Memphis Votes for 135-Day Data Centre Pause

After five and a half hours of debate and a 6-6 tie, Memphis has settled on a short pause rather than a long ban. Memphis City Council voted on Tuesday for a 135-day pause on new data centre applications, after councillors split evenly on an 18-month moratorium, DCD reported. The city is home to data centres run by Elon Musk’s xAI, now SpaceXAI, which TSN tracks on its Musk Companies hub.

The vote buys the city time rather than settling the argument. The pause is designed to run alongside a 90-day review of digital infrastructure projects that Mayor Paul Young commissioned at the start of October, so councillors can act on its findings before any new projects move forward.

The long ban fell one vote short

The 18-month moratorium, put forward by councillor JB Smiley Jr., failed when councillors split 6-6, with one member absent, according to DCD. Instead, the council backed a shorter measure that halts new data centre projects pending the outcome of the mayor’s review. That review is meant to “develop clear, actionable recommendations for regulating large and hyperscale data centers in Memphis.”

The proposal had already been delayed. Lawmakers postponed a vote after a meeting on 6 October attended by more than 100 members of the public, most of them opposed to data centres, DCD said. That meeting reportedly ended in protests and fights outside the chamber.

A packed chamber and a court ruling

Hundreds of residents turned out this week, with 407 fitting into the chamber and dozens more watching on screens outside, local outlet Action News 5 reported, according to DCD. They included six people the council had banned for breaching its speech and decorum policy at the 6 October meeting. A judge lifted that ban this week, saying the council’s actions were unreasonable.

Not every councillor wanted a long halt. Some argued that a moratorium would hurt economic development, because data centre companies could take their tax dollars elsewhere, DCD reported. One of Musk’s data centres already sits across the state border in Mississippi.

xAI’s sites are the backdrop

Memphis is not a big data centre market, DCD noted, but it hosts several facilities built over the past two years by xAI, which has been rebranded as SpaceXAI. They power the Grok chatbot and offer cloud services to clients including Anthropic. Environmental and civil rights campaigners have filed several lawsuits claiming xAI breached its permits on the gas turbines that helped bring the sites online quickly.

DCD did not report whether the pause affects xAI’s existing or planned facilities, and it gave no response from the company. Memphis joins a growing list of US communities, and some states, that have paused or banned new data centres as opposition to AI infrastructure grows.

The next marker is the mayor’s review. Commissioned at the start of October for 90 days, it is due to report before the 135-day pause runs out, leaving the council to decide whether to write new rules for large data centres or let the pause lapse.