What this could cost
the people who live here.

Cloverleaf describes closed-loop cooling drawing up to 100,000 gallons per day from the Pintlala Water System, framed as a one-time fill. That is the company’s own characterization of its own system.

The reason to ask for the executed contract instead of the summary is on the record one county over. For a data center at Hope Hull, the publicly stated figure was about 30,000 gallons per day. The contract obtained through an open-records request allocated about 150,000 gallons per day, plus roughly 90,000 gallons per day of wastewater that was never publicly disclosed at all. Different company, different project, and not a prediction about this one. It is the reason the paper matters more than the press release.¹​²​³​

Residents have been assured from every direction that their bills are safe. The chair of the county economic development board cited assurances from Alabama Power and PowerSouth that current ratepayers will not be impacted. Commission Chairman Charlie King Jr. said it plainly in April: "The power bill will not go up. They will pay their own charges."

The electric-service agreement and the cost-allocation study that would demonstrate that assurance have not been made public. The Alabama Public Service Commission opened Docket 33709 on July 8, 2026 to examine exactly this question for large-load data-center contracts, and it is open for public comment.

Where the paper has been written, the numbers are not reassuring. Virginia regulators approved a separate rate class for large data-center loads 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. And when Ohio adopted protective ratemaking rules, data-center demand requests in the state fell from about 30 gigawatts to about 13, which is what happens to demand that was never willing to pay its own way.⁴​⁵​⁶​⁷​⁸​

Cloverleaf’s Chief Development Officer told WSFA the facility would typically operate under 60 decibels at the property line, comparing the sound to air conditioning. That is the company’s estimate, offered without a published noise study for this site.

A Lowndesboro resident whose career includes more than 30 years building, managing, and operating data centers warned commissioners that nearby residents could experience continuous fan noise known as acoustic roar.

Near hyperscale facilities elsewhere, first-person reporting from residents in Northern Virginia and Michigan documented headaches, vertigo, sleep disturbance, hypertension, and ear pain. Sustained sound above 65 decibels is associated with elevated stress and blood pressure. Those are documented experiences in other places, not measurements from this site, and that is precisely the problem: for this site there are no measurements at all.⁹​¹⁰​¹¹​

Data centers keep banks of backup generators, and diesel generators emit substantially more nitrogen oxides than equivalent natural-gas generation. During an outage, a single facility can release a large share of its annual permitted emissions in a matter of days.

For this project, the generator count, the fuel, the stack locations, and the permitted run hours have not been disclosed. Those numbers exist in an air-permit application whenever one is filed, and they can be published before any vote rather than after.¹²​

Four numbers describe this property and none of them match. The public site plan describes roughly 800 acres of farmland along U.S. Highway 80. A coalition assessment reports up to approximately 1,700 acres under option. An August 9, 2026 al.com report describes 1,050 acres. And a state permit now carries a government-filed figure: the construction stormwater permit the Alabama Department of Environmental Management issued on July 8, 2026 states a property area of 1,043.91 acres, with 270.42 acres authorized for disturbance. We carry all four separately rather than reconciling them, because the paperwork that would reconcile them has not been produced. Converting working farmland at any of those scales changes drainage, habitat, and night lighting for everyone around it.

Part of the gap this page used to describe has since been filled, and not by a public process. ADEM issued permit ALR10C89L to Sandstone Cliffs DevCo LLC on July 8, 2026, authorizing clearing, grubbing, erosion controls, mass grading, and sediment basins, discharging to Dry Creek and unnamed tributaries through thirteen outfalls, with construction anticipated to begin August 1, 2026. A stormwater plan for this site is now in the public record. The thirty-day window to contest that permit closed on August 7, 2026.

What is still missing is most of it. The permit covers construction stormwater and early civil work. It is not approval for campus construction, operation, backup-generator air emissions, water supply, wastewater, wetland fill, road access, tax incentives, or electric service. The permit plans state that no jurisdictional wetlands are present, while marking at least six depressed areas that are not to be impacted until the Army Corps of Engineers issues a jurisdictional determination. No habitat survey and no lighting plan have been published. The honest status of wildlife and habitat at this site is still undocumented, and the clearing is permitted to begin before the documents exist.¹³​¹⁴​¹⁵​¹⁶​¹⁷​¹⁸​¹⁹​

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 harms page you can trust is one that includes the finding you did not want.²⁰​