Henderson may become the latest municipality in Nevada to adopt a temporary pause on building new data centers, even as other Southern Nevada jurisdictions are moving ahead with expanding data centers.

The city council voted Tuesday to consider a moratorium on its July 21 meeting. If approved, the city could implement up to a 180-day ban on new construction of data centers within city limits. 

A staff report said that while existing city code addresses noise and water usage, "additional criteria and deeper analysis are needed to properly evaluate items under current conditions." Potential issues named in the report include electricity demand, environmental impacts, land use compatibility and community and economic benefits. 

During the meeting, Mayor Michelle Romero said she was interested in looking into regulation changes related to the data centers but did not expand beyond that. Currently, there is only one data center in Henderson, operated by Google. In an email to The Indy, a Henderson spokesperson said aside from a conditional use permit approved in November 2025, there are no other data center applications pending. 

"The proposed ordinance was amended to allow the temporary moratorium to be lifted earlier, at the Council's discretion, if questions are addressed sooner," the statement said.

The action comes amid a national reckoning on whether data centers — once viewed as a promising new front for economic development — are worth the incentives governments have used to attract them and whether they're taking an undue toll on water resources and the electrical grid. Demand for the centers has exploded as the use of artificial intelligence booms.

The City of Reno recently passed a data center moratorium extending into 2027, and Humboldt County has put a similar one in place until new zoning laws have been passed. There will also be a question on the 2026 ballot in Boulder City related to data center development. 

However, other Southern Nevada governments are moving in a different direction. 

Last month, the data center facility company Switch, which is headquartered in Las Vegas and operates 17 centers in the county including many in Nevada, bought about 54 acres for a new data center facility in southern Las Vegas, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The company also bought more than 300 acres of land for data center development in North Las Vegas Apex Industrial Park.

On Wednesday, the Clark County Planning Commission approved a design proposal for a  roughly 57,000-square-foot expansion of an existing Switch facility in southwest Las Vegas.

More than a dozen people testified in public comment against the data center expansion, citing environmental concerns, lack of proven job creation, as well as increased strain on Nevada's electrical grid. Commissioners said many of the concerns don't apply to the Switch project before unanimously moving to approve the expansion.

"This particular item is a 100 percent renewable, it's been since [20]16 using dry-cooling," Commissioner Michael Naft said. 

Data centers have drawn increased skepticism in Nevada and across the country over the relatively few permanent jobs they create. They could also potentially hinder the state's ability to meet clean energy goals on time because a high volume of centers are expected to come online in the near future.

A large issue for data centers in other areas of the country — water consumption — is less a concern for southern Nevada, where new centers using evaporative cooling techniques have been banned since 2023. 

Evaporative cooling relies on water vapor to lower the temperature of facilities. When the water evaporates, the Southern Nevada Water Authority is unable to reuse it. Instead, data centers, such as the NOVVA data center in North Las Vegas, as well as the proposed Switch data center expansion in southern Las Vegas, would rely on a "closed-loop" technique that recycles up to 99 percent of its water. 

However, the Google data center in Henderson, which opened in 2020 before the law was implemented, uses evaporative cooling and was dubbed the "thirstiest data center in Nevada" by the Las Vegas Review-Journal last year because of its water consumption. In 2024, it used 352 million gallons of water — as much as about 2,700 average households use in a year.