really rigorous regulations so we can put forward a model protective ordinance is going to really matter.”
