Kearney’s City Council voted 5-0 on Tuesday night to write the city’s first zoning rules for data centers and, in the same session, hand a conditional use permit to Tech One Crossing, a 368-megawatt computing campus that will rise on the site of an existing bitcoin mine on the city’s east edge.
The vote does two things at once. It creates a rulebook — noise limits, water reporting, setback and energy standards — and it approves the first project that has to live inside it.
What the council actually approved
The council passed a series of city code amendments targeting the three complaints that have followed data centers into small towns across the country: noise, water use, and load on the grid, according to KSNB Local4’s reporting on Tuesday’s meeting. The same 5-0 vote then cleared a conditional use permit for Tech One Crossing, a multi-phase campus planned to replace a local bitcoin mine on the eastern edge of the city.
The headline number is 368 megawatts of eventual capacity, as the Omaha World-Herald reported. For scale, that is roughly the draw of a mid-sized Nebraska city, dropped onto a single campus, phased in over years rather than switched on at once.
The council said t...