On a stretch of former farmland near the eastern edge of the Everglades, about 1,250 feet from a two-year-old elementary school, one of the region’s largest artificial-intelligence data centers could rise.
On July 15, Palm Beach County commissioners will take a final vote on Project Tango, a hyperscale AI campus proposed for a 202-acre site north of Southern Boulevard. The commissioners will decide whether to let the developer amend its approved master site plan to build the AI campus—a request that wouldn’t rezone the land, but would transform what gets built on it. On July 2, after a hearing at which 39 residents spoke against it, the county’s zoning commission voted 6-0 to urge county commissioners to deny the project—breaking with planning staff, who had recommended approval.
At the center of the fight is a question the county has never had to answer: What, exactly, is a hyperscale AI data center, and what would it do to the water, the air and the children next door?
When the county approved this land for development in 2016, it was zoned as an “employment center” of warehouses and a 206,000-square-foot server farm, a use the code treats as light industrial. Hyperscale AI data centers did not yet exist.
