The city, which had weighed a 180-day moratorium, is one of several Southern Nevada governments considering changing data center regulations.

By Oona Milliken
The Nevada Independent

The Henderson City Council decided against imposing a 180-day moratorium on data center construction Tuesday evening, opting instead to explore additional code changes. 

Henderson Mayor Michelle Romero, who proposed the moratorium last month, said during the meeting that city staff would develop regulations for future licensing of data centers in city limits. Any future data centers would be subject to an individually negotiated development agreement between the city and the developer. 

“There has to be a framework of laws and ordinances for us to refer to,” Romero said. “A development agreement proactively gives us the ability to change the codes now and adaptively update them as technology changes.” 

City attorney Nicholas Vaskov said that code changes would be more permanent and more effective in the long run than a moratorium. There are not any pending data center applications currently in front of the council, according to Romero. 

“A moratorium is temporary to some degree, they are only defensible for up to a certain point, usually that’s up to 12 to 18 months before you have to make some permanent changes to your code,” Vaskov said. 

In a text message to The Nevada Independent, Sierra Club Toiyabe Chapter Director Olivia Tanager said the group was “very disappointed.”

“While requiring development agreements provides additional oversight beyond the city’s standard development process, it falls far short of the temporary pause residents requested to allow the city time to develop comprehensive regulations before additional projects move forward,” the Sierra Club said in a follow-up statement. 

Neighboring Southern Nevada municipalities Boulder City and Clark County are considering new regulations on data centers amidst the artificial intelligence (AI) buildout, while other local governments, including Reno and several rural counties, have passed moratoriums on new data center construction. The issue is playing out nationwide as the additional infrastructure, which can be resource intensive, is built to handle the demands of the AI-boom.

Last month, Henderson issued a staff report that said, “Additional criteria and deeper analysis are needed to properly evaluate items under current conditions.” It suggested looking at the potential environmental impacts, land use compatibility and increased electrical demand in the area. 

At the meeting, around 20 people spoke about the need for regulating data centers; several called for a yearlong moratorium extension while others asked for an outright ban on data centers in the city. Major topics of concern included excessive energy use, noise pollution and environmental impacts. 

“As a regular guy who lives here and really cares about this area, it alarms me how little time we’ve been given to prepare the proper regulations to protect people,” Drake York, a Henderson resident, said. “I’m a big tech nerd so I’m not one of those dudes who are like ‘Screw tech,’ it just needs to be working for everybody.” 

Many residents spoke about data center water usage — Henderson is currently home to a Google data center that is one of the “thirstiest” in the state. However, the center, created in 2019, uses water intensive evaporative cooling methods that were banned by the Southern Nevada Water Authority in 2023. The moratorium would not have affected current data centers in the city.

There are 43 data centers in Clark County, some of which have been there for decades. Switch, one of the oldest data center companies in the country, has been in Las Vegas since 2000 and employs approximately 1,200 people in the county — Councilmember Carrie Cox cited its use of renewable energy as a bonus for Clark County.