Palm Beach County staff approve plans with 698,000 square feet of data center space at the Project Tango site, with no public hearing

Palm Beach County zoning staff approved revised site plans on Oct. 7, 2026 for the Project Tango site on Southern Boulevard in western Palm Beach County, with three data center buildings holding 698,000 square feet of data center space, according to the county’s approval letter and its Project Tango page.¹² The letter counts 206,000 square feet of that data center space, with its office, as approved before this application.¹

The decision was made by the county’s Development Review Officer, a staff review, and not by the county commission. The county lists it among its administrative applications; no public hearing is listed for it, and the page says no public hearing applications are in process for the site.² The letter, application DRO-2026-00966, is signed by Zoning Director Wendy N. Hernández and finds that the requests meet the approval standards in Article 2.C.5.B.2 of the county’s Unified Land Development Code.¹

What was approved

The plan totals 2,020,000 square feet on 202.67 acres. The county’s page says that is the most the master plan approved by the county commission in January 2025 allows, and that the master plan already carried a concurrency approval for 752,000 square feet of data center space with office in three buildings.² By the county’s breakdown, the approved plan has:²

• one warehouse building of 1,200,000 square feet (1,175,000 of warehouse and 25,000 of office);
• two data center buildings of 306,000 square feet each (288,000 of data center and 18,000 of office in each);
• one data center building of 140,000 square feet (122,000 of data center and 18,000 of office);
• one 68,000-square-foot minor utility building.

That is 698,000 square feet of data center space and 54,000 square feet of office in the three data center buildings, 752,000 square feet in all.²

The July denial and the September moratorium

On July 15, 2026, county commissioners denied PBA Holdings’ application for a larger plan, 5-1, without prejudice. Commissioner Maria Marino voted against the denial. The resolution records Mayor Sara Baxter as absent; WLRN reported that she recused herself after publicly opposing the project.³⁴ The denied plan totaled 3,594,564 square feet, including 1,032,000 square feet of data center space.²⁵

On Sept. 24, 2026, commissioners voted 6-0 to pause, for up to a year, new zoning requests for data centers in unincorporated Palm Beach County expected to draw 50 megawatts or more at peak. CBS12 reported that approvals already granted stand, and that applications the county had found sufficient before the pause began can proceed under the rules in place before it.⁶

Conditions in the approval

The approval caps water service at 100,000 gallons a day for the whole site and requires cooling water to go to an approved industrial wastewater treatment plant. Data center buildings must be at least 850 feet from the east property line.¹

Sound from all sources, measured at the homes to the east, is limited to 60 dBA from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., 55 dBA until 10 p.m. and 50 dBA overnight. Permanent generators may reach 75 dBA during testing and power outages, and routine testing is limited to 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. At least three noise monitoring stations must be running before the first data center building receives a certificate of occupancy. Battery storage must use lithium iron phosphate cells or a chemistry with equal or lower fire risk.¹

The letter is addressed to Joseph Verdone of Carlton Fields, P.A., the firm listed as PBA Holdings’ agent on the application denied in July. Work under the data center and warehouse plan must begin by Oct. 7, 2030.¹³

Another application under review

A separate staff-level application, ABN/DRO-2026-01058, from WPB Logistics Owner, LLC and the Central Park Commerce Center Master Association, is pending. It would replace the approved 1,200,000-square-foot warehouse with four data center buildings of 294,250 square feet each, office included, and add a water treatment plant. It proposes no change to the 752,000 square feet of data center space approved on Oct. 7.²

What the records do not show

• Neither county record states the approved plan’s expected electrical load in megawatts.
• Neither says when the application was filed or found sufficient, so these records do not show whether the September pause could have applied to it. The letter lists noise and safety studies the applicant submitted dated Aug. 24 through Sept. 24, 2026.¹
• The letter does not say who may appeal the approval, where or by what deadline.
• None of these records names the company that would use the data centers.