As Data Centers Draw Opposition Across Florida, DeSantis and Environmentalists Forge an Unlikely Alliance

By Craig Pittman

Happy New Year! How’s 2026 treating you so far? Looks to me like it’s got a new twist on the challenges of 2025, at least when it comes to AI.

“AI,” in case you’ve just awakened from 12 years in a coma, does not stand for a spicy alcoholic drink called “Avocado Inferno.” It’s short for Artificial Intelligence — sort of like the HAL 9000 talking computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

A lot of people have strong opinions about the use of AI and what effect it’s having on education in particular and society in general. But what I want to talk about is how much the surging demand for something artificial is imperiling something very real: our water.

People in Palm Beach County found out recently about plans to build a huge AI data center on 202 acres in Loxahatchee. A lot of those people looked at the project and echoed HAL 9000 by saying: “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”

A Change.org petition opposing the project drew more than 7,000 signatures in just a month.

The zoning for Project Tango, as it’s known (more on why in a minute) was first approved 10 years ago, long before AI became the flashpoint it is now. But the project’s developer recently sought to expand that zoning to include another 64 acres, which is what tipped off everyone to what was going on.

“It wasn’t on anybody’s radar,” Mark Offerman, president of the Palm Beach County Environmental Alliance, told me.

Once they realized what was happening, people turned out in force to tell the Palm Beach County Commission to say no. The Dec. 10 commission meeting, according to WLRN-FM, featured “hours of emotional public comment from more than 50 residents worried about nonstop low-frequency hums, heavy water consumption, and long-term environmental impacts.”

They won — temporarily. But this is just one salvo in a war that’s starting to break out across the state.

A sidestep for Tango

Most of what I know about robots I learned from reading Isaac Asimov and watching “The Terminator.” But AI use has gone far beyond what science fiction envisioned.

Now people are turning to AI for assistance with everything from combating drug abuse to helping human fertility. Heck, you can’t even do a Google search now without tripping over an AI summary of questionable accuracy.

Turns out AI has a pretty bad track record when it comes to reflecting the real world. For proof, I refer you to the many court cases — including one in a Florida criminal case — in which attorneys filed motions written using AI. These lazy limabeans then wound up in hot water because their AI-written motions turned out to contain more fiction than Stephen King’s computer drive.

Stories like that are the reason Merriam-Webster chose “slop” — the mess left behind by careless use of AI — as its “Word of the Year.”

Yet the Florida Legislature, perhaps because it produces so much of its own kind of slop, feels a tremendous deference toward the big-money corporations pushing any sort of development. That’s why they allow these companies to hide their identities.

“State law allows the potential end-user’s identity to be shielded from public records,” Stet News reported. The supposed justification for the secrecy is “to improve the state’s competitive edge.” The fact that it prevents the neighbors from finding out who wants to move in and ruin the neighborhood is just too bad, I guess.

This explains why Palm Beach County officials are calling this AI data center “Project Tango” — apparently a reference to how they’re allowed to use fancy footwork to side-step the Sunshine Law.

To make matters worse, the Project Tango expansion first surfaced on the county commission’s consent agenda.

That’s supposed to be for uncontested items. Scheduling something controversial for the consent agenda is hardly a 2026 trick. It’s more of a throwback to the 1960s.

Fortunately, the anti-AI public showed up for real.

Once in a generation

The growing demand for AI is driving the growth of new AI data centers. As a result, data centers are popping up around the state like mushrooms after a hard rain.

A search of the website “datacenters.com” turns up 139 of them in Florida already, mostly in such urban locations as Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville.

Sites in more rural areas can sometimes make sense. In June, the Fort Meade City Commission approved a zoning change on 1,164 acres in Polk County to build an AI data center. That land used to be a phosphate mine. Given the environmental track record of phosphate mining, an AI data center could be an improvement.

But others are clearly not compatible with their neighborhood. Take the one that was proposed last fall on a former citrus grove in St. Lucie County.

“Sentinel Grove would be one of the largest data centers in the world, both by area and by energy consumption,” TCPalm.com reported in October. “The 1,218‑acre site would house up to 15 million square feet — more than 260 football fields — of computer systems, server racks and other data-center infrastructure across several buildings.”

Company officials called it “a once-in-a-generation economic project for St. Lucie County.” But the county didn’t agree.

St. Lucie County’s planning and zoning commission voted 4-2 to recommend against approving development, citing concerns of stormwater runoff, construction traffic, and urban sprawl.

“I just can’t even understand it, or see it, or compartmentalize that building being out in the middle of that area,” one of the commission members said.

The recommendation has yet to go before the full county commission. Instead, the developer is now “engaging with surrounding residents and property owners and exploring potential refinements” to the proposal, according to Benjamin Balcer, director of Planning and Zoning Services for St. Lucie County.

Or consider one proposed last year for Osceola County, near Yeehaw Junction (which I always feel compelled to mention was originally named “Jackass Junction” until our prissy DOT made them change it).

The project calls for “nine data center buildings, each three stories with 675,000 square feet and an adjacent equipment yard, for over 7 million square feet,” according to the Orlando Sentinel, which called it “slightly smaller than the world’s largest data center.”

