New Orleans, the first Clean Compute Center zoning, and why a line of municipal code matters more than it sounds like it does
Here's a piece of the build most people would never think to watch, and it may end up being one of the most valuable things we do this year.
On January 28th, New Orleans adopted an interim zoning district for data centers. That was the city doing what dozens of American cities are now doing — reacting. The hyperscale build-out arrived faster than the codes written to govern it, and municipalities everywhere are discovering they have no working definition for what a data center is: how much power it draws, how much water it drinks, what it does to a grid and a neighborhood and a tax base. So they pause, and they write rules against the only model they've seen.
That's the opening. Because the only model they've seen is the transistor-built one — the multi-gigawatt, multi-billion-dollar, water-cooled campus that has to sit out past the parish line because nothing about it belongs near people.
A Clean Compute Center is not that machine. It draws roughly a tenth of the power. It uses no cooling water. It's small enough and quiet enough to sit downtown, in a building, in a city, next to the people it serves. If you write your zoning code with only the first machine in mind, you accidentally ban the second one — the good one — before it's ever built.
So we've gone to the City Planning Commission with a brief that does one thing: argue that a Clean Compute Center deserves its own definition, distinct from a conventional data center, with the standards to match. Not an exemption. A category. Because the two things are not the same thing, and the code shouldn't pretend they are.
Now here's the part I want you to take with you, because it's a lesson that applies to whatever you're building.
We have not finalized a site. That's deliberate. We could have announced a downtown location months ago and it would have made a better headline than this letter does. But the moment you name an address before the category exists, you hand anyone who wants to slow you down a specific thing to organize against — and you end up fighting the definition and the permit at the same time, in front of people who now have a neighborhood map in their hands. Get the definition written on the merits first, while the argument is still about physics and code language. The siting conversation afterward is a completely different conversation, and a much shorter one.
That's why this belongs in your room and not just in mine: whoever gets the first definition written sets the template. Municipal code is copied. City planners look at what comparable cities adopted and adapt the language, and a definition living in an adopted ordinance in a real American city is worth more than any white paper. If New Orleans defines a Clean Compute Center — power profile, water profile, siting, the whole envelope — that definition becomes the reference the next hundred cities reach for.
That's the real work behind Report Ten. The infrastructure story isn't only about what the machine can do. It's about whether the law lets you put it where it belongs. We're in the room where that gets decided, in my hometown.
I'll bring you what comes back.
— Derek