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.
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.