Tennessee leaders usually celebrate new business development in the state, including giant data centers. But when the property line for a planned data center is less than a football field’s length away from a breeding habitat for the clouded leopard, a vulnerable species, all bets are off.

Word that a permit had been filed to build a new data center campus next to the Nashville Zoo has created a rare bipartisan furor in the city this month.

Officials faced what one described as an “unprecedented” and impassioned crowd at an otherwise routine planning commission meeting last week. Brad Paisley, the Tennessee-based country music star, took to social media to predict that a data center next to the zoo would be “an absolute nightmare scenario.”

Senator Marsha Blackburn, the Republican front-runner for governor, released a video in which she noted the zoo’s importance to the city as an economic and educational resource and said, “Let’s revisit this placement.”

And on Monday, Mayor Freddie O’Connell, a Democrat, announced that he would support a metro council proposal to temporarily pause approval of large data centers in the Nashville area.

The outcry has turned a beloved Nashville institution, with ambitious expansion plans of its own, into the latest flashpoint in the national push and pull over data center construction. It appears to be the first time a data center campus has been planned so close to an accredited zoo.

“Data centers are relatively new, and so there’s a lot of unknowns about them, and the unknown is scary,” said Councilwoman Courtney Johnston, who proposed the moratorium, which would last until Nov. 1. “When you couple that with the proximity to our zoo that everyone loves, that is a perfect storm.”

Much of the concern stems from the unknowns of the project, and from the potential long-term effects of light and noise generated by the data center on the zoo animals.

The zoo’s human neighbors have also raised objections to the prospect of having their power sapped, or of pollutants infiltrating the environment.

There are already at least a dozen stand-alone data centers in the Nashville area, as well as several others across the state. Mr. O’Connell was on hand when Fisk University, a historically Black institution in Nashville, announced a nearly $1 billion capital improvement plan that includes “an innovation and technology center” that would contain a data center.

Ms. Blackburn and other elected officials have also celebrated the expansion of Elon Musk’s A.I. supercomputer in Memphis despite concerns from nearby neighborhoods that it could increase air pollution.

There are no shortage of people who live near the proposed Nashville data center and are worried about its potential ramifications. But the focus of the brewing anger is how it might affect the zoo’s most endangered or prized species.

There’s the pair of hyacinth macaws that occasionally squawk near the entrance. There are plans to acquire a second okapi — a sensitive species, also known as the forest giraffe, with distinct striped hind legs — and build a new okapi habitat.

Then there are the cloud leopards, the crown jewels of the zoo’s conservation program, with 51 cubs born there since 1991. They include Azi, a 12-week-old cub who spent a recent morning tumbling around as rapt young children looked on.

The breeding enclosure where Azi was born — and may one day bear her own cubs — is about 320 feet from the proposed data center’s property line, zoo officials said.

“They’re just going up randomly and we don’t have time to sit back and actually understand what these effects are,” said Dr. Heather Schwartz, who oversees animal health at the zoo, shortly after scooping up the rambunctious cub. She said she was particularly concerned about the potential effect of light and noise from the data center, given that animals are more sensitive than humans.

The strength of the backlash has surprised data center allies and opponents alike.

“Until this campaign started, we didn’t think this was controversial,” said Chris Gatch, the chief revenue officer and executive vice president at DC BLOX, the Atlanta-based company planning to build the data center campus.

“We never contemplated that what we might build would be unsafe for animals to live in that zoo,” he added, “nor do we believe that now.”

The zoo property in South Nashville was set aside long ago for a “nature study center”; the zoo has been there since 1997. But next door are buildings that once housed a call center.

Rick Schwartz, the zoo’s president and chief executive — and Dr. Schwartz’s husband — said he and others had discussed having the zoo buy one of those buildings and turn it into a conservation and education center. But the landowner entered a contract with DC BLOX, which quickly sought permits to demolish the existing buildings and construct a data center campus.

There was “disbelief,” Mr. Schwartz said, when zoo officials learned of the permit application in early June.

“Our biggest and primary concern is how it’s going to affect so many endangered species,” he said.

Mr. Gatch confirmed that the plan includes a 69,000-square-foot data center, which would provide 10 megawatts of peak power for an eventual customer’s computing equipment. He noted that it would replace a vacant building that once housed a data center — albeit a much smaller one.

MarketStreet Enterprises, a longtime local developer that owns the property, confirmed that the former data center on the site was estimated at less than 2,000 square feet and supported the call center.

Mr. Gatch acknowledged the facility proposed by DC BLOX would be larger. But he added that the smaller data center had “not been a problem for the zoo,” which he noted had chosen “to locate in an area that was already designated for industrial use.”

Mr. Schwartz said the old data center was essentially “a very small room,” adding that equating it to the much larger planned campus “is somewhat laughable.”

DC BLOX is also planning a second, larger building that would be at least 261,000 square feet and serve as a 40-megawatt data center, Mr. Gatch said. The entire campus would cost at least $700 million to build.

Mr. Gatch declined to say who the company’s intended client is, citing a confidentiality agreement. But he said the first building would be “principally a connectivity hub” and “will likely never be an A.I.-centric data center.”

DC BLOX has built data centers in at least 10 different Southern cities. Mr. Gatch acknowledged that more conversations could have been had before the company filed its permit application in Nashville, but said the zoo had helped fan “a campaign filled with misinformation.”

He said the company would work to address now-familiar concerns about the strains data centers put on power grids and the environment, as well as noise and light pollution.

And he warned that the city’s growth meant it could not entirely shut out data centers.

“If Nashville goes and creates even further restrictions, they need to be very thoughtful about where this development can ultimately be supported, because in the end they need it,” Mr. Gatch said.

But in a city already bubbling with frustration over expensive, rapid growth and a struggle to preserve local institutions, there appears to be little appetite for the technology.

Opponents of the data center are facing a ticking clock: A new Tennessee law grants certain property rights upon submission of a building permit application, rather than upon approval.

Challenges to the permit application have been filed, in hopes of at least forcing the company to resubmit and be subject to new restrictions.

“The city is behind us, the residents are behind us,” Mr. Schwartz said. “And that’s very apparent.”