About Project
Red Clay.

Project Red Clay is a proposed hyperscale data center campus on farmland in Lowndes County, Alabama, near the junction of U.S. Highway 80 and Alabama Highway 21 at Burkville, roughly six miles southwest of Montgomery.

The construction stormwater permit the state issued on July 8, 2026 states a total property area of 1,043.91 acres, and an August 9, 2026 al.com report describes the project as having grown to 1,050 acres. The public site plan, first reported in April 2026, described approximately 800 acres. The site keeps all of these figures separate rather than reconciling them, because no document in the record reconciles them.

The plan describes roughly 3.01 million square feet of buildings: four data buildings of 720,000 square feet each, a 100,000 square foot warehouse, and a 30,000 square foot office.¹​²​³​⁴​

The developer is Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a Houston-based company incorporated in 2024. It raised $300 million in July 2024 led by NGP’s Sustainable Infrastructure platform and Sandbrook Capital, which is anchored by the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Cloverleaf describes itself as a developer of clean-powered, ready-to-build sites. Its model is to acquire land and secure electrical power, then sell the assembled package to a hyperscale operator. That is why the company at the county meeting is often not the company that ends up running the facility.

The entity actually filing paper on this project is Sandstone Cliffs DevCo LLC, a Delaware LLC formed April 23, 2025 and registered to do business in Alabama since May 8, 2025. Its address on file with the state is the same Houston office suite Cloverleaf lists as its own headquarters.⁵​⁶​⁷​

That has not been disclosed. The end user of the data center has not been named.

This is the single most important open question, because nearly everything a community would want to know — the real power draw, the real water draw, the noise profile, the number of jobs, the tax posture — depends on who the operator is and what they sign.⁸​

The project is reported to have requested roughly 1,500 megawatts. For scale, Alabama’s new large-load statute defines a reviewable data-center customer as one with expected peak demand of at least 150 megawatts. The reported request is about ten times that threshold.

The study status, the ramp schedule, and the contract terms are not public. Which utility serves the specific parcel has also not been settled in the record.⁹​¹⁰​¹¹​

Cloverleaf describes closed-loop cooling drawing up to 100,000 gallons per day from the Pintlala Water System, framed as a one-time fill.

What is not disclosed is the part that matters most: the initial fill volume and schedule, makeup water under peak Alabama heat and humidity, blowdown, fire-flow demand, construction-period demand, and the volume, composition, and disposal of wastewater.

There is a reason to ask for the executed contract rather than the public summary. For a different data center at Hope Hull, the publicly stated figure was about 30,000 gallons per day, while the contract obtained through an open-records request allocated about 150,000 gallons per day plus about 90,000 gallons per day of wastewater. That was a different company and a different project. It is not a prediction about this one. It is the reason we ask to see the paper.¹²​¹³​¹⁴​

The answer has changed depending on who is speaking. The developer’s website says at least 50. The Commission chairman, via WSFA, described 50 to 100. A coalition summary recorded 50 to 200. A WSFA interview with the company described 200 to 300.

Separately, Dr. Regina Moorer estimated in a letter to The Lowndes Signal that roughly nine permanent positions would go to Lowndes County residents at current capture rates.

The construction figure is the one consistent number: more than 1,000 construction jobs over three or more years.

We are not accusing anyone of lying. We are pointing out that a range from 50 to 300 is not a plan, and that reconciling it is the company’s job before a vote, not after.¹⁵​¹⁶​¹⁷​¹⁸​¹⁹​²⁰​

The abatement at issue is 30 years. At the May 26, 2026 Commission meeting the Chairman stated three times that he would not vote for any 30-year data-center abatement.

HB399 caps Alabama data-center property-tax abatements at 20 years, down from 30, for any abatement granted on or after January 1, 2027. The act itself took effect earlier, on June 1, 2026. A longer term, up to 30 years, is available only through a binding agreement approved by the Alabama Departments of Revenue and Commerce and the affected local governing body, committing to qualified local investments that can include local education support. It passed the Legislature unanimously on April 9, 2026; Bloomberg Tax and LegiScan report the Governor signed it April 16, 2026.

The dollar value of the abatement has never been disclosed.

And the abatement is only one lever. As of late July 2026, no abatement request had been filed, no operator had been named, and the project had not been withdrawn. A commitment about the abatement is not a commitment about the project. The water contract, the electric-service agreement now under state review, and the permits are decided elsewhere, and the project has kept moving without any abatement request on file.²¹​²²​²³​²⁴​²⁵​

The developer describes $10 million for the county over the project lifecycle, routed through the Central Alabama Community Foundation: $1 million upfront and $9 million milestone-gated. Of the balance, $4 million depends on an electric-service contract and Public Service Commission approval, and $5 million is payable over five years after construction begins.

