Joel EngelhardtPBA Holdings challenges county’s decision under state dispute resolution law, sues competing landowner for breach of contract.
Another Project Tango hearing could be coming.
This one would be presided over by a magistrate judge, not the Palm Beach County Commission.
PBA Holdings, the longtime landowner of the proposed AI hyperscale data center site, has filed an appeal of the County Commission’s July 15 rejection of its rezoning request under the Florida Land Use and Environmental Dispute Resolution Act.
The act gives the county and PBA until Tuesday to agree to a special magistrate, who would be hired to hear the challenge, much like a mediator.
The magistrate would preside over a hearing where PBA and some opponents could call witnesses and argue about whether the county followed its own rules in rejecting the data center zoning request.
The magistrate would issue a report for consideration by the County Commission. If the commission rejects the rezoning for a second time, PBA can sue or refile its zoning application and try again.
In 2023, the developers seeking to convert Palm Beach International Raceway, the old Moroso racetrack, into a warehouse complex applied the act to reverse the County Commission’s initial denial of their rezoning request.
In its 15-page “request for relief,” PBA outlines how the County Commission erred when it voted 5-1 to reject its proposal to allow 3.6 million square feet of development, including about 1 million square feet devoted to the data center, on a 202-acre site at Southern Boulevard and 20-Mile Bend.
PBA pointed out that it asked for no changes to the warehouse approval on a 60-acre parcel it sold in 2023 to a company called WPB Logistics Owner. But WPB Logistics objected to PBA’s rezoning request and sued to block it.
On top of the Aug. 5 filing with the county, PBA’s Tampa-based attorney Ethan Loeb filed a 57-page lawsuit the next day against WPB Logistics and its attorneys. The suit claims WPB Logistics’ backer, TPA Group of Atlanta, undermined PBA because it, too, wanted to grab a piece of the data center pie.
The pie is vast. PBA put the value of a 3.6 million-square-foot data center and warehouse complex on its land at $34.5 billion, far beyond the value of any other property in Palm Beach County.
The figure would take into account not just the land and buildings but the value of AI hyperscale data computing systems, including servers, networking gear and cooling towers.
Partners in PBA, which stands for Palm Beach Aggregates, have owned the property since 1993. They made a deal in 2021 to sell part of it to TPA Group, which created WPB Logistics to manage and market the property.
PBA maintains that it believed TPA planned to build warehouses on its portion of the land, but as PBA pursued data center development, and the appetite soared among big tech companies for hyperscale data centers to support artificial intelligence, TPA changed course.
It already owned 60 acres with the option to buy another 75 acres. Its switch is documented in the suit.
While the corporate skirmish played out behind closed doors, residents of the neighboring Arden community and other data center opponents soon realized that instead of the 1 million-square-foot data center PBA pursued in hearings dating to December, the site’s entire 3.6 million-square-feet of development could be converted into one giant data center complex.
The opponents argued successfully before the County Commission on July 15 that the centers posed an existential threat to their 2,300-home community, putting forth noise, vibrations, heat, lighting and potential water contaminants that could sicken their children and destroy their property values.
Staff found data centers compatible with Arden
In its filing with the county, PBA outlines the arguments it will use to try to overturn the commission’s decision.
It harkens to county support for the project in 2016, when the commission approved 1.2 million square feet for a “large-scale data center,” later changed by PBA to 206,000 square feet.
“A large-scale data center (which falls within the allowable zoning use category of ‘data and information processing’) was defined to include (a) centralized computer storehouse that provides information technology infrastructure for single or multiple commercial or government clients,” PBA’s attorney, Loeb, wrote.
In the July hearing, county commissioners, prodded by opponents, made the case that the county’s 2016 definition failed to contemplate the massive advances in data center technology.
In 2020, Loeb’s argument continued, “the county’s planning staff — i.e., the expert planners that the Palm Beach County taxpayers employ to provide land use opinions — concluded that Arden and large-scale data center uses would be compatible, based, in part, on the distance between such uses.”
But the county’s support for data centers on the site shifted when “a movement opposing large scale data centers outright began to rapidly spread,” Loeb wrote, blaming in particular Mayor Sara Baxter, who represents the district.
“Observing the way in which the ‘wind was blowing,’ Mayor Baxter transformed from having approved the land use … and zoning change … in January 2025 (consistent with the use that the county had encouraged for over a decade) and began to employ a populist platform during an election season to increase her chances of being reelected,” Loeb wrote.
