ESCAMBIA COUNTY, Fla. — Data centers are trying to make their way into Florida. Several data centers are trying to set up shop in the southern part of the state.<\/p>\n
They are used to power things, like high speed internet and artificial intelligence. But these centers require a large amount of electricity and water to power them.<\/p>\n
The idea of them has caused controversy across the state and even prompted Gov. Ron DeSantis to pass legislation protecting taxpayers from the costs of running them.<\/p>\n
Now, one company is looking to build one in Escambia County. Chris Plate has been the CEO of Florida West Economic Development for two years now.<\/p>\n
Plate says since he’s been on the job, five data center companies have inquired about building in Escambia County.<\/p>\n
“There’s a few areas that could support smaller ones,” said Plate. “We don’t have anything like the mega data center.”<\/p>\n
Plate says one company is in active negotiations with the county. He says the facility would be a couple hundred thousand square feet and be built somewhere in the middle of the county.<\/p>\n
“The ones we would consider at some point are on the smaller size,” Plate said. “The other thing we would look at is where to put them. We would be very considerate of where they need to go. You would typically not put them close to residential density, you would want to put them a little further out.”<\/p>\n
Data centers are large buildings filled with computer servers. Floridians have expressed concern about the amount of electricity and water used to power them.<\/p>\n
Many have also said the constant humming coming from the building makes them difficult to live next to. Florida Power and Light says they have consumer protections in place with data centers.<\/p>\n
“We have a legal obligation to service everyone, including any data centers that materialize in our service area,” said Andrew Sutton with FPL. “But Floridians shouldn’t have to pay more for electricity because of data centers. That’s why we’ve established these consumer protections to make sure data centers pay their own way.”<\/p>\n
The law passed by DeSantis and current policies by PFL both require data centers to pay the full cost of any additional electrical infrastructure needed to power their building.<\/p>\n
But Plate says as technology progresses, data centers will soon require less resources to operate.<\/p>\n
“You have to think about Nvidia, or whoever is making the chips inside the data center, are just going to become more and more efficient,” Plate said. “So they become, at some point, a less of a demand. They won’t need as much cooling. They won’t need as much power. They’re always going to strive to get better. They don’t want to consume that much power because that’s expensive.”<\/p>\n
Escambia County says no deal is set in stone. Santa Rosa County says they’re not interested bringing a data center in at this time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ESCAMBIA COUNTY, Fla. — Data centers are trying to make their way into Florida. Several data centers are…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-281787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}