Following up on an announcement Wednesday by Google that it would be building a transatlantic cable and land it in Flagler Beach, Palm Coast and Flagler County for the first time this week disclosed what has been reported since last August–that a company would build a large data center in Palm Coast’s Town Center. But the two governments’ releases provided more boasts than information.
It’s been known since last August, when FlaglerLive first reported it, that Atlanta-based DC Blox was planning a huge data center on 34 acres in Palm Coast’s Town Center. The company secured an easement with Flagler Beach to land up to six cables on South 6th Street for up to $1.2 million in one-time payments to the city.
Since then the company and Palm Coast would not disclose any information about the Town Center project other than to describe it as a “state-qualified economic development project,” which means it’s getting taxpayer subsidies (either direct subsidies or through tax credits or rebates). The company and the city have not disclosed the amount. Nor have they disclosed much else beyond what Google, on its own, just revealed.
Even then, the city and the company continue to be mum about essential aspects of the Town Center data center beyond a cheery but cagey press release. (The data center will be built just south of the canal that parallels Royal Palms Parkway, on the west side of Town Center Boulevard.)
On Wednesday, Google announced that it will build “the only in-service fiber-optic cable between Florida and Europe,” called Sol (meaning “sun”), stretching from Spain to Flagler Beach, where it will connect at DC Blox’s Cable Landing Station before making its way to the Palm Coast data center, and from there to one of Google’s “really big data centers” in South Carolina.
The cable, operating in tandem with a nearly parallel cable landing in South Carolina, is part of Google’s global cloud infrastructure. It won’t affect service in Palm Coast so much as strengthen redundancies and reduce latency globally.
The Google announcement did not offer any information about the Town Center facility, nor provide a date for its cable landing locally.
DC Blox has submitted a preliminary conceptual plan to Palm Coast. The city is refusing to disclose it, citing confidentiality. The city’s position is questionable and contradicts the city’s own disclosures this week.
State law provides for confidentiality for 12 months if a company signs an economic incentive agreement. State law is just as clear: “the information is confidential and exempt… for 12 months after the date an economic development agency receives a request for confidentiality or until the information is otherwise disclosed, whichever occurs first.”
The company disclosed its plans in the main this week, after its representatives and Google’s met with city officials to craft the local announcement, Palm Coast Communications Director Brittany Kershaw said.
The press release the city issued included information by Craig McKinney, the city’s economic development director, according to an email thread the city provided. But it did not provide the size or footprint of the data center, its expected water and power consumption, or any information easements the company will require as its cables cut through from Flagler Beach to Town Center, what construction disruptions that will entail, what payments if any the company will make to the city for those easements (as in Flagler Beach), or when construction would begin. Kershaw acknowledged that “we need to make sure we’re ahead of this in letting people know it’s coming” so as to minimize impacts. “They are going to kind of trench through the city.”
The city’s press release stated that “construction on the DC BLOX facility will begin soon.” In fact, after a query on a more specific construction date, McKinney estimated that construction “is likely to begin” at the end of 2026, so the data center would not be operational until 2028.
Pre-review documents aside, the company has not yet submitted a technical site plan to Palm Coast’s Building Department. That site plan will be evaluated by the city’s technical review team, which will provide a series of “comments” to ensure that the building abides by land regulations, says Community Development Deputy Director Ray Tyner.
The building is expected to be larger than 50,000 square feet, so the site plan will require a review by the city’s planning board at a public hearing. If the building is larger than 100,000 square feet, it will require a review by the City Council. But even city planners have been largely in the dark. “I don’t even know what the total size is going to be, I’m just guessing it’s going to be a pretty large facility,” Tyner said. The regulatory process will take about six months.
The exact route of the cables will be determined by the site plan. Those routes will require the company to pull right-of-way permits, and pay associated fees.
The only new information the city’s release disclosed was that “The data center’s cooling system uses a recycled refrigerant, not a water-based system,” which means that “After the initial filling of the cooling tanks, water usage will be minimal,” that noise will be minimal as well, and that the data center will “Host secure colocation space for cable partners and local businesses,” but it did not explain how. None of the information could be documented. So the city was essentially saying: trust us.
There is no disclosure about the data center’s demand on the electric grid, though it is expected to be substantial.
And there were dubious claims, such as the assumption that the data center–a self-contained, highly secure and mission-specific node in a global network–will be a “catalyst for high-tech growth.” That may be true of a university campus focused on high tech, or a company seeding high-tech research, services or employment. It is not as true of what amounts to an electronic waystation for internet traffic, dependent more on geography than the local economy or workforce.
