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Lowndes County is rural and impoverished, and its scars are in plain view. Residents have been plagued with a decades-old raw sewage crisis so horrible that a United Nations special representative traveled to Alabama to investigate. After discovering cancer-causing emissions, federal officials fined a plastics plant on U.S. Highway 80, the historic route of the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis led thousands down that road, an action that led to passage of the Voting Rights Act. On the third night of their five-day journey, as they traveled through Lowndes County, the marchers stopped at what is now known as Campsite #3, located on the Gardner farm. Less than a mile from where exhausted civil rights activists rested after hours of marching, one developer is vying to make roughly 800 acres of farmland shovel-ready for a $1.5 billion hyperscale data center facility dubbed “Project Red Clay.”
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As Alabama’s plantation and sharecropping economies withered away in the Black Belt, so named for its fertile, dark soil, the region’s local white power brokers turned to another style of racism. They have burdened the residents—60 percent of the men, women, and children who live here are African American—with substandard infrastructure and poorly maintained industrial projects that have produced environmental catastrophes.
Many Lowndes County community members fear that Project Red Clay would lead to another such crisis.
Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a Houston-based company, is a data center real estate developer. It does not own, operate, build, or even own data centers. Company officials identify parcels of land for future development, often signing options to buy them at a fraction of the purchase price while working to secure power, water, and tax concessions from local governments. Cloverleaf then sells the primed site to a data center developer—as it plans to do with Project Red Clay.
Project Red Clay is at the center of countervailing forces: local activists primed to confront environmental miscues, neighbors familiar with historical injustices, and a web of players who thought they’d find plenty of sellouts.
The Lowndes Signal first reported in April that Cloverleaf had talked with local leaders and utility providers about the viability of a hyperscale data center project in northern Lowndes County. Later that month, the Alabama legislature passed a bill capping the maximum tax abatement for data centers at 20 years, down from 30.
With that legislation going into effect on January 1, 2027, the clock is ticking for Cloverleaf to formally request a 30-year tax abatement before the end of the year. Details of the abatement proposal remain scant, but in Alabama more broadly, these abatements enable developers to avoid most sales and use taxes, as well as property taxes, that would otherwise apply to data center projects. The local body that will decide whether Project Red Clay receives any tax breaks is the Lowndes County Commission.
Cloverleaf must also secure regulatory approval for electricity with Alabama Power, which is owned by Southern Company and serves some 1.5 million customers across the southern two-thirds of the state. For water service, the developer must reach an agreement with the Pintlala Water System, a member-owned nonprofit water utility.
There’s widespread skepticism about Cloverleaf’s commitments to minimize air, noise, and light pollution, prevent contaminant leaks, and ensure that the local drinking water supply is not disrupted. Rev. Tom Gardner is a Vietnam veteran whose property is right next to the site’s footprint. “I don’t know which way to turn if it comes, but I know I couldn’t live here,” he says.
Project Red Clay is at the center of countervailing forces: local activists primed to confront environmental miscues, neighbors familiar with historical injustices, and a web of players who thought they’d find plenty of sellouts. What they found instead were community members more than willing to take them on.
IT IS EASY TO SEE WHY Cloverleaf has set its sights on Lowndes County. Not only does Lowndes lack zoning, but the Project Red Clay site is located in an opportunity zone. Opportunity zones provide tax breaks for investors so long as they reinvest untaxed capital gains into local businesses and infrastructure. But this framework, born out of the mid-to-late-20th-century neoliberal push for alternatives to Keynesianism, has been criticized for failing to alleviate poverty in economically disadvantaged communities. Investors secure rewards for putting capital in these communities. However, they aren’t required to invest new capital there or demonstrate that their investments materially improve residents’ quality of life.
Congress established the Qualified Opportunity Zone program under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The One Big Beautiful Bill made this program permanent, leaving no shortage of incentives for developers to target communities like Lowndes for data center projects.
The Lowndes County Economic Development Commission works to attract new investment, preserve and expand existing businesses, and support workforce development in the county. The economic development commission was created by the Lowndes County Commission, local municipalities, utilities, and other businesses. It does not have public meetings and is not a municipal entity.
Community members have accused the county’s economic development commission and Cloverleaf of overstating the project’s benefits. According to the developer, Project Red Clay will create 1,000 construction jobs and at least 50 full-time “high-paying” positions, such as data center technicians, network engineers, and IT support staff. Cloverleaf has also suggested that a local workforce is “preferred,” and would be “frequently sourced through local training programs funded by the end user” (meaning the eventual tenant of the data center); the developer has not disclosed the identity of that end user.
To sweeten the deal, Cloverleaf has offered up to $10 million for community development through the Central Alabama Community Foundation. That funding would include $1 million up front and $4 million after the Alabama Power contract is approved by the state. Once construction begins, another $5 million over five years would go toward workforce development, emergency services, child care, and other community services. The developer committed to providing community members with “timely and easy-to-understand project information.”
