A local economic development consultant reiterated the reason Warrenton officials don’t have all the answers about a proposed data center is because specific plans have not yet been submitted nor has a possible owner been identified.
He also noted multiple other companies have looked into developing the property in question, located north of the Warrenton West interchange, but those plans never gained traction.
Steve Etcher, Greater Warren County Economic Development Council (GWCEDC) consultant, comments were made in an interview with The Record following a contentious Warrenton Board of Aldermen meeting Sept. 2 where opponents to the proposed data center spoke out. Some of the comments questioned the involvement of the GWCEDC and whether the data center had been in the works for years.
Part of the issue is confusion about Evolve, the developer on the project, and its current role in the process.
Etcher explained that in development of a data center there are typically three entities involved: a horizontal developer, vertical developer and the owner/operator of the facility.
Evolve Energy Partners is the horizontal developer, which Etcher described as the entity that is developing the real estate solution for the property. He said Evolve’s role in the project was to ascertain power options and location options. He said once Evolve was able to get a power commitment from Ameren they needed to acquire easements from nearby property owners in order to create the lines to power the project. That was the reason for Evolve’s meeting with local property owners in April, he stated.
The next step in the process is for Evolve to find a vertical developer, or the company that would actually develop the buildings and build the data center structure, he said.
The vertical developer would then engage the owner/operator of the data center, which he said would be a company like Meta, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle or a similar type of company.
He said the vertical developer could develop the property in one of two ways, either build the facility themselves and lease it to the owner/operator or build the facility per the specific specifications of the operator.
Etcher said he believes the vertical developer would be identified by the end of September.
He said one of the reasons that no specific answers exist yet for the project is that those answers will depend on who the owner/operator is.
“Operators have their own unique design criteria,” Etcher said. “That will then influence what the vertical developer does and ultimately what plans are submitted to the city.”
For instance, with respect to a common question regarding water usage, Etcher said that each operator has their own approach to which cooling method to use. He said there are primarily three ways to cool a data center. Some use an air cooling method, basically large-scale air conditioning, while others use a closed-loop system consisting of miles of cooling pipes where water is recirculated through the system. Others use an evaporative cooling system where water flows across cooling plates.
He said if the operator for the project uses a water system they will have to forecast their water usage for the facility. He added that all water used for cooling, or discharged from the system, would be regulated by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.
Project size
One of the other misconceptions Etcher said he wanted to address is what he called the “order of magnitude” of the project. He said when local residents think of a data center they are thinking of a center that is 100,000 square feet that employs a couple dozen people, because those are the types of data centers people have seen in the surrounding area. He said the proposed project for Warren County is what he called a “hyper-scale” center that would generate millions of square feet, not thousands.
“Initial projections is that this site will have more than 250 jobs locally, permanent jobs,” he said, which would include computer technical experts all the way down to the security teams for the facility.
Etcher also noted that during the construction phase of the project, some 1,000 jobs would be created just to build the facility based upon pro forma estimates from Evolve. He added that after the facility is built, in addition to the jobs created by the facility, there would be indirect jobs flowing from the facility as well as tertiary jobs, which are those jobs that could be realized from the additional investment in the community due to people moving to the community.
Etcher also noted the significant financial boon to the community. He said the project has the potential to generate billions in new investment in the community. That investment would equate to significantly increased taxable value to the tune of tens of millions of dollars each year. These additional funds would give not only the city, but the Warren County R-III school district the opportunity to invest funds into education and the community as a whole, he said.
One of the other long-term benefits to the project Etcher said is that he can see a future where the I-70 corridor evolves as a technology corridor.
“It would attract more tech jobs, new fantastic job opportunities,” he said. “It would create an environment where we can increase the prosperity level for the community.”
Questions about development of the project
Etcher also addressed some comments in the community regarding how the project developed, specifically that there have been long-term plans to bring a data center to the community. He also emphasized he has not signed any non-disclosure agreements related to the project.
He started by stating plainly that there have been no long-term plans to build a data center. He said that the county’s overall economic development strategy was born from strife, specifically the great recession of 2008, which caused significant damage to the local economy.
“We saw from 2008 to 2010 a 30 percent increase in poverty in our county,” he said.
At that time local business leaders came together to seek to do something proactively to reverse the negative trajectory. They decided the best way to alleviate poverty was to create opportunities for prosperity and to do that they decided to focus on new large-scale investments that would create high-paying jobs for the community. It was this thought process that led to the development of the public-private partnership known as the Greater Warren County Economic Development Council (GWCEDC) in 2011, Etcher said.
The goal of the newly founded entity was to bring businesses to Warren County that paid at least 120 percent of the county’s average wage. The entity’s focus was on five key industries: manufacturing, advanced manufacturing, agriculture and ag-related businesses, technology and tech industries and distribution logistics, Etcher said.
In order to attract the right kinds of businesses, Etcher said the entity had to create tools that could be utilized to attract projects.
Those tools included the creation of the Enhanced Enterprize Zone in 2013, being designated as a U.S. Opportunity Zone in 2017, and the Time Zone designation in 2023. They also began working with property owners to create certified sites to add an additional aspect to the community’s offerings, Etcher said.
Those efforts paid off with two large projects, the CertainTeed facility in Jonesburg, which generated a $200 million investment and 150 employees and American Foods Group meat packing plant in Wright City, with over a billion dollars in investments with a goal of 1,300 employees.
“We also had a number of wins in between there,” Etcher said of the GWEDC’s efforts.
He said the data center project really became a discussion in the last quarter of 2024. He added that while some say there is a connection between the solar farms being developed in Warren County and the data center, there is no direct connection, but there is an indirect connection as the solar farms and the Root Beer substation’s existence made the area more attractive to data centers.
The proposed site for the data center was submitted for other opportunities including advanced manufacturing, electric vehicle production and food production prior to the data center project ever being considered, according to Etcher. He did note however that the currently proposed data center is of higher investment value than any other projects the GWCEDC looked at putting at the site. It is also the most non-disruptive use for the site, according to Etcher.
