Is A Datacenter in Our Future?

Aurora has recently adopted zoning rules written specifically for data centers. In simple terms, Aurora decided that data centers are important enough, and potentially impactful enough, to deserve their own category in the zoning code instead of being treated like ordinary office or industrial buildings. Aurora’s new rules require a conditional-use approval, a development agreement with the city, public notice, and technical studies on issues like sound, vibration, water use, and energy use. Aurora also added standards tied to backup generators, resilience, and certain privacy-related protections.

Orland Park does not appear to have done the same thing.

In the current Orland Park Land Development Code, you cannot find a separate land-use category for “data center.” Instead, the code appears to regulate land through broader categories such as office, light industrial, research, manufacturing, warehouse, and distribution uses. That matters because if a village has no data-center-specific category, a proposed data center may be reviewed under older zoning buckets that were not written with modern server campuses in mind.

That does not mean Orland Park could not review or condition a data center project.

It could.

The village still has site-plan review powers, special-use procedures in some cases, and general authority to impose development conditions related to traffic, landscaping, access, and similar issues. But that is different from having a modern ordinance written specifically for data centers. Aurora now has that kind of ordinance. Orland Park, based on the current public code does not.

For readers, the practical difference is straightforward. In Aurora, the city has already decided that data centers raise special questions: How loud will the generators be? How much power and water will the site use? How close can major equipment be to homes or schools? What extra studies should be required before approval? In Orland Park, those questions do not appear to be answered in a dedicated data-center section of the zoning code. They would instead have to be addressed indirectly through broader zoning categories, negotiated conditions, or project-by-project review.

There is also evidence that Orland Park has been interested in attracting data-center development. In 2024, village materials tied to the Centennial Crossings area stated that the property was being marketed with potential development opportunities “particularly for a data center user.” That shows data centers are not just a theoretical issue here. The village appears to consider them as a possible economic-development target, even though its zoning code does not appear to contain Aurora-style rules written specifically for that use.

A typical standalone data center often needs about 10 to 40 acres.

A useful way to think about it is by type:

• Small / enterprise facility: roughly 5–15 acres
• Mid-size wholesale or colocation facility: roughly 15–40 acres
• Large hyperscale campus: often 100+ acres
• Very large AI / hyperscale campuses: now sometimes 500–800 acres or more

Why the range is so wide:

• The building footprint is only part of it.
• You also need room for setbacks, substations, generators, cooling equipment, stormwater detention, truck circulation, security buffers, and future expansion. Industry site-selection material notes that the biggest facilities can require 500–800 acres.
• Real-world recent campus examples show that 100–200+ acre sites are common once projects get into the hundreds of megawatts. Cushman & Wakefield cites examples such as 103 acres for a 336 MW campus and 200 acres for a site intended to support hundreds of MW.

I believe that the village needs to take a serious look at proposing zoning regulations that address datacenters, specifically.