Her February town hall meeting, which drew more than 400 residents opposed to the data center, aimed to “‘drum up’ opposition,” he wrote, pointing to the moment Baxter used the word “we” to suggest the commission had no intention of approving the rezoning request.
“PBA has significant concerns about Mayor Baxter’s foreshadowing use of the word ‘we’ and whether Mayor Baxter had some knowledge that the County Commission was going to vote ‘no’ as a collective body before the July 15 hearing occurred,” he wrote.
County Commission caved to ‘public hysteria’
He points to the Palm Beach County Zoning Commission’s July 2 denial of PBA’s application as a “curious event” since the same board on Dec. 4 had approved a request for even more data center development on the site.
That “radical change,” he wrote, foreshadowed the July 15 County Commission decision.
At the hearing, commissioners asked about noise standards “that are not applicable to the Project Tango application and issues pertaining to heat emissions.”
“Indeed, against the concrete, existing, and actually controlling standards, there was no question that the Project Tango application met all governing objective criteria for approval,” he wrote.
“It is readily apparent from the conduct of the board, and the comments of the board’s members, that the board reviewed the Project Tango application not pursuant to the regulatory provisions actually and legally governing such review, but measured against what the board wished those provisions were — namely, a total ban on data centers.”
By ignoring the evidence and giving in to “public hysteria,” the commission is destroying PBA’s ability to use the property as proposed.
“This was, of course, the express basis for the board’s decision — as with the moratorium, to ‘ban’ data centers in the county on policy and ideological grounds, and contrary to controlling law and evidence,” Loeb wrote.
“The board’s prejudged, predetermined opposition to Project Tango was so complete that even Project Tango application’s necessary warehouse uses — which are not a ‘data center’ by any conceivable definition and, by agreed to conditions, could not be — were also denied outright.”
Lawsuit: a tale of corporate intrigue
In the lawsuit, Loeb relates a different tale: A story of corporate intrigue, charges and countercharges that resulted in WPB Logistics breaching its 2021 contract.
The contract called for WPB Logistics, backed by TPA Group of Atlanta, to buy Phase 1, the 60-acre piece it bought in 2023; Phase 2, the 75-acre parcel that it has not yet bought; and its “right of first refusal” to buy about 37 acres if it were to be marketed for warehouse development.
The document reveals for the first time when things went wrong between PBA and TPA Group, at least by PBA’s account.
It pins the blame squarely on the rich allure of data centers.
It started in March 2024 when TPA Director Matt Prince reached out to PBA partner Enrique Tomeu and offered to pay $20 million for the site’s previously approved data center parcel, blessed by the county for 206,000 square feet.
Tomeu learned that Prince had met with Florida Power & Light officials without Tomeu’s knowledge, the suit says.
He learned TPA had begun marketing its 60-acre site for data center development with expansion opportunities onto lands owned by PBA even though the only data center use approved on the 202-acre site belonged to PBA.
TPA advertised access to 300 megawatts of power for a data center, enough to serve as many as 180,000 homes.
Tomeu confronted Prince, asking whether TPA was “stealing PBA’s power,” the suit said.
Prince conceded as much, the suit said.
“After a few non-responsive answers to repeated questioning, Prince ultimately admitted that he and TPA Group were seeking to develop a data center on the Phase 1 property and that they were, in fact, seeking to divert power from PBA’s large-scale data center,” the suit said.
The next day, Tomeu terminated discussions.
Yet in August 2025, the parties signed an amendment to their original 2021 agreement laying out how PBA would pursue approvals for TPA’s second phase, a 75-acre tract to be zoned for warehouses, the suit said.
When TPA withdrew its consent and objected to the rezoning before the county, PBA saw the Atlanta group’s objections as “unfounded” since PBA was pursuing approvals as required by the contract, the suit said.
“As it continued to investigate the strange course of conduct exhibited by TPA Group … PBA discovered the real reason for the abrupt change in position: … WPB Logistics was secretly planning to convert the Phase 1 and 2 properties into competing data centers — through mere administrative approval.”
Those changes, first reported by Stet News in May, are still under review by Palm Beach County zoning officials, who concede they can be approved without the County Commission’s review.
The idea, the suit said, would be to “sneak through WPB Logistics’ data center approvals without the same scrutiny that the county was applying to those pursued by PBA on PBA’s own property and further to torpedo approval of PBA’s data center so that TPA Group and WPB Logistics could step in and utilize the power and utilities PBA already procured for its own proposed data center.”