Cloverleaf maintains that it does not sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) with local officials, but residents say the developer has been withholding critical information about the project. Protect Lowndes County, a community group formed with the goal of pulling back the curtain on Project Red Clay, spent this past summer demanding answers.
“The lack of transparency around the proposed Project Red Clay has left us angry, scared, and desperate for answers,” said John Urquhart, a Lowndes resident and organizer with Protect Lowndes County.
Urquhart, whose property line sits roughly 1,260 yards from the proposed site, made that comment at the Lowndes County Commission’s July 27 meeting. He informed the commissioners that the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed an open records request for all materials related to the project’s development with the county on behalf of Protect Lowndes County and the Alabama Rivers Alliance, a statewide network of community- and watershed-based groups working to protect water resources.
The groups requested ten categories of documents, including NDAs; property transactions; site selection and economic development records; utility and infrastructure planning; environmental and noise studies; permits; and minutes from county commission meetings where the project was discussed. SELC and NRDC also asked the county for the economic development commission’s governance records, which the county commission itself had requested at a separate meeting earlier that month.
Ryan Anderson, staff attorney at SELC, told the Prospect that they’re trying to understand the relationship between the county commission and the economic development commission. “At this point, we really don’t know exactly what the Economic Development Commission does.”
LOWNDES’S STORY IS NOT unique. Data centers are cropping up across the country, but Southern political leaders have been particularly welcoming. Black communities across the region have suffered repeated abuses. “The pattern is to disenfranchise and target our communities for these poisonings, and so that we don’t have representation to fight,” Robert Bullard, founding director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University, told the Prospect. “If you look at the counties, they’re disproportionately poor, Black, rural, and lack representation.”
But despite political support from Washington, a groundswell of opposition to data centers has emerged, unnerving the tech giants and the politicians who back these projects. President Trump continues to tout his toothless Ratepayer Protection Pledge while making disparaging comments about communities that push back on proposed developments, going as far as to suggest that they risk becoming “backwards and poor.”
But in a July Truth Social post, Trump named Alabama as one of the states that will benefit from data centers, calling them “money machines” and “cash cows.” Most states, including Alabama, offer tax incentives for data center development. But data centers are among the least labor-intensive sectors of the economy. Construction jobs are temporary, and for the most part the number of permanent positions is small.
Data centers have become a flashpoint in the midterm elections, and some Democrats are echoing their constituents’ concerns. “Given … the unprecedented scale of the proposed development, this project demands far greater scrutiny than it has received,” Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) wrote in a July op-ed opposing the project. Sewell is a co-sponsor of the AI Data Center Moratorium Act introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) earlier this year.
The debate has also been playing out in Alabama’s governor race. Former Sen. Doug Jones, the Democratic candidate for governor, visited Lowndes in August to discuss his plan for a one-year statewide moratorium. “What I see happening in Lowndes County right now is really typical of what’s wrong with Alabama government,” said Jones. “Everything done behind closed doors, no transparency … nobody really knows what’s going on down here.”
Outgoing Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the GOP candidate, had been a strong data center proponent. He recently backtracked and claimed that he would ensure that communities have the power to say no to data centers and levy taxes on the facilities.
Years of progress spent addressing the public-health crisis are on the line: Residents could again see conditions that were close to being resolved, on top of the impact of a hyperscale data center.
Historically, Lowndes has had a complicated experience when it comes to residents having a say in how issues that may, or have, had an impact on their environment are approached. For decades, the county has experienced the effects of a raw sewage crisis unlike any other. Clay soil in the region is almost completely impermeable to water, which throws up massive roadblocks to building typical septic system drainfields. A significant number of homes aren’t connected to municipal sewage systems due to their location in the county’s rural areas.
Like thousands of communities across the country, many of Lowndes’s residents struggle with being able to afford running a proper sewage system. Around a quarter of Lowndes is considered impoverished, and 80 percent of homes lack reliable sewage systems.
In 2017, a study revealed that 34 percent of people tested in Lowndes had hookworm, a disease that was thought to be essentially eradicated in the U.S. The raw sewage crisis was left unaddressed for years by government officials who lacked the political will to remedy a crisis that disproportionately impacted impoverished Black people. It led a representative from the U.N. to report that he had never seen such a crisis before in the developed world.
Catherine Flowers, CEO of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice and a Lowndes native, was instrumental in bringing the sewage crisis to national attention, which led to a settlement with the Department of Justice in 2023. But when Trump began his second term, the DOJ canceled it, citing its commitment to eradicating “DEI,” which includes environmental justice.
Now, years of progress spent addressing this public-health crisis are on the line. Residents could be slated to again see conditions that were close to being resolved, on top of the impact of a hyperscale data center.
