Raleigh City Council Work Session on Data Center Infrastructure - June 16, 2026
Raleigh City Council Work Session on Data Centers and Infrastructure - June 16, 2026
The Raleigh City Council held a work session on June 16, 2026, at 4:30 PM to discuss the expansion of data centers, their impacts on the community, zoning regulations, utility considerations, and potential policy responses. The presentation was a collaborative effort between the Office of Sustainability, City Attorneys, Information Technology, Planning and Development, and Raleigh Water. No formal votes were taken, but council members raised questions and requested follow-up information.
Discussion Items
- Data Center Overview: Mark Wittenberg (IT) explained the types of data centers: edge (small, low power/water), enterprise/corporate (medium), co-location/cloud regional (larger), and hyperscale (large, high power/water). He noted that Raleigh currently has no hyperscale data centers or pending requests. Data centers are driven by cloud computing, digital services, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence.
- Community Benefits and Challenges: Benefits include increased tax base, municipal service efficiency, utility revenue growth, and support for research/technology. Challenges include land use ratios, obsolescence (equipment replaced every 2-3 years), noise from cooling systems, energy consumption, and water use.
- Cooling Systems: Closed-loop systems (air-cooled) use less water; open-loop evaporative cooling uses more water but is cheaper. Emerging liquid/immersion cooling may reduce water use.
- Zoning Regulations: Pat Young (Planning) explained that small-scale edge centers (under 20,000 sq ft, <5 MW) are classified as minor utilities and allowed by right in all zoning districts. All other data centers are major utilities, limited to IX (Industrial Mixed-Use) and IH (Heavy Industrial) districts, and require a special use permit from the Board of Adjustment. Staff noted that high land values in Raleigh make hyperscale centers economically unlikely. State law (2024) restricts downzoning, limiting new zoning standards for AI data centers.
- Water Utilities: Witt Wheeler (Raleigh Water) reported existing data centers use <25,000 gallons per day. The city’s reclaimed water system has about 2 million gallons per day of capacity available. Data centers would be classified under industrial water rates (same as pharmaceutical or manufacturing plants), and system development fees are state-regulated. The city is working on a revised fee schedule for the next budget.
- Energy Considerations: Duke Energy provided data: 4.8 gigawatts in new large customer contracts, expected $3.6 billion in benefits supporting residential customers, and an estimated $5–$6 reduction in residential bills over 15 years. They offer power curtailment clauses and do not have discounted rates for data centers. Duke expects data center peak demand to grow from <1% to 13% by 2030.
- State Legislation: Senate Bill 730 (Ratepayer Protection Act) applies to data centers >100 MW, requiring site assessments, water use standards, and prohibiting local incentives/eminent domain.
- Future Monitoring: Staff will monitor technology advances (e.g., chips with better heat dissipation, edge computing), vendor sustainability goals, and state/federal regulations.
Council Questions & Staff Responses
- Councilmember Silver asked for a map of IX/IH districts and whether data centers can go vertical. Staff replied that data centers typically stay single-story due to equipment weight/costs, but will provide maps.
- Mayor Pro Tem Harris raised concerns about customer bills, water safeguards, environmental impacts, clean energy, and frontline communities. She mentioned other communities enacting moratoriums. City Attorney noted moratoriums are allowed under state statute to develop criteria, but staff believes current zoning and water standards protect public interest. Councilmember Fort suggested closed session discussion for moratorium.
- Councilmember Patton asked about water table connectivity (Jordan Lake vs. Falls Lake), waste byproducts from evaporative cooling (no contamination expected), and water rate classes. Staff explained industrial rates will be proposed next budget; residential use is majority.
- Councilmember Silver followed up on proximity: hyperscale centers in Southeast are rural, while regional edge centers (100,000 sq ft, 10-20 MW) may appear in metro areas needing proximity to users.
- Councilmember Fort asked about coordination with six other municipalities served by Raleigh Water; staff confirmed discussions and capacity limitations.
