City Council
El Segundo hits pause on data centers
El Segundo City Council voted Tuesday to impose a 45-day moratorium on new data center approvals — a landmark move in a city that has watched its industrial base shift toward hyperscale computing facilities. The interim ordinance, adopted under California Government Code Section 65858, halts new land use entitlements for data centers while staff studies how current zoning handles them and what, if any, new rules are needed.
Dozens of residents showed up to support the moratorium, citing noise, power consumption, water strain, and air quality concerns. The vote passed 4-1, with Councilmember Boyles casting the lone dissenting vote. The transcript doesn't clearly attribute specific reasoning to him by name — a property-rights concern was raised during discussion, but we can't confirm who raised it, so we're not putting words in his mouth.
Under state law, the council can extend the moratorium to 10 months and 15 days at the November meeting. Staff will deliver a 30-day report with findings before that date. See the full Vision 2050 backgrounder below for context on why this moratorium and that update are inseparable.
And this isn't a hypothetical, first-of-its-kind fight — El Segundo is already a real data center town. At least four named facilities operate along the Nash/Douglas corridor: Equinix's LA3 and LA4 campuses, Centersquare's LA1, and Serverfarm's LAX1. LA4 is even a submarine cable landing station, part of why the city became a West Coast telecom hub in the first place. One resident's claim on Nextdoor that there are '10 data centers already' is probably an overcount of buildings — but not a wild one, if you count individual tenants inside them.
Timeline: how we got here
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2026-07-09 | Developer Eight Form withdrew its proposal for a 5-story AI data center at the Hyatt Place site (750 N. Nash St.) after a 3-hour Planning Commission hearing and organized community opposition. |
| 2026-09-15 | City Council adopted a 45-day moratorium on new data center land-use approvals, 4-1 (Boyles opposed), after extensive public comment. A 30-day staff report and possible reconsideration are expected. |
Watch the vote
The debate: arguments on both sides
- FOR: Data centers can generate outsized property and utility-tax revenue relative to their footprint — an extreme national example (Loudoun County, VA) draws roughly 38% of county revenue from about 4% of commercial parcels.
- FOR: Some nearby aerospace and defense firms may have real latency or data-sovereignty reasons to want local colocation capacity rather than sending data out of state.
- FOR: A moratorium doesn't make the underlying question disappear — a developer can wait it out, refile, or take the project to a neighboring city instead.
- AGAINST: Power draw is the central issue, not an exaggeration — a hyperscale facility can draw 5-10x the electricity of a comparably sized office building. Santa Clara, CA has two completed data centers sitting idle because its grid can't yet supply them, and is spending $450 million on upgrades.
- AGAINST: Permanent staffing is genuinely low relative to building size — one commonly cited example is a 1.1-million-square-foot facility projected at roughly 73 permanent jobs.
- AGAINST: Approving one facility can narrow a city's legal footing to deny the next similarly-situated application — arguably why El Segundo is pausing to write rules first.
- For comparison: Monterey Park, CA did a 45-day moratorium in January, extended it, then voters passed a permanent ban in June with 88% approval — one possible path this could follow.
Source: City of El Segundo City Council Special Meeting, September 15, 2026