Six ways Project Red Clay would damage Lowndes County.
Cloverleaf says the data center will “sit there quietly” and no one will notice. Their words. Below are the documented harms — from communities already living next door to hyperscale data centers — and what would happen here. Every claim on these pages is sourced in the receipts.
They will drink our wells dry.
Meta's 1.3M-sqft data center 12 miles away in Hope Hull is already the single largest water user in Montgomery's water system. Project Red Clay would be nearly four times that size.
Your power bill goes up. Theirs doesn't.
Virginia Dominion residents face an extra $11.24/mo in 2026 to pay for data-center load. PJM capacity prices rose 833% for 2025–2026. Alabama Power's “no impact” promise is a promise, not a tariff filing.
The neighbors call it ‘living in hell.’
Constant white noise. Diesel backup generators that emit 200–600× more nitrogen oxides than gas plants. Headaches, vertigo, sleep disturbance, hypertension. U.S. News, April 2026.
$1.4 million in tax breaks. Per job.
No state reports both jobs promised and jobs actually delivered at subsidized data centers. Illinois averages $1.4M of public subsidy per data-center job. The “$75M tax revenue” pitch is a ceiling, not a floor.
1,000 acres of Black Belt timber, fragmented forever.
Hyperscale campuses fragment habitat, light up the night sky, and dump runoff into local watersheds. Fragmented landscapes show ~12% fewer species than continuous ones.
What it does to the neighborhood.
Constant industrial noise. Light pollution at the property line. Round-the-clock traffic. The honest research on adjacent property values is mixed — but quality-of-life impacts are not.