Dawn Hahnfeld moved into her eastern Independence home off Bly Road in 2017, where she could be in the country without leaving the comforts of the city a few minutes away.
There’s a bald eagle that nests in the area and plenty of deer. Soon, there could be a massive artificial intelligence data center. Hahnfeld said she only found out about the development when her husband spoke to heavy equipment operators who came in to grade the land.
“Going through my mind right now is, am I ever going to be able to sell my home?” Hahnfeld said. “Who's going to want to live next to that? But my biggest issue is the environmental and health issues and concerns that we have.”
Independence officials have been preparing to welcome a nearly $7 billion data center that will be one of the biggest in the country. The Amsterdam-based Nebius data center would have four buildings on nearly 400 acres of land. That’s almost twice the size of the Truman Sports Complex.
It will sit just a couple of miles from the Lake City Ammunition Plant, the Metropolitan Community College Blue River campus, and two elementary schools. The Little Blue River and Little Blue Trace Trail also run nearby.
Nebius bought the land near Missouri Highway 78 and Little Blue Parkway in December. Construction has been underway for the past few months, with heavy equipment operators grading the acreage to prepare for the data center.
The data center would have a planned capacity to use about 800 megawatts of energy at a time. That’s enough to power about 400,000 Independence homes for a year, according to the city. A Nebius spokesperson said the total capacity of the center, including reserves, could be up to 1.2 gigawatts.
The city council already approved a $2 billion plan to generate more electricity for the data center by reopening and expanding a power plant it closed in 2020. And in January, Independence approved a plan for Nebius to buy electricity and operate the first phase of the center, which could be ready in the fall.
To some, it seems like the data center is already a done deal. But a growing coalition of concerned residents is planning to do everything it can to stop it.
Growing resistance
More than 200 people packed a Feb. 10 meeting in St. Mark’s United Methodist Church in eastern Independence to organize to stop the data center and get some answers from city leaders.
“We're here to make sure public health, transparency and community voices stay at the center of this conversation, and that major economic decisions aren't just rushed through without real public input,” Misty Vaughn, one of the organizers against the data center, said at the start of the meeting. “At the end of the day, this is our city. It's our resources and it's our decision.”
Vaughn is one of the organizers behind a Facebook group called “Stop the AI Data Center in Independence,” which has nearly 2,000 members. She said many of the residents she’s spoken to feel the project is being treated as a “quick fix” for the city to get more money without investigating its long-term impact.
Data centers are booming all over the country — and have become controversial. Developers and local governments generally encourage them for the promise of new construction and economic growth. But residents are pushing back more and more, and have managed to stop data center construction in some places like in Peculiar and St. Charles, Missouri.
Residents are concerned about the water and power usage of the plant, negative health impacts from having the data center so close to schools and residences, and the fate of wildlife in the area.
John Sutter, a spokesperson for Nebius, said the company is exploring the Independence site as part of its global expansion.
“Responsible development for us means purposeful design to minimize impact while maximizing resource efficiency, and engaging with local communities in a transparent manner,” Sutter said.
Opponents have organized quickly. They’ve held meetings, knocked on doors to give people more information, encouraged people to call and email their council members and stood outside polling locations during this month’s primary elections.
The Independence City Council is set to consider the final piece of the data center plan in the coming weeks. At its Monday meeting, the council will introduce a Chapter 100 incentive plan for Nebius. The council is likely to vote on the plan at its March 2 meeting.
Major incentives for a massive data center
The full details of the incentives are not yet available, but the deal is likely to exempt much of the company’s real and personal property taxes for decades. Nebius could also take advantage of Missouri’s exemption from sales taxes on construction materials.
Technically, Nebius already owns the land and has the permissions it needs to build and operate the data center; zoning to turn the area industrial was approved in 2022. But opponents believe that if they can persuade city leaders to deny the incentives, the company could go elsewhere.
Even without public information about the tax breaks the city plans to offer Nebius, Independence officials have estimated that the project could bring between $35 million and $55 million in annual tax payments in lieu of taxes, as well as about the same annual revenue for Independence Power and Light.
At a January open house, Interim City Manager Lisa Reynolds said the city could use the money to pay down debt and restore programs and services it’s previously cut.
At a meeting earlier this week, Mayor Rory Rowland said he was skeptical of the Nebius plan at first, but is confident that it won’t have a major negative environmental or financial impact on the city after hearing more from the company. Rowland said the money Independence gets from the data center could help the city pay for better parks, streets and public safety.
“I’m a citizen here, and I've also seen projects that have not been completed and have not worked,” Rowland said. “I understand the power of ‘if,’ particularly in Independence, but I'm in favor of this project because of what it'll do for this city in the long term.”
Many experts don’t agree. Studies have shown that long-term tax subsidies do not provide local growth in the economy or in tech employment.
Anthony Elmo is with Good Jobs First, a nonprofit that promotes corporate and government accountability in developments like this. He said tax breaks for data centers haven’t shown an economic benefit for the communities they go into.
“These are huge projects,” Elmo said. “One of our biggest problems with data centers is they are essentially just a warehouse with electrified computer servers inside of them, so they do not generate a ton of long-term job growth or job investment. They are trying to take advantage of cheap land and relatively cheap energy and tax exemptions in order to build this infrastructure that may or may not bear out.”
In addition to the tax breaks, Elmo said reopening and expanding the Blue Valley power plant, financed in part through industrial revenue bonds, puts the city at risk if the data center goes under and “shifts the financial exposure” to Independence Power and Light and its ratepayers.
Independence Power and Light said it has safeguards in its service agreement with Nebius to ensure that residential customers don’t see their bills go up. The agreement is structured so ongoing data center costs are passed through to Nebius, rather than letting the company buy power at fixed rates.
Rebecca Gannon, a spokesperson for Independence, said one of the benefits the city sees for the power plant is that the cost burden for Independence Power and Light would shift from mostly residential customers to more industrial clients paying most of the costs.
“The new industrial customer will also shoulder more of the overall energy delivery costs, like improving infrastructure,” Gannon said.
What comes next
Opponents of the data center plan to speak out at upcoming city council meetings, and hope the public pressure will be enough to make council members reconsider voting “yes.”
John Perkins, 1st District city council member, said he’s taking the feedback from residents and details about the data center holistically before he makes a decision.
“I want to make sure that this is right for the city of Independence, for our constituents, and that it's right for the area in general,” Perkins said. “Looking at the facts, the legal agreements, the water usage, the data, the power usage — all of that's very important (information) that I need to look at and to reassure myself.”
If the council approves the incentives and Nebius moves forward with the project, opponents said they have another plan. They would circulate a petition to put the data center incentives up for a vote. They believe if the public gets a say in whether to put one of the country’s biggest data centers in their backyard, it’ll be an easy “no” vote.
“Honestly, that's a big piece of what we're fighting for, along with all the other concerns that we have,” Vaughn said. “We just want to have the council members actually listen to us.”
Hahnfeld, whose house sits just a couple hundred feet from the data center site, said she hopes she never sees it built.
Much of the land is already cleared, and she will miss some of the natural beauty of the area. But she’s got other ideas for what Independence could do with the property that she thinks will keep the wildlife and her property values, health and peace of mind intact.
“They could put a little neighborhood down there,” Hahnfeld said. “They could put apartments down there. I don't know, something useful that would benefit the city, other than a data center.”