Nine of the ten million dollars is contingent. The gift-agreement terms, including the administrative-fee structure and the disbursement schedule, are not public. Whether an executed agreement exists, who controls the money, what happens if the project is sold, and whether the county could enforce the promise are all open questions.²⁶​²⁷​

Nobody in Lowndes County can answer that from the public record, because the contract is not public. The assurances are public: the Commission chairman said in April that the power bill will not go up and that the project will pay its own charges. The electric-service agreement and cost-allocation study that would demonstrate that assurance have not been released. That is precisely what the Alabama Public Service Commission opened Docket 33709 to examine, on July 8, 2026: a generic proceeding reviewing Alabama Power’s large-load data-center contracts.

Elsewhere, large loads have moved onto residential bills. Virginia regulators approved a new large-load rate class after reporting attributed an additional $11.24 per month in 2026 to data-center load for a typical Dominion residential customer. Ohio residents pay roughly $16 more per month tied to related capacity costs.

The most useful fact from Ohio is what happened next: after the state adopted protective ratemaking rules, data-center demand requests fell from about 30 gigawatts to about 13. How the rules are written changes how much power is actually asked for.²⁸​²⁹​³⁰​

The honest answer is that the evidence is mixed, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

A George Mason University study of 2023 home sales found that homes closer to data centers in Northern Virginia tended to sell for higher prices. The authors caution that this may reflect that region’s pent-up housing demand and may not generalize to rural markets like ours.

We publish that study because it cuts against what many of our neighbors expect. A record you can trust is one that includes the findings you did not want.³¹​

The company estimates the facility would typically operate under 60 decibels at the property line, comparing the sound to air conditioning. No noise study for this site has been published. A Lowndesboro resident with more than 30 years of experience building, managing, and operating data centers warned commissioners that nearby residents could experience continuous fan noise known as acoustic roar.

Residents living near hyperscale data centers in Northern Virginia and Michigan have described headaches, vertigo, sleep disturbance, hypertension, and ear pain. Sustained sound above 65 decibels is associated with elevated stress and blood pressure.

Diesel backup generators emit substantially more nitrogen oxides than equivalent natural-gas generation, and during an outage a single facility can release a large share of its annual permitted emissions in days. The number of generators proposed here, their fuel, and their permitted run hours have not been disclosed.

These are documented experiences in other places and modeled national effects. They are not predictions about this site. They are the reason to require a noise study and an air permit review before a vote, not after.³²​³³​³⁴​³⁵​³⁶​

Yes, and it has said so in writing. In an email released under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, a Cloverleaf development principal wrote of a different site: "Cloverleaf will not work in communities where this type of development is unwelcome or the development does not match the existing use for the land. That is a decision we will make ten times out of ten."

The company withdrew from Greenleaf, Wisconsin in January 2026, and dropped its initial Michigan plans in October 2025 after the Dundee council voted to block the water supply, acknowledging it should have done more public communication and listening.

In Port Washington, Wisconsin, the other outcome is on the record too: Cloverleaf assembled and annexed 1,900 acres, then handed the package to Vantage Data Centers for an $8 billion campus.³⁷​³⁸​³⁹​⁴⁰​

On July 27, 2026, Protect Lowndes County announced that it is working alongside the Alabama Rivers Alliance, a statewide network that has spent nearly thirty years building and supporting more than a hundred community and watershed groups working for clean water across Alabama.

The Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a public-records request with the Lowndes County Commission that same day, on behalf of both the Alabama Rivers Alliance and Protect Lowndes County. The letter and the county’s response, when it arrives, are on our public record and press pages.

Protect Lowndes County remains a separate organization from Four Five Strong LLC and from any other group opposing this project. Outside of the July 27 filing, no organization is authorized to speak on our behalf.⁴¹​

No. Lowndes County needs investment, jobs, and a tax base, and saying so is not a concession.

What we are against is being asked to approve a thirty-year commitment without knowing the operator, the power contract, the water contract, the wastewater plan, the generator count, or the enforceable value of what the county receives.

A good project survives disclosure. Our position is that the county should see the paper first.

Three things, in order. Add your name, so the public count of neighbors asking for disclosure is real and countable. Be in the room at the next Commission meeting, because that is where abatements are granted or denied. And follow Docket 33709 at the Public Service Commission: both public comment windows have now closed, on August 6 and August 21, 2026, the Commission has not ruled, and the contract for this project, if it is ever filed, will appear in its own separately numbered docket rather than in that one.²⁸​