LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — The Interior Department is pausing the Bureau of Land Management’s plans to allow a data center to be built near Boulder City.
On Tuesday, the Interior Department’s Board of Land Appeals issued a stay, in favor of Boulder City and environmentalists.
According to the new filing, Townsite Solar 2 LLC was granted a right-of-way (ROW) in 2023, which authorized the company to build a solar power plant with a battery storage system on BLM-managed land. To satisfy requirements with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), BLM studied the potential environmental impacts of the power plant.
Townsite Solar 2 had originally planned to build a data center on a parcel of land near Interstate 11 and U.S. 95. However, the company withdrew its application due to public backlash and concerns from Boulder City officials.
That’s when company officials approached the BLM to change their ROW for the same site but instead of building a solar power plant, they requested authorization for a data center including computer servers, network equipment, and a battery storage system twice the size of the proposed power plant’s.
“BLM did not study the effects of the data center project in a new or revised EA,” filings read in part. “BLM determined the data center is ‘essentially like’ the solar plant project and that it would have ‘similar anticipated impacts.'”
According to the Interior Department, those projects are not “substantially the same.”
“CBD [Centers for Biological Diversity] has demonstrated that permanent and irreparable harm is likely to occur to its members’ aesthetic and recreational interests in the project site, and those harms outweigh the temporary financial harm to Townsite from the delay,” filings state. “Furthermore, the public interest in the timely development of data center infrastructure does not outweigh the benefits of a thorough and open consideration of the potential environmental effects of that development, as NEPA requires.”
In July, city officials and Boulder City residents pushed back against plans for the data center.
“I don’t know in any world how they could have made the statement that that project is in any way similar to the original solar energy production and battery energy storage application that they did the NEPA for in 2023,” councilman Steve Walton said. “This is absolutely out of line, just ridiculous. I don’t know how they could even come to that conclusion.”
“This was never a good faith negotiation,” resident Grant Turner said. “They had a gun to our heads at all times. … I recommend that we fight them tooth and nail.”
You can read the decision from the Interior Department below.

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