Could Moore County actually support a data center?

We have power, water, fiber, and land, but an actual project would have to prove infrastructure can handle it

2:42 p.m. Oct. 7, 2026

DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher•Editor

Say “data center” around Moore County right now, and folks tend to have an opinion. Some worry about water. Others have heard about massive electric loads, rows of generators, and the low hum of cooling equipment running all night.

Those are fair things to ask about.

But there is a more basic question underneath all of it: Could Moore County actually support a data center?

Probably. At least some kinds.

That does not mean Moore County could handle a 200-megawatt AI campus dropped onto the first available farm. It means the county already has several things data center developers look for – high-voltage electricity, water, fiber, and available land.

The harder question is how much of those resources can actually be delivered to one site without causing trouble somewhere else. That is what Moore County needs to figure out.

The county already hit pause

Nobody is approving a data center right now. The Metro Council gave final approval April 20 to a two-year moratorium on new data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, and similar high-impact computing facilities. The moratorium runs through April 19, 2028, unless the Council changes it sooner.

The purpose was to buy some time. Instead of waiting until a developer arrived with plans in hand, county officials wanted to figure out what the rules should be first.

Planning and Zoning commissioners started putting some of those ideas on paper Oct. 6. Heavy industrial zoning is being considered. So are setbacks, building height, water limits, cooling systems, noise, and restrictions on backup power.

The working discussion included a possible 100,000-gallon water limit, although exactly how that would be written remains unsettled. Commissioners kept closed-loop cooling in the proposal and discussed a possible 60-decibel noise ceiling measured 500 feet from the facility, with a lower nighttime limit also on the table.

Those are proposed rules. They are not approval of a project. That distinction has gotten a little lost in some of the conversation.

First, not all data centers are alike

“Data center” is a pretty broad label. It can describe a relatively small building housing servers for one company. It can also describe a hyperscale campus covering hundreds of thousands of square feet and drawing more electricity than a small city.

Tennessee's Department of Environment and Conservation makes the same distinction. Its guidance separates enterprise, colocation, cloud, and hyperscale facilities because the size, power demand, cooling system, water use, and environmental footprint can vary considerably.

So when somebody says a data center will use a certain amount of power or water, the next question ought to be pretty simple: What data center?

Without a proposed size and design, there is no honest single number.

Electricity may be the first real test

Moore County is served by Duck River Electric Membership Corporation, which buys its wholesale power from TVA. DREMC itself notes that rates and service for large power users are more complicated and require individual review.

There is also substantial TVA transmission infrastructure already in Moore County. We know that from the Silicon Ranch solar project.

TVA approved plans for the 200-megawatt solar project to connect to the existing Franklin-Wartrace No. 2 161-kilovolt transmission line running through the project site. The plans included a 161-kV substation and switchyard, along with improvements to roughly 10 miles of transmission line.

That is not a neighborhood power line. It tells us Moore County is connected to serious transmission infrastructure.

What it does not tell us is that 200 megawatts of unused electricity are sitting there waiting for somebody to plug into them. A solar farm feeding power onto TVA's system and a data center pulling power from it around the clock are two different engineering problems.

TVA and DREMC would have to study an actual site. They would need to know the requested load and whether the system could handle it. A large project could require a new substation or other transmission work before the first server ever arrived.

That study has not been done for some unnamed future data center. So saying Moore County definitely has enough electricity for a huge AI campus gets ahead of the facts.

Saying we have no electrical infrastructure for one does, too.

Water deserves a closer look

This is where the discussion gets much closer to home. The Metro Utility Department draws raw water from Mulberry Creek and has access to Tims Ford Lake as a supplemental source. MUD's treatment plant was expanded in 2008 to produce up to 800 gallons per minute.

On paper, Moore County has water. Delivering a lot of treated water to one customer is a different matter.

We saw that firsthand this summer. After a leak drained the fire-protection tanks at Jack Daniel's South Bottling, MUD began refilling them at about 250 gallons per minute. As MUD's own storage tanks dropped, the utility had to reduce the flow. At one point, it was down to about 70 gallons per minute.

Nobody in town lost water, and MUD did not run dry. The system simply reached the point where it could not keep feeding one large customer at that rate while protecting pressure and reserves everywhere else.

MUD officials also said a recent state sanitary survey had the treatment plant operating at about 70% of capacity. And water loss remains a persistent problem. In July, MUD reported nearly 9.8 million gallons lost under the calculation it sends to the state, more than one-third of the water available to the system that month.

So, yes, water should be part of the data center discussion. It would be foolish for Moore County to promise a future industrial customer huge amounts of treated water without knowing what MUD can safely provide.

But there is another side to that conversation.

Cooling matters more than the name on the building

Servers create heat. A lot of servers create a lot of heat. How a data center gets rid of that heat determines much of its water demand.

Traditional cooling-tower systems use evaporation. Warm water moves through the cooling system, some of it evaporates, and more water has to be added. The Department of Energy describes those cooling-tower systems as water-intensive, especially when they are serving a steady load such as a data center.

That is where many of the stories about heavy water consumption in data centers come from. But it is not the only cooling system available.

Modern facilities can use closed-loop systems that recirculate water instead of constantly consuming and replacing it. Some designs rely much more heavily on dry cooling or other systems that reduce direct water use.

A 2025 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study found that water consumption associated with data center workloads can vary by more than 10,000-fold, depending on the servers, cooling technology, climate, power source, and other factors.

