Town Center Data Center Will Be 100,000 Square Feet, Nearly Triple Footprint Size Palm Coast Approved

A vice president for DC Blox, the Atlanta-based company building a data center in Town Center, had a stunning surprise for listeners this morning–and for Palm Coast officials, who had no idea–as he described the facility on WNZF’s Free For All Friday. 

Free For All host David Ayres asked him how many square feet the Town Center building under construction will be. 

“It’ll actually be two buildings that are very similar, built on the same property,”  Bill Thompson, vice president of marketing and product management for DC Blox, said, speaking to Ayres on zoom. “Together, they’re about 100,000 square feet, so that’s roughly the square footage of a typical Home Depot, only shorter, because they’re only single-story buildings.”

Two buildings? 100,000 square feet? That’s not the size of the project Palm Coast’s planning department approved when it permitted the site, without review by the city’s Planning Board or the City Council. Had it been 100,000, both those panels would have had to review the plans in public hearings. 

Planning Manager Phong Nguyen  had explicitly told the company that the plans it had submitted in September 2024, showing a 50,460-square-foot facility, would trigger public review before the Planning Board. “Please address in details the MEP equipment yard because it makes a difference whether your application is approved administratively or going to Planning Board,” Nguyen told the company. The plan included a 13,250 square-foot equipment yard. MEP stands for mechanical, electrical and plumbing. 

“Projects that are 40,000 and greater up to less than 100,000 are required to go before PLDRB and projects 100,000 sq ft and greater will have to go before PLDRB and City Council,” Nguyen said in an email to FlaglerLive at the time. The PLDRB is the Planning Board. 

DC Blox turned in plans for a 35,000-square-foot facility. 

That’s roughly the size the city administration and Palm Coast City Council have been referring to again and again since, especially as they have combatted the public impression that the data center will be the kind of large facility that has drawn strong public opposition across the country. 

The city just printed rack cards to amplify the point. It lists the Town Center data center as being less than 40,000 square feet. There is no mention of a second building. 

There is no mention of a second building in the plans the city provided subsequent to the public record request. Neither the city nor the company disputed a single fact when the article about the facility, its size and its site plan, appeared here on March 26. (“Records Reveal Some Details as Construction Starts On Scaled Down Data Center in Palm Coast’s Town Center.”)

Neither Ayres nor Palm Coast Observer Editor Brian McMillan, a co-host of Free For All, react to the disparity, appearing unaware. 

Palm Coast City Council member Ty Miller was in the studio with Ayres and was one of the guests on this morning’s show. He did not flinch when Thompson initially mentioned that there would be two buildings totaling 100,000 square feet. Moments later he addressed the disparity: “I know Bill had mentioned 100,000 square feet, but I think the current approved site plan is between 30 and 40,000 square feet for the first building, I think,” Miller said, “and so potentially a second application would get them to the 100,000 square feet that he’s talking about.” 

Phasing in the project as DC Blox and the city have, in effect, has provided another avenue to keep it from public regulatory review. That’s not how site planning usually works in Palm Coast. For example, on Wednesday, the Palm Coast Planning Board reviewed a site plan application for a warehouse on Commerce Boulevard. The project consists of two identical warehouses, each just over 40,000 square feet. The project was submitted as one plan, being one plan. 

Miller said after the show that it was the first time he’d heard of the 100,000 square foot plan. The city’s communications director, Brittany Kershaw, had said likewise–as reflected in the city’s own rack card on the subject. Other officials could not be reached before this article initially published: city offices were closed in observance of Juneteenth. It appears DC Blox had blindsided the city, or at least city officials not aware of undisclosed plans. But it is the city, not DC Blox, that will end up paying the price of a public backlash. 

In any case, as Miller noted after the show, the second building will now require public review by the Planning Board and the City Council regardless of its size, as the council is about to approve a change to the Land Development Code that requires all data centers, regardless of size, to have such reviews. But DC Blox’s disclosure could tarnish what goodwill the council had been building with its affirmative attempts to take control of data center regulations. (See: “Palm Coast Fast-Tracks Restrictions and Supermajority Requirements For Approving Future Data Centers.”)

So far, DC Blox has secured the contract for just one cable. It signed a deal with Google for its “sol” cable connecting Palm Coast and Santander, on Spain’s northern Atlantic coast. It signed a deal with Flagler Beach to allow for a total of six cables landing at South 6th Street, paying Flagler Beach $200,000 per cable. (Palm Coast has no such deal with the company.) Once the additional cables are contracted, the second building would go up, Thompson said. 

Ayres and Thompson steered the discussion toward minimizing the impact of the facility. 

