Florida data center needs up to 50k gallons water a day. That might be a problem

A real estate developer’s plan to build Florida’s first hyperscale data center — taking up more than 1,300 acres of land in Polk County — is humming along despite misgivings by some locals.

Earlier this month, the planning commission for the small town of Fort Meade, about 40 minutes southeast of Lakeland, voted unanimously to approve a 20-year agreement with the developer on the project, a Maryland company called Stonebridge. The city council is scheduled to vote Tuesday evening on final approval. At least one local advocacy group encouraged residents to show up in opposition.

But there could be an unexpected snag related to the project’s water use.

A development agreement between Stonebridge’s company, Fort Meade LLC, and the city says that the data center could use up to 50,000 gallons of city water per day.

Data centers, which are warehouses that contain thousands of computers used to power programs like AI, consume huge amounts of water to keep the machines cool.

But under new policies quietly adopted by the Southwest Florida Water Management District at the end of last year, the city can’t use its existing water permit to supply the data center, the Tampa Bay Times has learned.

The water management district sent a letter to the city of Fort Meade on Tuesday ahead of its city commission meeting, saying that the data center’s water demand doesn’t fall into the city’s already-approved permit.

Instead, the letter says, the data center’s water request must be separately approved by the Southwest Water Management District’s full governing board at a public meeting.

“Please be advised that all required District permits must be obtained prior to initiating any regulated activities at the project site,” the letter reads.

Fort Meade officials have previously praised the project, saying the millions the city will get from Stonebridge could help upgrade water infrastructure.

“I think the benefits are really going to be the economic benefits,” planning Chairperson Richard Cason said at the meeting earlier this month, according to WUSF. “I’m sure there’s going to be some employment to Fort Meade.”

The water group’s board, which will now have final say over the data center’s permit, is appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been a vocal skeptic of large data centers entering Florida, saying they could cause costs for residents to rise. It’s unclear if the water management board would approve the data center proposal.

The district did not comment aside from confirming that a vote at a public meeting would be required.

Fort Meade’s city manager and mayor, along with representatives from Stonebridge, also did not immediately return requests for comment.

In November, Adam Blalock with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection sent a memo to all Florida water districts saying that data centers could put “additional pressure on Florida’s already constrained aquifer.”

Blalock said that all data center permits should be made by the governing board, not staff, for the sake of transparency.

About a month after his memo, the board of the Southwest Florida Water Management District amended its policies to give the board final action for all data center water permits.

The board approved the change during a December meeting with no discussion.

This policy change has not been previously reported. If other water management boards similarly followed the state’s instructions, this restriction could affect proposals in other parts of the state.

Data centers have rapidly become a hot-button issue in Florida this year, as the industry has reached saturation points in other states and has turned its gaze to Florida’s stretches of open, rural land. No large-scale or hyperscale data centers have been built here yet, but there have been signs that could soon change.

In this year’s legislative session, Florida lawmakers passed a bill to add guardrails to the industry designed to protect residents from cost spikes on their electric bills and risks to their water supply from these resource-hungry facilities.

But in the final days of negotiations, at the urging of business lobbyists, lawmakers removed a proposed ban on government employees signing nondisclosure agreements with data center companies — allowing greater secrecy to persist in the projects.

In Fort Meade, it’s unclear what tech company could ultimately use the data center Stonebridge wants to build.