Eatonville’s town council, still hopeful HostDime will open its massive data center on the east side of Interstate 4 this month or next, shelved — for now — a plan to double the daily fines it assesses the company for each day its project is unfinished.
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“Some people are calling it the ‘I-4 Eyesore Part II,’ ” quipped Eatonville Mayor Ruthi Critton, referencing the derisive nickname given to a skyscraper up the road in Altamonte Springs that more than two decades later is still not complete.
But Manny Vivar, founder and CEO of HostDime, told the Orlando Sentinel the company was scheduling final inspections of the seven-story, uniquely shaped data center for the last week of September. “So yeah, we’ll be open October at the latest.”
The new building also will serve as the global headquarters for HostDime’s corporate staff.
Eatonville leaders long have hoped the project, on land cleaved from what had been the campus of the Robert Hungerford Preparatory High School, would boost the town’s limited tax base. It is also expected to add as many as 100 jobs in the long term.
But construction has been plagued by delays since the company purchased the property fronting Wymore Road in 2016.
Vivar said the journey has been “long and painful” with post-pandemic, supply-chain challenges, infrastructure hurdles and more public scrutiny, all of which have added years to the construction schedule and millions to the project’s cost.
At a ground-breaking in 2021, he had estimated the cost at $35 million.
“It’s crazy,” Vivar said. “We’re now probably close to $20 million over that.”
A developer’s agreement with the town, amended after COVID, targeted June 2024 as the opening date.
The town then agreed to a company request for an extension to April 19, 2025, for “substantial completion” and an “operations commencement” date of July 31, 2025, which requires a certificate of occupancy. At the same time, the agreement was tweaked so that the town could tack on a $250-a-day penalty for each day after that July 2025 date that there was no certificate of occupancy for HostDime’s building.
Friday will mark 400 days past.
The bill totaled $99,250 when council met Tuesday to consider possibly raising the fine to $500 a day.
Council members did not vote on the matter because Vivar was not present.
In August, Vivar appeared in front of town council to update the board and field questions.
At that meeting, council member Tarus Mack said he was disappointed to learn Vivar was breaking a promise to provide free WiFi to every Eatonville household, a pledge he made at the ground-breaking and repeated over the years.
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“I know things change, and I know you’ve been dealing with a lot with this particular project,” Mack said in frustration. “I’m trying to choose my words wisely, but if you say you’re going to do something, I think you need to do it.”
Vivar said HostDime’s goal now is to make free WiFi available for public connectivity from an antennae atop its building, but constructing the residential infrastructure for every household to connect to the Internet for free was “not sustainable.”
He pointed out the pledge was never a requirement in the developers agreement.
Critton, elected mayor in March, said she is sympathetic to council frustrations but also HostDime’s challenges.
“Everyone’s very eager to see the final product. I’m eager, too. I’m like, ‘Manny, are we there yet?’” she said. “I want to give Manny some credit and the benefit of the doubt that if COVID doesn’t interfere he’s up and running right now.”
“In my opinion, it would behoove us to work with them, extend some grace,” Critton said.
HostDime, which owns and operates data centers in Los Angeles, Brazil, Colombia, India, Mexico and the United Kingdom, also has operated for many years a smaller data center on West Kennedy Boulevard, west of Interstate 4.
Vivar predicted three years ago the new center “will be the backbone of digital infrastructure” in Central Florida.
A data center is a physical facility that houses rows of computers and networking equipment used for storing, processing and transmitting massive amounts of data. The rise of artificial intelligence has created an exponential demand for data centers.
According to the Pew Research Center, which cited figures published this year by DataCenterMap.Com, an industry resource, more than 3,000 data centers are operating in the U.S. with another 1,500 in various stages of development.
Florida has 128 working or in development, including HostDime’s new center in Eatonville.
Once toiling in anonymity, data centers have become a subject of greater public concern because of their impact on energy and water resources. In May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed SB 484 imposing restrictions on construction and operation of data centers.
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