Thompson said large facilities use 300 megawatts to 1 gigawatt. “The data center that we’re building is about 100,000 square feet,” he said, “about 10 megawatts, and essentially that is significantly smaller than the ones you hear about in the news. Generally, those typical AI data centers, or the larger facilities, are 10 to 100 times bigger than the one we’re building in Palm Coast.” The facility will use a refrigerant he compared to an air conditioning system and a water-cooling system that draws water once, then loops the same water over and over again. 

“We have a very similar size data center in Myrtle Beach, which right now is pulling about the same amount of water per year as seven average homes,” Thompson said. 

Miller has been stressing the difference between the Palm Coast facility and “hyperscale” data centers for weeks, as he did again on this morning’s show, and again returned to its smaller size: “When you’re talking about hyperscale being a million square feet, this is 30,000 square feet, you’re talking about, three one hundredths of its size,” Miller said. 

Miller said the company is investing $50 million, which he said would translate to roughly a $500,000 in property tax revenue “to the city of Palm Coast.” In fact, the city will reap only about 22 percent of the tax revenue, the rest going to the school district, the county and other agencies. 

The data center is in the Town Center Community Redevelopment Agency, so for several years still, until the CRA expires, a significant share of the tax revenue may only be spent within the CRA boundaries. The property tax revenue doesn’t reflect the significant amount of development impact fees paid the city. But if the proposed constitutional amendment to gradually eliminate homesteaded taxes and lower the cap on taxable, commercial properties’ valuations to 5 percent, future tax revenue will be more limited than the figures Miller mentioned. 

There was one other disparity: the city rack card claims DC Blox’s investment is $100 million, not $50 million. Still, Thompson said “the tax revenue per square acre from a data center is far, far greater than almost anything else you can put in a community like Palm Coast. The higher tax contributions are from casinos and from high-rise commercial buildings, so you probably don’t want either of those.”

Thompson appeared to settle the question of whether the facility, officially a cable-landing center, is also a data center. It is: “The reason why we call it a data center, not just a cable landing station, is because we offer co-location space. What that means is local businesses that want to put their computers in a safe and secure facility can lease space and put their computers in our data center, so any new industry or tech companies you would like to attract, it could be any enterprise, it’s not just tech companies that use computers. Any business you’re trying to attract, it’s a benefit to say, ‘Hey, we have a local data center that you can put your computer equipment in, safe and secure, and built for the kind of coastal areas that you’re in.’ It’s also going to attract a significant amount of new fiber networks into the area.”

Thompson addressed several other, uncontroversial and informative aspects of the data center. 

“We’re building data centers of various types across the southeast, and that’s keeping us quite, quite busy, along with helping people understand what it is we’re building and why.” Some of those facilities are large and host AI infrastructure. Others, like the one in Palm Coast, are smaller and route internet traffic by bridging undersea data-carrying cables–which carry 99 percent of internet traffic between the United States and other continents–to mainland infrastructure. There are dozens of such cables landing on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. 

The cables themselves are “amazingly small,” Thompson said. “Most of the diameter is probably about the thickness of your wrist when you see it coming in, and most of that is just insulation to protect it and keep it from getting damaged.” A single strand of fiber optic cable is barely thicker than a blade of hair. DC Blox chose to build a landing station in Palm Coast because the majority of such stations are concentrated in the Northeast. 

It is a matter of diversification and redundancy, in case a cable or a station is damaged. “If that gets cut, that cable operator and the systems that operate data traffic flow can direct it to a different cable annexation over a different subsea cable to get to Europe, so diversity is important for those kind of benefits,” Thompson said. 

It also helps as more internet infrastructure is built in the Southeast. Every cable is mapped. The information is public. 

Will satellites eventually make land-based infrastructure obsolete? Not so fast, Thompson said. Satellites “are too slow and too unreliable,” Thompson said. “Bottom line, you could never do a Facetime over a satellite.” 

Elon Musk’s Starlink wouldn’t dispute that it’s slower, but not so slow as to prevent a Facetime link or movie streaming. Some airlines use Starlink for those purposes. The rapid addition of satellites is intended eventually to shift at least a substantial share of traffic to space-based links. But earth-based fiber optic cables will still carry the bulk of heavier data.

Miller used the occasion again to underscore the council’s efforts to control data center development. “Any future development of what would be quote unquote a data center has to come before city council,” he said. “We can’t receive an administrative approval, and that’s just so that we can look at these projects holistically and see what are good projects and block the ones that are bad projects, so to speak.”

That includes whatever plans DC Blox may have for Town Center that it did not disclose until today.