Jackson’s Data Center Ordinance Is Days From the Council. The Revenue Case Rests on Taxes the State Already Exempts.
City Attorney Drew Martin told the council Oct. 27 a draft is days away. The sales tax exemption MDA advertises for certified data centers covers the equipment and building materials a project would buy.
Jackson’s data center rules are now a matter of days, not months. City Attorney Drew Martin told the City Council on Oct. 27 that a draft ordinance would reach members “sometime next week,” after missing his own internal deadline twice, according to WLBT. The 183-day moratorium the council passed July 14 took effect Aug. 13 and was written to run to about Jan. 13. Martin said that end date will likely slip because the ordinance was published later than expected.
The delay matters because the city’s case for allowing the buildings rests on money. Mayor John Horhn told the Clarion Ledger in an Oct. 12 interview that “one of the surefire ways to put a great infusion of cash and resources back into a community of late is data centers,” and that he would be “crazy as a mayor of this city, which is cash-strapped, not to at least want to consider data centers.” Ward 1 Councilman Ashby Foote, who voted against the moratorium, said Oct. 27 the industry “has the potential to generate a lot of revenue for the city.”
The state’s own incentive documents narrow where that revenue can come from. The Mississippi Development Authority’s data center fact sheet says companies certified by MDA get a state sales and use tax exemption on “all computing equipment and software,” and that “component building materials and equipment used in the initial construction or expansion of the data center facility qualify for the exemption.” The Department of Revenue’s exemption schedule goes further: in Tier Three counties, data and information enterprises meeting MDA criteria are exempt from the taxes on component construction materials and on machinery and equipment bought within three months of completion. In Tier One and Tier Two counties the exemption covers one-half of those taxes.
Hinds County is a Tier Three county, so a certified project here would sit in the fullest version of that exemption. The practical effect is that the largest purchases a data center makes, the building shell and the equipment inside it, are the purchases the state has already carved out. What a city can still tax is narrower: the land, the finished building on the property rolls, and whatever the facility buys that falls outside the certified categories. The ordinance draft, the MDA fact sheet and the Department of Revenue schedule do not put a dollar figure on any of that for Jackson, and no document reviewed for this article estimates what a Jackson data center would pay the city.
Set that against the base the city is working from. Jackson received $2,622,651 in sales tax diversions from the Department of Revenue in September, down 0.2% from $2,628,600 a year earlier, though its fiscal year to date is up 3.9% at $7,951,288. Ridgeland, the suburb that has absorbed much of the metro’s recent commercial growth, took in $1,557,911 in September, up 14.0% from a year earlier. A single large facility’s property tax bill would have to be substantial to register against numbers like those, and nothing in the record yet shows what it would be.
The city’s exposure runs the other way too. Horhn told the Clarion Ledger he does not want “the utility costs of average citizens who are ratepayers to go up because a data center is part of the uses,” and suggested developers could put money toward Jackson’s water and wastewater systems, without naming any commitment. Entergy Mississippi says data center revenue helped eliminate a residential bill increase of nearly $5 a month beginning in July 2026, a position the company repeats on its data center page. A May 2026 report prepared by Synapse Energy Economics for Earthjustice disputes the framing, estimating that residential ratepayers had contributed about $38 million toward data center related investments as of March 2026 and would contribute more than $74 million by the end of 2026.
Only one project is actually waiting on the rules. Saxum Investment Group, a New Jersey company, asked to rezone roughly 190 acres along Forest Avenue, later amended upward to about 230 acres, for a data center and power plant, according to Mississippi Free Press and WLBT reporting. Its attorney asked the Planning Board to hold the request on May 27, and the board postponed it indefinitely on June 16. It has not come back for a vote. Martin said the ordinance would be general and would require developers to clear state requirements first, including MDEQ, JXN Water and Entergy approvals, and that the city would likely need an outside engineering firm to review applications because it lacks the expertise in house.
What’s next: Martin said the draft should reach council members the week of Nov. 2, and Council President Vernon Hartley has said a public hearing would be announced once the legal department signs off, with no date set. The moratorium’s original end, around Jan. 13, is the clock. Residents can watch for the ordinance to appear on a council agenda at jacksonms.gov, where agendas and packets are posted before each meeting, and can check the MDA fact sheet at mississippi.org and the Department of Revenue exemption schedule at dor.ms.gov to see which purchases a certified data center would not pay tax on. The question no one has answered publicly is what a Jackson facility would actually pay the city each year, and the office that could answer it is the Hinds County tax assessor, which sets the property value the city’s millage rate would apply to.