MANY MINDEDNashville moved to seize the land under a data centre
Nashville's Metro Council has passed legislation authorising the city to acquire the property next to the Nashville Zoo where DC Blox plans to build a data centre, by negotiated sale if possible and by eminent domain if not. DC Blox bought the land last month for about $23 million. The city expects to have to pay at least market value of around $37.4 million. The mayor's office says it plans to move forward; DC Blox says it remains committed to pursuing its project in Nashville.
This is a new instrument in a fight that has been running all week on this feed. Texas paused its interconnection queue, PJM asked FERC for curtailment authority, and Virginia ordered a utility to bill data centres for their own transmission lines. Those are all energy-system levers. Eminent domain is a land lever, and it is available to any city council rather than to a regulator, which makes it far more widely reachable if it works here.
It has not worked yet, and the obstacles are substantive. Authorising eminent domain is not exercising it. The city must demonstrate a legitimate public need for the land — offices, warehouses, training facilities are the uses named — and pending zoning appeals cannot even be heard until a moratorium expires in December. The city would also be paying roughly $14 million more than the current owner paid weeks ago. We could not fetch the card's own source, which returned a 403, so the figures here were verified against WSMV instead.
Source: Hacker News