NILES — Days after an hourslong public comments portion of a city council meeting opposing a potential artificial intelligence data center near the city, officials want further discussion before taking action.

According to a notice from the city’s law department, council is calling a public hearing to implement a moratorium on data centers at 5 p.m. May 20, before the month’s second meeting.

The hearing comes after city officials heard from representatives for Bitdeer Technologies Group, a Singapore-based company focusing on cryptocurrency and AI cloud infrastructure.

The property where Bitdeer aims to build a facility is at 1047 Belmont Ave., which was purchased in May 2025 by California-based Whitetail Creek LLC, one of its subsidiaries.

Mayor Steven Mientkiewicz said the presentation by Bitdeer representatives was only a fact-finding session.

“They had reached out to myself (and) the law director, and we had begun having minimal or brief conversation,” Mientkiewicz said. “It led to the need to present the facts of the project to city council, and also the request to annex into the city.”

Mientkiewicz said Bitdeer representatives approached the city with the project and annexation request approximately six months ago. A portion of the property is in Weathersfield.

“Since then was a handful of calls, phone calls, Zoom meetings with them, that helped answer my questions and make sure my due diligence was done before it was brought to city council,” Mientkiewicz said.

Councilman Aaron Johnstone, D-2nd Ward, who urged council to consider a moratorium at the meeting as the city proceeds through the annexation process, explained the hearing was a group decision.

“To get the legislation forward, you need a committee to do it, or you need council as a whole, which is at least four members of council,” Johnstone said. “Because of the volatile situation, if you will, I wanted to get everybody on board.”

Johnstone said he made phone calls on Thursday morning to arrange the hearing.

“I think I wanted to do it this way in a way to show the public that we have a unified front — this is the message I’d like to get out there,” he said.

Johnstone said the next step is having committee meetings and discussing the city’s zoning.

“Where do we go from here? We need to bring in experts — (the) Mahoning Valley Sanitary District needs to come in,” Johnstone said. “Then we need to address our zoning situation.”

Mientkiewicz said the moratorium will allow council to do more research and due diligence on the subject, project and specific zoning in relation to data centers.

He said it also will allow all parties to craft a pre-annexation agreement that also would be presented to council.

“It further allows us to explore the economic development project and explore this new technology and make sure that the project doesn’t come at an expense to our citizens,” Mientkiewicz said. “And also make sure that, if additional safeguards need to be placed regarding zoning, if reliability as far as utilities needs to be explored, we will do that in the interim throughout the moratorium period.”