What changed since April
The inventory grew from 222 instruments to 533, across 42 states instead of 30. Method explains most of that jump. This is the first release to sweep states month by month, so read 533 as a floor.
New activity
- 283 moratoria were adopted between May 1 and July 31. June accounted for 80 of them, the busiest month on record.
- Big cities joined in. Seattle passed an emergency ordinance on June 9. Cleveland followed on July 15 by a 14-1 vote, after committee cut the term from twelve months to three. Minneapolis, Denver, Charlotte, and Montgomery County, Maryland all acted. Durham city and Durham County each passed their own.
- Five states appear here for the first time: Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, South Carolina, and Texas.
What happened to the older ones
- Extension is the usual outcome. DeKalb County, Georgia voted its permanent ordinance down on June 23, then pushed the pause out to March 2027. Prince George's County, Maryland renewed for two more years.
- Nine became permanent rules - among them Griffin and Polk County in Georgia, Montour County in Pennsylvania, Brevard in North Carolina, and St. Charles Parish in Louisiana.
- Six simply lapsed. La Grange, Kentucky and Waterville, Ohio let theirs run out with nothing ready to replace them.
- A few went the other way. Lowell Township, Michigan voted a moratorium down 2-5. Hill County, Texas repealed one after a developer sued for $100 million. Oliver County, North Dakota repealed its third pause seven weeks in.
State legislation
All 438 tracked bills now carry a final disposition, and 84 are law. Legislatures went after cost allocation more than siting. New Jersey signed its large-load tariff act on July 7. Oklahoma passed a Data Center Customer Protection Act, Maryland the Utility RELIEF Act, and Idaho now requires a "no harm" test for any new load above 50 megawatts. Florida moved the opposite way and protected local land-use authority.
How to read the coverage
50 states got the month-by-month sweep. The other 0 did not, so their May-July counts are floors. Florida shows why: it held one row before its sweep and 14 after. The state did not change. Our looking did. Five swept states recorded no local adoptions at all - a finding worth as much as a count. Known gaps has the full accounting.
What is a moratorium?
A moratorium is a temporary pause. A city, county, or township stops accepting or approving a certain kind of development while it writes rules for it. Most run six to twelve months. The trigger is almost always the same: a project arrives that the zoning code has no word for. Read the FAQ →
Top 13 states by moratorium count
Use the data
📊 Spreadsheet
The 533-row inventory as a CSV — opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or any tool. Includes enacted_status, moratorium_id, and lat/lon for instant mapping.
🐍 Python / R / pandas
Load directly from GitHub raw, no clone required. The data folder guide has working snippets.
Browse data files →📚 Citation
The dataset is published under CC-BY-4.0. Cite the working paper or this dataset directly. CITATION.cff in the repo gives GitHub a "Cite this repository" button.
Methodology
We collect the primary documents first - ordinances, resolutions, board minutes - then code them. The corpus runs to roughly 4,600 files gathered across all 50 states. 348 moratorium texts have been read line by line against a 44-clause taxonomy; that sample predates 28 April 2026 and covers 211 jurisdictions, so it describes what moratoria contain rather than all 533 of them. Coordinates were checked three ways across 89 verifications, with no confirmed errors. Where we could not confirm something, the row says so.
Related projects by Michael Bommarito
Other public resources on the U.S. data center buildout and what it does to the communities that host it.
servercountry.org
An educational resource on the $1 trillion AI data center buildout: 10+ explainer articles, a 604-project database across all 50 states, glossary of 52+ terms, plus the full book This Is Server Country (402 pages).
Visit →fightadatacenter.com
A citizen's guide for community members facing a data center proposal: ten-chapter book on local, state, and federal strategies, plus a free abridged online version with checklists and templates.
Visit →michaelbommarito.com
Personal site of the dataset's author. Builder, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of food systems, legal technology, AI, and open source. Co-founder of Alea Institute and 273 Ventures.
Visit →Status & contributions
This release is v2026.07, current as of 31 July 2026. Found a moratorium we missed, or an error worth fixing? Open an issue and we will take it up in the next refresh, which runs roughly quarterly while the wave lasts.