Data centers would get their own zoning rules, with noise studies and water-free cooling, under a staff plan going to council members Monday

Dallas planning staff want the city's zoning code to treat data centers as their own land use for the first time, with noise studies, water-free cooling and buffers from homes required for the bigger projects, according to a briefing set for a City Council committee on Monday, Nov. 2.

The council's Economic Development Committee is scheduled to hear the presentation from Planning and Development Director Emily Liu and senior planner Wayne Powell at its 1 p.m. meeting. Staff describe the recommendations as preliminary.

How the code works now

The city's zoning code has no category for data centers, the briefing says. A data center operating as a primary use is classified as a communication exchange facility, which is also listed under local utilities. That use is allowed by right in industrial districts, the two central-area districts downtown, the mixed-use and multiple-commercial districts, several office districts and regional retail zoning.

In community retail districts it is allowed only up to 50,000 square feet.

Council members asked for the review in an Aug. 11 memo signed by five of them, which directed staff to study how other cities regulate data centers and to start the process of either amending the existing communication exchange rules or creating a separate data center use.

What staff propose

The draft would rename the use a "Data and Communications Exchange Facility," write data centers into its definition and bar cryptocurrency mining from it.

Rules would scale with size and with the kind of site. Staff sort projects into four tiers: 50,000 square feet or less, up to 500,000, up to 1 million, and more than 1 million, which the briefing says is almost always a hyperscale campus running artificial intelligence workloads.

Projects are also sorted by whether they reuse an existing building, redevelop a brownfield, fill in a vacant lot in a developed area or go on undeveloped land.

Under the proposed table, a center that reuses an existing building could go in by right at any size below 1 million square feet, as long as it meets the district's usual rules. New construction on open land would have to meet the extra standards at every size, as would anything over 1 million square feet.

Those extra standards would require:

• A 72-hour noise study before development and a second study afterward showing the site meets the city's noise limits, including a cap on low-frequency sound.
• A closed-loop or other water-free cooling system.
• A 30-foot landscape buffer along any side that abuts or faces residential property.
• Acoustic enclosures around outdoor mechanical equipment within 250 feet of the lot line, built at least one and a half times as tall as the equipment.

Separate design rules would apply to new buildings outside industrial districts that face a street, a park or homes. They would call for windows covering at least half of the street-facing ground floor and limit blank walls to 40 feet.

Other cities

The presentation points to Loudoun and Fairfax counties in Virginia, Atlanta, Chandler, Ariz., and Fort Worth, where it says closed-loop cooling is already required and noise rules and residential setbacks have been proposed.

What comes next

According to the briefing, the first draft of Dallas's broader zoning code rewrite, due out later this week, leaves the data center section marked "Reserved." Staff plan to refine the standards based on the committee's feedback and move the data center amendment separately from the larger rewrite. Any code change would still need public hearings and a council vote.

Sources

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