That is why one national headline about a thirsty data center somewhere else tells us very little about what a future Moore County facility might use.

The design matters, and Planning and Zoning has already zeroed in on that point. Board member Jim Crawford pushed during the Oct. 6 discussion for closed-loop cooling rather than a traditional cooling tower.

“I think we ought to specify a closed-loop cooling system,” Crawford said. “So they won’t have a discharge. They won’t have to have a cooling tower.”

That kind of requirement could dramatically change the local water question. It does not make water use disappear. A facility would still have fire protection, restrooms, maintenance needs, and whatever other demands come with the operation.

But there is a world of difference between that and pulling large volumes of makeup water every day for an evaporative cooling tower.

Moore County ought to know which one it is talking about before anybody starts predicting what happens to Tims Ford Lake.

Fiber is not the problem it once might have been

A data center also needs something else in large quantities: connectivity.

Moore County's fiber picture has changed quite a bit. United Communications has expanded high-capacity fiber through Moore County as part of regional middle-mile projects connecting Lynchburg with other communities across Middle Tennessee. United says two of those projects include more than 200 miles of new fiber through Moore and surrounding counties.

United is not the only provider here. Ben Lomand Connect and Point Broadband also provide fiber service in rural parts of Moore County. Ben Lomand's fiber network offers symmetrical gigabit and multi-gig service in areas it serves, while Point Broadband has fiber customers in Moore County as well.

That does not make every back road data-center ready. Residential fiber running past a piece of property is not the same thing as the dedicated, high-capacity connectivity a large data center needs.

Big operators also want redundancy. Ideally, separate fiber routes approach the site from different directions so one fallen tree, wreck, or backhoe does not cut both connections at once. The routes and available capacity would have to be studied for an actual property.

Still, Moore County is not a connectivity desert. There are multiple fiber networks already operating here, and that is one more piece of infrastructure a potential developer would look at.

The site still has to work

Having resources somewhere in Moore County does not mean they all come together on the same piece of ground. That may eliminate many potential sites. A large data center needs land for the building itself, electrical equipment, stormwater controls, security, and cooling equipment. Depending on the design, backup generators may take up considerable room.

From there, the site still needs nearby high-voltage transmission, commercial-grade fiber, enough water, and room to meet whatever setbacks the county ultimately adopts.

Planning and Zoning commissioners are currently leaning toward placing data centers in an I-2 heavy industrial district. They have discussed a 500-foot separation from residential areas, schools, town areas, and other high-density locations, along with a 35-foot building-height limit.

Moore County may have plenty of acreage, but the amount that checks all those boxes could be considerably smaller.

Noise is a fair concern

Data centers do not shut down at 5 p.m. Cooling equipment, transformers, and other mechanical systems can operate around the clock. Backup generators have their own noise concerns when they run.

That is why Planning and Zoning spent so much time Oct. 6 talking about decibels. The working discussion centered on a possible 60-decibel maximum measured 500 feet from the facility, with members considering something closer to 50 decibels at night.

That is exactly the kind of issue the ordinance should settle before an application arrives.

Fans and transformers are going to make noise. The question that matters is what the neighbor hears at his property line at 11 o'clock at night. Write the rule around that.

The state will not make every decision for us

Tennessee regulates parts of data center development, but there is no single state agency that approves or rejects the whole project.

TDEC deals with environmental issues that fall under its authority, including certain water withdrawals, wastewater discharges, stormwater, air emissions, generators, and fuel storage.

But TDEC specifically says zoning, land use, noise, electric-service availability, and local infrastructure costs generally belong to local governments and utilities.

In other words, Nashville is not going to write all of this for Moore County. Some of it is ours to decide, and that is the point of the moratorium.

So, can Moore County support one?

For some data centers, there is little reason to believe it could not. Moore County has access to TVA power through DREMC and an existing 161-kV transmission corridor. MUD has a substantial raw-water source and an 800-gallon-per-minute treatment plant. Multiple companies have built fiber in the county.

Those are real assets, but they come with limits.

MUD has already shown that delivering a large amount of water to one customer can put pressure on the rest of the system. Its treatment plant is not sitting empty, and water loss remains high.

Nobody has produced an engineering study showing how many megawatts could be delivered to a specific Moore County tract for a hyperscale data center. Nobody has shown where redundant commercial fiber routes would enter that tract, because there is no tract before the county to study.

That is where this conversation probably needs to stay grounded. There is no reason to pretend a large data center would have no effect here. There is also no factual basis to say a data center would drain Tims Ford Lake or overwhelm the power grid. And until we know the equipment and the site, nobody knows what a neighbor would hear from his back porch.

The Metro Council bought the county two years on April 20. The best thing officials can do with that time is write rules that answer these questions before an application lands on somebody’s desk.

Write a water rule that protects existing MUD customers. Require a cooling system that makes sense for what Moore County can supply. Put enforceable noise limits where neighbors will actually hear the equipment. Make developers pay for the infrastructure their project requires rather than quietly spreading those costs among the people already here.

Then, if somebody does show up with plans, require the numbers.

The county needs to know how much electricity the facility will need and what DREMC and TVA say it will take to provide it. It needs the actual water demand and the cooling design. It needs to know where the fiber will come from and what happens if one route gets cut.

Those answers will tell us considerably more than the words data center ever will. That was the reason for the moratorium in the first place.

Moore County does not need to be scared of the label. It needs to know what it is willing to allow behind it.