The data center itself will have a handful of employees. It will generate property taxes, but little else: when the City Council, responding to public opposition, declined to institute a utility franchise fee or a public service tax (it has declined to do so on four occasions since 2011), it also forfeited the considerable revenue the data center would have generated due to its power usage. The principal local beneficiary of the data center will be Florida Power and Light, not local taxpayers.
Meanwhile DC Blox has not completed all that it is required to complete with Flagler Beach government in order to get the green light there. Its agreement with the city requires it to submit engineering plans before the company starts construction.
“They still haven’t gotten the ‘final’ approval from the city commission to start ANY work here,” Flagler Beach City Commissioner Rick Belhumeur said in a text. “It’s a big assumption on their part that what they propose for ‘grounding beds’ will be accepted by the commission.”
DC Blox and Flagler Beach government tangled for several months over the easement agreement. The company at first wanted to pay the city just $100,000 for up to eight cables at two locations. The city found the offer inadequate. The company eventually agreed to double the payments, with an initial, $600,000 payment up front, whether it was landing one or three cables.
The company wanted to locate a landing station on city property–first, in a parking lot on South 6th Street, which would have made the parking lot unusable for anything else in the future, then through Veterans Park, which would have made 30 percent of the park unusable for a variety of things. The company finally agreed to limit its right of way to South 6th Street, and to six cables, not eight (as a Palm Coast press release stated).
Pogo says
@Came then the dawn
…to reveal the colossus whose shadow covered the land. The ants, at the beginning, didn’t really know what had happened — time, as always, answered all questions.
HayRide says
Of course it’s in secretly terms, they don’t want all the Karen’s to wake up and launch all their Conspiracies Theories they dream of
Really concerned says
How much are our taxes going down by?
laurel says
That’s government. Always looking out for its residents (sarcasm).
John O says
The reason for all of the secrecy is because the public would revolt if it knew the facts about data centers. A simple google search of “Data center Noise” or “Data center problems” is all you need to convince you that this project is not a good idea, at least here in Palm Coast. The mainframe computers housed in these centers are nothing like the benign desktops and laptops the average person is familiar with. They require massive cooling systems with compressors and fans that operate 24 /7. The constant drone and hum can be heard miles away. This won’t bode well for Palm Coasters living and working near the facility and especially in Town Center which is being promoted as a modern, upscale community. Good luck trying to convince people to pay higher home prices, higher rents, higher taxes and CDD fees to live next to a noisy data center. Just like not disclosing the noise from the flight schools at Flagler airport. Palm Coast and Flagler County figure it’s okay to keep these things secret if it means more home sales. And has anyone asked why Flagler County was chosen as the landing spot for this transatlantic cable. Could it be that all of the larger, wealthier, more developed counties on Florida’s east coast would have (or already have) rejected it on the grounds discussed here. I know Palm Coast and Flagler are backwoods towns desperate for revenue, but this will come back to haunt them later.
Endless dark money says
suckers! These places can use over 5,000,000 that’s millions of gallons of fresh water every single day thats more than the use of around 50,000 humans!
Big Mike says
Endless… While it’s possible that a large Google data center in Palm Coast could use over 5 million gallons of fresh water daily, based on the upper range of water usage for large data centers (1–5 million gallons/day), there is no direct evidence confirming this figure for the proposed facility. If the Palm Coast data center is designed with air-cooling or uses reclaimed water its freshwater consumption could be significantly lower. I’m sure you did your homework and reached out to our local government or environmental reports for Palm Coast or contacted Google for specific project details….NOT
Deborah Coffey says
All you have to do is Google the negatives about Data Centers. You will be without water, electricity and Internet. The entire city of Palm Coast should be in high rebellion.
Just Saying says
So one of the wealthiest corporations in the country will be getting tax breaks, while us poor slobs will be suffering the consequences? There goes our already declining property values. We need a LOT MORE transparency before this gets the stamp of approval from our illustrious leaders in this place. I’m so disgusted with the way they’ve destroyed Palm Coast, etc.
DKWise says
So could we expand our student pipeline to UCF more directly through dual enrollment agreements and get Lockheed Martin to establish an R&D facility here in the county based on proximity to this DC Blox center? Asking for a Friend.
Kara says
I want to know how this is going to affect our environment. Our air quality. Our water supply.
I dont want this data center, and if people knew what it was going to do to our living conditions, I think they would agree.
Don says
This data center is a Closed System data center, it will not be using 5 million gallons of water daily. It reuses tbe water within the cooling system. Power usage drain on the Palm Coast area can be greatly limited if the development plan calls for a independent power station or a modular Molten Nuclear Reactor which in itself is a closed system highly safe form of power.
