A five-building, 2.5-million-square-foot data center campus is going up at 10800 University City Boulevard, with up to 500 megawatts of power capacity behind it, and the Charlotte City Council had no role in approving it. On Monday night, the council deadlocked 5-5 on whether to even schedule a public hearing about giving itself one. Mayor Vi Lyles broke the tie. She voted no.

The motion came from Council Member Dimple Ajmera, who at the open of her remarks credited Council Member LaWana Slack-Mayfield for first sounding the alarm on data center regulation in 2023. Two years later, the issue has urgency. A memo from City Attorney Andrea Leslie-Fite, referenced by Ajmera at the dais, confirmed that under Charlotte's current Unified Development Ordinance, data centers are allowed by-right in commercial districts, industrial districts, research campuses, mixed-use areas, and even the uptown core. No special permit. No public hearing. No council vote.

"Currently this feels like wild west right now and we need some guardrails in place," Ajmera said.

Her motion would have placed a public hearing on the council's June 8 business agenda. The hearing itself imposes nothing — it is the procedural step that, under state law, makes a moratorium vote possible. Leslie-Fite explained the threshold from the dais: a moratorium of 61 days or more requires a public hearing, ten days of advance notice, and a documented study of the unique conditions justifying the pause. The June 8 hearing would have started that clock.

Three council members stated on the record that they would vote against the motion: Ed Driggs (District 7), Malcolm Graham (District 2), and Kimberly Owens (District 6).

"I would just like to be sure I understand all the dimensions of this problem before shutting down data centers for months," Driggs said.

Owens went further. She had a substantive policy concern beyond the timing: "Pushing these offshore is a greater risk to our citizens than having them well-located." She added that she would not be comfortable voting on a moratorium "regardless of what I hear on the 11th." Graham said he agreed with Council Member Dante Anderson (District 1), who argued that the council should hear from Duke Energy — the utility that powers data centers across North Carolina — before making policy.

Three council members stated support: Ajmera by virtue of the motion itself, Slack-Mayfield, and Juan Diego Mazuera Arias (District 5). Council Member Victoria Watlington (At-Large) said she was "supportive of both" the moratorium and the longer policy conversation, "as long as we do it with surgical precision." The official roll for Anderson, Joi Mayo (District 3), and Mayor Pro Tem James Mitchell Jr. (At-Large) was not separately stated during floor debate. Council Member Reneé Johnson (District 4) was absent; the mayor told the chamber at the open of the meeting that Johnson was working hard to keep her husband healthy.

Mayor Lyles, casting the tie-breaking vote, framed her position the same way Driggs had: "I really do believe that this is important, but I don't believe that we ought to have a public hearing and to do something without more actually understanding."

What Ajmera Actually Asked For

Her motion specified four areas the council should evaluate before any moratorium decision: long-term impacts on water supply, energy demand, environmental quality, and noise; existing infrastructure constraints; enforceable mitigation measures including water conservation, cooling systems, and reclaimed water use; and a legal exemption analysis from the city attorney.

She framed the timing as a response to facilities already in the pipeline. "There is already 2.5 million square feet data center going up in the university area," she said, "and so many of us have already gotten emails. There is one being proposed in East Charlotte."

The University-area facility is PowerHouse Charlotte. Public filings show 300 megawatts of secured power on the site, with the potential to expand to 500. Vertical construction was scheduled to begin in March 2026, with the four data center buildings delivered in 2027. The campus sits on roughly 120 acres less than ten miles from the city center. Ajmera said facilities at that scale "can use millions of gallons a day" of water and consume "tens of thousands of homes' electricity."

Charlotte Water moved residents to voluntary water restrictions on April 20 under Stage 1 of the Catawba-Wateree Low Inflow Protocol. More than 72 percent of North Carolina is in severe drought. The voluntary conservation list asks residents to limit lawn watering to two days a week.

The Two-Year Lag

This is not a new problem. Slack-Mayfield first raised data center regulation in 2023. Ajmera placed a referral on the April 13 council action preview asking for an approval pause; Planning Director Monica Holmes told the council that day that regulations could take three to six months. On April 27, Mayor Lyles repeated that timeline.

That timeline was the central frustration on the floor.

Slack-Mayfield: "Us slow walking is what now is putting us in a position where we feel like we need to do something now or it never happens. That was a year and a half plus where we had the opportunity to put energy into this conversation that we chose to kick the ball down the road."

Mazuera Arias was sharper. The first-term District 5 council member used his council-topics remarks to put the broader question on the record: "How many more conversations do we need to have about something before action is made on it, especially conversations that we've been discussing for years?"

The complaint extended beyond data centers. Earlier in the same meeting, Mazuera Arias had argued for respecting the housing committee chair's recommendations on a contested River District funding question — only to watch the council override that chair on a substitute motion. The procedural standard he applied to housing did not, by his reading, get applied to data centers. The data center vote sent the question back to committee. The housing vote went around the committee.

Watlington made the same point in different language: "There's no way we should be talking about data centers for a year and a half and then be nickel and diamond a week or this week or how many minutes on an agenda. At some point, we've got to be responsive. It's not enough to know. We've got to do."

The May 11 Reset and the June 8 Window

Update, May 11: The May 11 council meeting opened the data-centers discussion item as scheduled. City staff briefed council on what regulations would require, with Dimple Ajmera publicly pressing for a 90-day construction pause and Budget Committee chair Malcolm Graham supporting a public hearing that could lead to a moratorium.

Data centers stay on the May 11 council agenda as a discussion topic. The mayor placed them there before the moratorium motion failed, and that placement survives. There is no public hearing scheduled, no moratorium in force, and the current UDO continues to allow data centers by-right across most of Charlotte's commercial and industrial zoning.

Staff is expected to return in three to six months with proposed regulations. June 8 — the date Ajmera's failed motion had targeted — is also a regular council business meeting. A second motion that day would not be procedurally barred.

Five council members were ready Monday night to start the clock that ends at a moratorium vote. Five were not. PowerHouse Charlotte does not need any of them to keep going up.

Companion neighborhood takeaways are running today at Strolling Ballantyne, Strolling Firethorne, and Fourth Ward Charlotte.

Related: On Data Centers, Mecklenburg County Wants a Voice It Mostly Doesn't Have — the county board took its own data-center briefing on May 19.