On July 31, 2026, U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell published a guest opinion column headlined "Why I oppose the proposed data center in Lowndes County." She writes that she stands with the residents of this county in opposing the project, that too many questions remain unanswered, and that the people who will live with the consequences deserve better answers than the ones they have been given. She says she heard those concerns directly at the town hall she held on the evening of July 30. Her column is the first link in the sources at the bottom of this page. Read it in her words before you read ours.
She is careful about what she is not saying, and so are we. She writes that she believes in the promise of innovation, that she wants America to lead the world in artificial intelligence, and that she wants rural communities in the Black Belt to benefit from it. That has been this organization’s position since the day it launched. Nobody here has argued that data centers should not exist. The argument is about this project, on this parcel, on terms nobody outside the room has been allowed to read.
The question she puts at the center of the column is the one residents have been asking at Commission meetings since April: who benefits, and who bears the costs. She writes that it deserves an honest answer. So far it has received an estimate.
Water is where she is most specific. She asks that before this project moves forward, residents receive independent analysis of its water demands, its impact on groundwater, and its effect on existing infrastructure. No such analysis has been published. What is public is a company figure of up to 100,000 gallons a day, described as a one-time fill for a closed-loop system. Peak makeup water in an Alabama August, blowdown, fire flow, construction demand, and the volume and destination of the wastewater are all undisclosed. An independent analysis cannot be written from a press statement. It has to be written from the contract.
She points 12 miles up the road to make the point. The existing data center at Hope Hull is smaller than the one proposed here, and she writes that it has become the single largest user of water in the Montgomery water system, attributing that to a local official. That is her figure and we carry it as hers. What this site has documented separately about Hope Hull is the distance between the public number and the paper: the publicly stated figure there was about 30,000 gallons a day, while the water-service contract obtained through an open-records request allocated about 150,000 gallons a day, plus roughly 90,000 gallons a day of wastewater that was never disclosed publicly at all. Different company, different project, and not a prediction about this one. It is the reason we keep asking for the executed contract instead of the summary.
She also points to federal legislation. In July she cosponsored the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House and Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Senate, which would pause construction and major expansion of AI data centers until Congress sets a federal framework covering environment, energy, water, labor, privacy, and community impact. Her column describes it as legislation she proposed. Her own office announced it as a cosponsorship and the House version was introduced by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, so cosponsored is the word this site uses. It is also a bill in a Congress controlled by the other party, and nobody in this county should plan around it passing.
It is worth being plain about what this changes. A member of Congress does not vote on this project. The decision sits with the Lowndes County Commission and with state regulators, and nothing in a column moves a date on the calendar. What it does is put a federal officeholder’s name on the same request residents have been making in public since April: publish the documents before the vote, not after.
Three of those dates are close. In Alabama Public Service Commission Docket 33709, the proceeding reviewing Alabama Power’s large-load data-center contracts, the initial comment window has closed and reply comments are due on or before August 21. The county’s first statutory deadline on the open-records request filed July 27 by the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Natural Resources Defense Council fell on or before August 10, though the county may lawfully take longer to actually produce the records. The next evening Commission meeting is August 24 at 6 p.m. at the Charles Smith Annex in Hayneville, and it is the one most working people can actually get to.
We did not ask for this column and we did not write it. We are pointing at it because it is now part of the public record of this project, and because the request inside it is one the developer and the county could satisfy in an afternoon. Publish the water model, the electric-service agreement, the site plan, and the dollar value of the abatement. Then the independent analysis she is asking for can actually be written, and every one of us can argue about something real.123456789