To say this one would not fit with its neighbors is an understatement. It’s next door to the 27,000-acre DeLuca Preserve, one of the state’s largest nature preserves and crucial habitat for the endangered Florida grasshopper sparrow.

A million noisy computers

One of the people I talked to for this column knows a lot about AI data centers because he’s built some. It’s the reason why he opposes the one proposed for Palm Beach County.

Rudolph Tinker is a political science professor at Palm Beach State College and a licensed general contractor. One of the main problems with such centers, he said, is the noise.

“It’s like having your computer running, but you’ve got a million of them,” he explained.

To have such a tremendous number of components at work inevitably produces a tremendous amount of heat, he told me. Cooling things down requires millions of gallons of water.

“The water consumption by this plant is going to be tremendous,” he predicted.

The bipartisan Environmental and Energy Study Institute reports that AI data centers “can consume up to 5 million gallons per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people.” That’s more than 1 billion gallons a year.

Fresh drinking water is in increasingly short supply in this state, to the point that some places are calling for moratoriums on new connections. To let one factory slurp up more than 1 billion gallons every year seems absurdly excessive.

The plant’s electric consumption will be huge as well, Tinker predicted.

“As artificial intelligence data centers multiply across the state,” Medium reported in July, “their voracious appetite for power and water is triggering costly infrastructure upgrades and rate increases that are quietly being passed on to Floridians’ household budgets.”

In fact, Drew Martin of the Sierra Club’s Loxahatchee chapter predicted Project Tango will drive up electrical rates for everyone in the county. It doesn’t help that the nearest power plant runs on polluting natural gas, not clean solar power.

Even worse, the location chosen by whoever is behind Project Tango is right next door to the environmentally friendly Arden community, said Offerman of the Palm Beach County Environmental Alliance. The Arden residents were flabbergasted to see they would be on the front lines of the AI battle and fought back hard.

“A facility of this magnitude — operating around the clock with massive electrical usage, water demands, and constant mechanical systems — does not belong anywhere near these homes, farms, or equestrian properties,” one Arden resident wrote to county commissioners. She warned that “Project Tango will permanently alter the character of the region.”

As another Arden resident told the Palm Beach County Zoning Commission: “If you actually ask AI if it’s good to live next to a data center, it will tell you absolutely no.”

An unlikely ally

The zoning commissioners voted 7-2 to say yes to Project Tango, even though the project manager said they were only beginning to study the noise problem and the water usage. Despite Tango doing things backward, the zoning officials were ready to dance with them like Ginger Rogers matching steps with Fred Astaire.

But at the Palm Beach County Commission meeting, the commissioners looked at the angry crowd, listened to their objections — and pushed pause.

Instead of voting to halt the project, they voted to postpone any decision until April. That would give the company time to do all the studies that its project manager had promised.

Still, at least one commissioner got the message.

“I want to reject the whole application,” said Commissioner Maria Sachs.

We’ll find out in a few months whether Sachs’ colleagues will see the light the way she did. In the meantime, the people opposed to this project picked up an unlikely ally.

I hope you’re sitting down. The ally’s name is Gov. Ron DeSantis. No, I’m not kidding. In early December, DeSantis announced he wants the Legislature to enact what he called “an AI Bill of Rights.”

Most of it involves children and chatbots, but there are two provisions of interest to the folks in Loxahatchee: giving local governments explicit permission to reject AI data centers and forbidding the data centers from being built in agricultural areas.

DeSantis has been on the wrong side of virtually every important environmental issue since he took office. I’m talking about everything from water pollution and toxic algae blooms to Everglades restoration and removal of the Rodman reservoir. Heck, this is the guy who thought it would be a nifty idea to put golf courses in the state parks!

But on this one point, he’s got a point. AI data centers are water-draining, energy-sucking polluters that drive up power bills and drive down residential property values. Local governments should be allowed to say no to them, period.

During the first of a series of legislative committee hearings on AI last month, one industry executive admitted that his colleagues know they’re about as welcome in Florida residential communities as a burning bag of dog poop on the porch.

“To say that data centers are unpopular right now is probably an understatement, to say the least,” said Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition.

Nevertheless, they’re pushing these unpopular projects because they can rake in millions of dollars.

Here’s my proposed New Year’s resolution: Let’s pass a law that says any company that wants to build a massive AI data center in an area not zoned for industry can get a green light only if they put up a bond.

The bond has to cover any damage done — to the water supply, the energy grid, breathability of the air, you name it. The amount would be at least $10 million, with the cost higher for larger projects.

I think even HAL 9000 would tell you that was fair.

Craig Pittman is a native Floridian. In 30 years at the Tampa Bay Times, he won numerous state and national awards for his environmental reporting. He is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller Oh, Florida! How America’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country, which won a gold medal from the Florida Book Awards. His latest, published in 2021, is The State You’re In: Florida Men, Florida Women, and Other Wildlife. In 2020 the Florida Heritage Book Festival named him a Florida Literary Legend. Craig is co-host of the “Welcome to Florida” podcast. He lives in St. Petersburg with his wife and children.