AINEWS
Google found a planning gap in Iowa. A county is racing to close it.
Google routed a hyperscale data center proposal through an incorporated Iowa town to sidestep county land use review.
Google routed a hyperscale data center proposal through an incorporated Iowa town to sidestep county land use review.
Google found a gap in Linn County's data-center rules, and the county is racing to close it before the next application arrives.
The gap is municipal: Palo, Iowa is an incorporated town with its own zoning authority, sitting geographically inside Linn County but jurisdictionally outside it. When Google explored siting a hyperscale campus at the former Duane Arnold nuclear power plant site near Palo, it examined whether to file under Palo's municipal rules rather than Linn County's — a routing that would sidestep the county-level review where road access, utility coordination, and regional planning usually get negotiated, according to Iowa Public Radio's March reporting.
Linn County supervisors saw the routing clearly. Their response — a vote scheduled for Wednesday, July 1 — is a proposed moratorium on new data-center applications in unincorporated Linn County through January 1, 2028. The stated concerns are electrical and water consumption. The underlying driver, written into the resolution itself, is planning regret: supervisors say they approved an earlier data-center project before they had the technical studies or regional coordination they now want.
The moratorium resolution, scheduled for the Board's July 1 meeting, would freeze new data-center applications in unincorporated Linn County through January 1, 2028. The county already maintains a public-facing page on data centers in unincorporated Linn County, a sign this is not a brand-new file for supervisors. The Board of Supervisors itself is the five-member elected body that sets county policy.
The resolution's language is unusually candid about why a pause is suddenly necessary. It says a previous data-center approval happened before "substantial additional technical information and regional planning discussions" were available, according to KCRG's reporting on the agenda item. That phrasing, on a public resolution, is what a planning department writes when it knows it moved too fast and is trying to give itself room to retrofit the rules.
The Palo dimension makes the regret sharper. By April, Iowa Public Radio reported that the Palo routing had created a visible rift between the city and the county. A county moratorium cannot reach a project inside Palo's city limits. Linn County cannot stop Palo from approving a project Palo wants, but county review is the venue where regional planning, road access, and utility coordination usually get negotiated. A project that skips that venue skips the negotiation.
Duane Arnold is why the routing mattered. The decommissioned nuclear plant sits on grid and water infrastructure that is rare in rural Iowa — existing interconnection capacity and water access that a hyperscale operator would find attractive without needing to build from scratch. A modern hyperscale campus is a different order of magnitude in electrical draw and cooling water demand compared to Duane Arnold's historical use, the kind of step-change that a county planning office is built to vet over months rather than the kind that gets handled cleanly when a single anchor site is already decommissioned and shovel-ready. The moratorium as described to The Gazette names electricity and water consumption as the cited concerns, in that order.
The single largest uncertainty in the story is the underlying load and water numbers. Neither the local reporting nor the public resolution has published the figures for the existing approved project or for the Google proposal. If those numbers turn out smaller than a hyperscale build would imply, the planning-regret language in the resolution is overreach. If they match what a Google-scale campus would draw, the moratorium is the minimum reasonable response, and the harder fight is the Palo question.
Two things to watch after Wednesday. First, whether the adopted moratorium language includes an exemption for projects already in the Linn County approval pipeline; the resolution text cited by KCRG leaves that open. Second, whether Palo and the county reach any kind of joint review agreement before the Board lifts the pause in 2028, because a county-only moratorium that quietly expires does not actually close the arbitrage door Palo opened for Google.