- Councilmember Jones asked about tracking impact of city’s AI use (e.g., Ask Raleigh) on communities; staff said it’s not possible due to cloud computing load balancing. She also asked about long-term side effects; staff mentioned working with NVIDIA, Dell, Microsoft on chip efficiency and e-waste recycling.
- Councilmember Harris requested a map showing industrial zones near residential areas and locations of reclaimed water lines relative to zoned sites. Staff agreed to provide details.
- Councilmember Branch noted data centers in RTP (water from Durham/Cary) and asked about building reuse due to shorter tech cycles. Staff responded that cooling systems will need upgrades, but buildings themselves can be reused.
Key Outcomes
- Staff will provide council with maps of IX/IH zoning districts, total land area, and proximity to residential areas.
- Staff will follow up on Duke Energy’s projected $5–$6 residential bill reduction.
- Council will consider whether to pursue a moratorium on high-impact data centers in a future closed session.
- No formal votes or decisions were made; the session was informational.
Meeting Transcript
That's all for this episode of Wake TV. Keep up with all the latest Wake County news by visiting us online at Wake.gov slash news. And be sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. So you can always stay in the loop. We'll see you next time. Well, we'll see. Well, we're not going to be able to do it. All right. We will call the work session to order. And on our canes photo to the uh data center information and infrastructure. We have Mark Wittenberg Information Technology. Good morning. Uh mayor, members of the council, and Madam City Manager. Yeah, that's a hard act to follow. But I am also joined by my colleagues here. I want you to know that this presentation was a collaborative effort between the Office of Sustainability, City Attorneys, IT, Planning and Development at Raleigh Water. First of all, just an agenda for today. We're going to talk a little bit about data centers, like what they are, the sizes, the different types, what they're used for. We're going to talk about the impacts on the community, both the benefits and some of the challenges that we're seeing. We're going to talk about zoning regulations and the tools that you have in your toolbox to be able to regulate where these are built and the sites. We're going to talk a little bit about the utility considerations, the energy, the power that these consume. And then we're going to bring it home with what to watch. In other words, what is staff looking at? What are we observing? What are the things that we are looking forward as far as uh developments in this space? So let's start off with what's driving data center expansion. And I'm going to start with today. If you drove into the council meeting, took a bus, uh, searched for something, used your phone, you've used a data center. If you watched the canes just dominate Vegas the other day, you most likely used a hyperscale data center somewhere. The point is that every day we're using these uh cell phones, we're using uh information, we're providing services, all of these consume and use data centers. One of the big expansions started with cloud computing. So, what is cloud computing? Cloud computing is basically just computers that are somebody else's. It's where you're leasing computer use or space in a data center. The reason that cloud computing and data centers kind of came to be is that by consolidating all of these things into one place, we can share the care the cooling, we can share the backup protection, and we can share the facility instead of us all building our own and consuming more resources. And so cloud computing was kind of that first foray into that market of consolidation of those resources. Digital services, I love to say, you know, there's an app for that. And there is. Poor, that's not what we're seeing today. What we're seeing now in this new AI world is we're seeing very directed cyber attacks that look very, very real. And so in the cybersecurity space, we need to make sure that we're staying up with this. Autonomous systems, these are these agents that are assisting and doing like daily tasks and automate uh providing automation around things that may have done uh been done by humans in the past but now are being done by computers. But I would say the primary driver for data center expansion and the reason that it's kind of all the talk is around artificial intelligence. Over the last two years, the development in artificial intelligence has just exponentially increased with generative AI, and now we're seeing these autonomous systems coming up, and you're just going to see this continue to grow exponentially. These systems require a lot of compute power. So different types of data center. I'm not gonna go through this all of this information, but I just wanted to give you a little brief overview that all data centers are not created equal. And I'm gonna start with the edge data center. And so these are the smallest size data centers, so think of something that's like a shipping container or smaller. And these are typically located near the service that they're providing.
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