Hillsboro, Ore., has adopted its first permanent data center zoning rules, and they shrink the land open to standalone facilities from roughly 6,600 acres to 608. The city council approved the ordinance unanimously on Oct. 20, and it takes effect Nov. 19, the Hillsboro News-Times reported.
The 608 acres aren’t empty lots waiting for a developer. The caps count data centers that were already approved, so much of that acreage is spoken for.
How the Hillsboro data center caps work
Standalone data centers will be allowed mainly in two zones. Industrial Park gets a cumulative cap of 215 acres and Industrial Sanctuary gets 310. Another 83 acres stays available in parts of the Jackson East area. Every new standalone facility now needs a public hearing.
Accessory data centers, the ones that supply computing to a business on the same site rather than operating as the primary use, get their own limits. One can’t exceed 25% of the site’s gross acreage or 30% of the primary business’s gross floor area, whichever is smaller. It has to serve that business, its tenants or partners, and it can’t lease computing to outside customers. At first reading on Oct. 6, councilors voted 5-1 to strip a provision that would have let a business put its accessory data center on a separate, affiliated industrial property.
A 1,000-foot buffer between data centers and schools serving mostly children under 18, measured property line to property line, applies to both types. Councilors made it temporary because they weren’t sure enough research supported that distance. It expires Oct. 31, 2027, unless the council extends it.
The ordinance also reaches past data centers. Sites where energy storage is the primary use are now capped at 12 acres.
Oregon’s data center permit pause stacks on top
The city’s temporary moratorium on new standalone data centers runs through Nov. 24. A second phase covering building heights, buffers, green-building requirements and other environmental rules is due over the winter and spring.
The bigger brake is at the state level. Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality has paused permitting for new and expanding data center projects until July 2027 under a directive from Gov. Tina Kotek, who wants time to review an advisory committee’s recommendations before the 2027 legislative session, the Oregon Capital Chronicle reported. The pause covers new air and water pollution permits.
Not every city wants the brakes on. Also on Oct. 20, the Umatilla City Council declared a state of emergency over the pause, citing $6 million in direct losses to the city, more than $5 billion of private development in the region and up to $12 million in water infrastructure and community benefit payments from data center companies. Umatilla has four operating data centers, one under construction and two more expected from Amazon and Sabey Data Centers. The declaration lets the city manager coordinate with other governments on possible legal action. Forest Grove, meanwhile, approved its own 120-day moratorium Oct. 12.
What the rules mean for data center builders
For contractors chasing Oregon work in 2027, the pipeline now sits on what’s already entitled and permitted. Hillsboro’s caps fold approved projects into the total, so new standalone campuses will have to fit in whatever acreage is left, after a public hearing. The accessory limits matter more than they look: they stop the workaround of calling a leased colocation hall an accessory use. Nationally, forecasters already expect far less capacity to get built than hyperscalers plan. In Oregon, local zoning and a state permit hold now point the same way.