Richard Fay says
@Big Mike – I think the problem with your comment is that the State, County, City and Google have cloaked the information in secrecy. If you have any additional information please share it otherwise your comment is unhelpful.
The issue of “Data Centers” and the problems posed by placement of such a facility within a community was brought to my attention with the events surrounding xAI’s facility in Memphis ( dailymemphian.com/memphis-colossus ). There are a number of critical questions to be asked and answered as the project moves forward. I feel confident that the powers that be are aware of these questions and answers as well as pros and cons of each response; will this type of information be shared with the community?
These questions address impact of the site: Energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions? Water consumption? E-waste generation? Land use and ecological disruption? Noise pollution? The answers to the following questions may mitigate/offset some of the less than desirable impacts: Investing in renewable energy sources? Improving energy efficiency? Developing and implementing emissions capture and control technologies? Adopting circular economy solutions (i.e. regenerative systems)? Minimizing land use and promoting efficient design? Prioritizing water-efficient cooling systems? Enhancing transparency and accountability? This is much to be learned before being able to comment on this issue in any meaningful way. As a community we have to do our homework. To that end a history of Warehouse Scale-Computing ( Google, 2024, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10551740 ) ; Starosielski, Nicole & Vaughan, Hunter & Pasek, Anne & Silcox, Nicholas. (2023, pp 111 – 118). Disaggregated Footprints: An Infrastructural Literacy Approach to the Sustainable Internet. ( https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003176497/routledge-handbook-ecomedia-studies-adrian-ivakhiv-antonio-l%C3%B3pez-stephen-rust-miriam-tola-kiu-wai-chu-alenda-chang )
Robjr says
Please before all the politicians begin talking about all the jobs that are going to be created, stop.
Data centers DO NOT require a large work force to operate.
On the other hand they use large amounts of resources. Water and then electricity for cooling and operation. Free air cooling can be used minimally in Florida.
My knowledge comes from having worked for a major ( the largest) global data center owner and operator.
Fb says
Google is a multi billion dollar company. One of the largest in the world. And the flagler council only talked them up to 200k a month and a one time payment of 600k? Get the fuk out of here with that low ass offer. They have billions. That cable is the internet. Google needs it. Should have swung for more money. Duh
FlaglerLive says
@fb The Flagler Beach City Council negotiated with DC Blox, which is the company landing the cables. Google is using DC Blox’s eventual infrastructure.
Nomodata says
The real question is how much will our electric bill go up when the data center sucks up all FPL can generate. Then we will have to psy for a new power plant and of course they are proposing nuclear -something that was rejected by FPL customers many years ago. They are restarting 3 mile island that was shut down in 2019 for an AI data center in PA
RT says
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o
FlaPharmTech says
And how are the upgrades to our wastewater plants progressing? I’m no expert on government, but I’m consistently unimpressed with PC’s leadership. I see the land cleared on Old Kings and throughout Town Center for more homes, more apartments. The roads are so insufficient to handle the additional vehicles. The loss of green space, wildlife habitat. And now, a data center!? Fix the infrastructure, then approach build up. The data center won’t even bring jobs here.
choochanna says
Google “data center problems” and educate yourselves. This is from the mouth of the Beast.
Both Palm Coast and Flagler Beach should be saying NO to this. As in NEVER. NO WAY. And NOT A CHANCE IN HELL.
Ed P says
A private/public approach to electricity generation holds significant potential to address the growing energy demands of AI. Many large businesses already generate a percentage of their electricity needs. It’s a natural progression. Total reliance on public utilities could retard success.
Accepting the premise that for profit entities normally do it more efficiently and cheaper than the public sector is the first step. Our dunes bridge is a prime example. Costing tax payers zero for construction and maintenance. Users pay tolls.
Once these electric vampires realize it’s their only short term solution, they will step forward and solve the problem. It may be pie in the sky, but if excess kilowatts are generated and sold back to the utility companies, consumer pricing will stabilize. Simple supply and demand.
Ed P says
A side note, most large data centers build, maintain, and operate water cooling towers necessary for evaporative cooling. Massive water usage is not an issue.
The county and Palm Coast need to diversify the tax base. They should not let this opportunity slip away.
Will the Palm Coast glass ever going to appear half full to all the naysayers?
Laurel says
Here’s how it goes in Flagler County (and municipalities): Company comes in. Commission loves them. Public outcries over lack of transparency, and/or outrageously good deal for company. Commission backs off. Company sues. Company gets what it wants. Public stuck with consequences.
Wash, rinse, repeat.