“I would like to extend an invitation to President Trump to come to Lowndes County and spend the night in the homes of the people that are going to be living near this data center to see what it’s like to live in Lowndes County,” said Flowers. “I think he should go and spend a night along the Selma to Montgomery Trail in one of these communities that would be impacted by this hyperscale data center.”
ON AUGUST 24, MEMBERS of Protect Lowndes County—many wearing black T-shirts branded with “NO DATA CENTER” in white letters—packed a county commission meeting to find out if they would get any answers. Charlie King Jr., the longtime chair of the commission, cut off several speakers critical of the project, raising his voice at one point.
King is also the vice chair of the county’s economic development commission. He has not responded to the Prospect’s requests for comment.
Anderson, the SELC attorney, was one of the people King cut off at the two-minute mark. She informed the commissioners that SELC has not “received any substantive documents” in response to their records request. Meanwhile, the county commission’s own request for the economic development commission’s governance records also went unanswered.
“Transparency isn’t a courtesy the commission extends to the public,” Anderson said. “It’s the law, and it’s the foundation of the public’s trust in how this decision gets made.” She was eventually invited to finish delivering her remarks.
Protect Lowndes County has also raised questions about the economic development commission’s filings with the IRS, which indicate that the business league does not have a written conflict-of-interest policy. Yet those same filings explicitly state that the economic development commission “makes its governing documents, conflict-of-interest policy and financial statements available to the public upon request.”
The filings bear the signature of Thomas Ellis, chair and principal officer of the economic development commission. He is also a member of Pintlala’s board of directors, and Ellis will likely be asked to vote on Cloverleaf’s water allowance for Project Red Clay. Cloverleaf has requested up to 100,000 gallons of water per day for its planned three-million-square-foot hyperscale data center facility in Lowndes County. The Pintlala Water System can only supply about half of it. It remains an open question as to where Cloverleaf will source the rest of the water needed for the project.
Protect Lowndes County has called on Ellis to recuse himself from voting on any water service agreement involving the project. Asked whether he would, Ellis did not provide a yes-or-no answer.
“There have been matters that have come before the board which I have abstained from in the past and may be matters in the future [in] which I elect to abstain from voting,” he told the Prospect in an email. “I believe each matter that comes before the Board should be considered based on the circumstances at that time and with the best interests of Pintlala Water Authority and its members as the priority.”
Ellis said that, for the past 15 years, he has “worked tirelessly as an unpaid volunteer to assist my home county in developing economic opportunities, prosperity, and educational opportunities for all its citizens.” Ellis was pointing to his role as chair of the economic development commission, also telling the Prospect that he has “paid money for the privilege of supporting general economic development in the county.” Voting members of the economic development corporation, which functions more like a dues-collecting local chamber of commerce than a community-oriented nonprofit organization, must contribute at least $2,500 annually, and the minimum annual contribution for a seat on the executive committee is $5,000.
Although he did not name them, Ellis claimed that “many influential people desire for the county to remain the same.” He appeared to point the finger at Protect Lowndes County. “I will not let this select group dictate the mantra that it should be kept in its current state,” Ellis said.
But Protect Lowndes County explicitly states the opposite on its website: “This county needs investment, jobs, and a tax base. What we oppose is a decision made faster than disclosure.”
Alabama summers are brutal, and drought conditions materialize quickly if high temperatures, intense sunlight, and low humidity are consistent enough. Darren Russell, a former Pintlala Water System employee who has lived in Lowndes County for more than a decade, is certain Project Red Clay will strain the local water supply, “especially if we go into a drought,” he said. “Even if they drilled a well onsite, they’re still going to be pulling from the same water aquifer.”
IN LOWNDES COUNTY, Black and white residents find themselves in the blast zone of a hyperscale data center they didn’t ask for. Protect Lowndes County has helped county residents forge connections across racial lines to fight the data center. Black and white community members have shown up at county commission meetings in recent months to voice their opposition to the project. They have pressured the county commission to comply with the open records request, shared concerns about the likely impacts of the data center, and demanded an end to the lack of transparency surrounding the economic development commission and Project Red Clay.
Lowndes’s opposition to the project could force Cloverleaf to back out. Its development principal, Michael Evans, told Michigan officials in an email that the developer “will not work in communities where this type of development is unwelcome,” going as far as to say “that is a decision we will make ten times out of ten.”
Cloverleaf did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment on why it is still pursuing the facility in the face of community resistance.
The SELC and NRDC’s open records request with the county is still pending, and the economic development commission has yet to provide its governance records to the county commission. But Protect Lowndes County’s demands remain the same. If Cloverleaf and the economic development commission get their way, Lowndes is expected to support a data center that could have disastrous environmental consequences, endorsed by a White House that dismissed efforts to remedy the raw sewage crisis.
Divided loyalties, a developer making fantastical promises, and the deep-rooted struggles of Black communities in the South create an ugly tangle for Project Red Clay’s proponents.
“The South will have a special place in hell because of what it has done over the past centuries and what it’s doing right now,” Bullard said.
