Virginia Beach approves 1-year data center moratorium
The Virginia Beach City Council unanimously approved a 12-month moratorium on new data center permits. This pause will allow city planners to research land use impacts and develop specific zoning regulations for future data center projects, as current ordinances do not explicitly address them.
Virginia Beach City Council has unanimously approved a 12-month moratorium on new data center permits, effective immediately. This decision follows city planners' recommendation to pause new developments to allow for thorough research into land use impacts and the development of specific zoning regulations for data centers. Currently, data centers are classified broadly under wholesaling, warehousing, storage, or distribution, permitting them by right in industrial districts, a classification the city aims to revise.
The moratorium will halt the issuance of permits for any new data center for the next year or until the City Council finalizes new ordinances, whichever comes first. Although Virginia Beach lacks large-scale storage and computing data centers, it hosts subsea data cable landing stations and carrier-neutral colocation facilities. The city of Chesapeake enacted a similar eight-month moratorium and also approved restrictions on data center locations earlier this summer.