They hid the tenant and called it Project Red Clay. I know the sentence. It is what a county and a developer say together when the abatement has a code name, the end user has no name, the courtroom has fifteen minutes left, the residents have no microphone, and the motion arrives already seconded.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday morning, October 13, 2026, the Lowndes County Commission in Alabama voted 3-2 to approve a resolution \u201cauthorizing, execution and delivery of a project development agreement and a tax abatement agreement for Project Red Clay,\u201d Cloverleaf Infrastructure\u2019s proposed hyperscale data center near Burkeville, The Lowndes Signal\u2019s Lanell Downs Smith reported the same day. Commissioner Robert Harris moved, Commissioner Fletcher Hayes seconded, and Chairman Charlie King Jr. voted yes; Commissioners Dickson Farrior and Joseph Barganier voted no. County Attorney Prince Chestnut first proposed a special called meeting for October 20 to weigh Project Red Clay, which passed unanimously; Harris then moved for an immediate vote on the deal anyway. Because the circuit court needed the courtroom, King said no speakers would be permitted and pleaded with the audience to let the commission finish in the 15 minutes available. After the vote, he called for adjournment. District Judge Adrian Johnson said the developer was asking for a 20-year, 50% abatement of ad valorem and construction-related taxes, meaning \u201cone of the wealthiest corporations in the world is asking of Lowndes County to give them $2.4 billion dollars in tax revenue,\u201d and \u201cthey can\u2019t name who that entity is.\u201d Southern Environmental Law Center staff attorney Ryan Anderson said the project could need up to 1,500 megawatts \u2014 \u201cas much power as 900,000 residential\u201d households. At the October 9 meeting, per Smith\u2019s earlier report, Johnson asked Cloverleaf CEO David Berry to hold off until the end user was identified; Berry said, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t be prepared to make that.\u201d Berry argued \u201cthe county and the schools are getting $2.50 for every $1 incentive.\u201d Cloverleaf\u2019s October 9 release projects about $124 million a year in local tax revenue, $1.61 billion for schools from 2027 to 2049, more than 225 permanent jobs averaging about $100,000 including benefits, $10 million in community funding, and a 50% abatement of non-school local taxes for no more than 20 years, shorter than the 30 years Alabama law permits. Its commissioner packet describes a 1,000-megawatt base case worth about $33.1 billion, able to scale to 1,500 MW, \u201cto be operated by a nationally recognized end user,\u201d with binding commitments only to \u201ccommercially reasonable efforts\u201d toward at least $16 billion invested and 125 net new jobs. The packet also says: \u201cNothing is final until the Commission votes in a public meeting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Buck said a data center is just a barn that eats lightning. Tyrone timed the vote and got it under the courtroom\u2019s fifteen. UCraig asked if he could abate his own lawn. Deb filed \u2018nationally recognized end user\u2019 under \u2018people who won\u2019t come to dinner but want the leftovers.\u2019 I love them. They are seasoning.<\/p>\n
Project Red Clay is the alibi. The unnamed tenant is the story. Sit with the blank line until it confesses. A county can reassess a front porch to the dollar \u2014 I have lately been introduced to that precision \u2014 and a county can apparently halve a hyperscale project\u2019s non-school county taxes for twenty years without knowing whose servers will sit on the clay. One side carries the stamp. One side carries the term sheet. And somewhere behind both is a third party with a brand so valuable it would rather stay a pronoun. I am not crowning Cloverleaf for its $10 million and its decimal-perfect school projections; \u201ccommercially reasonable efforts\u201d is what a contract says when it wants to be admired and not held. I am not crowning the commission\u2019s majority for \u201cjobs\u201d either \u2014 a public meeting where the public cannot speak is a closing, not a hearing. The anti-capitalist cut stays: a data center that abates its taxes and hides its owner is still a machine for turning a poor county\u2019s groundwater and grid into somebody\u2019s quarterly cloud margin. I am keeping the cardigan. Fill the notebook. Then ask, out loud, whose county it was when the tenant stayed secret and the vote took fifteen minutes.<\/p>\n
Sources:<\/strong> The Lowndes Signal, Lanell Downs Smith, \u201cCommission pushes through data center deal approval,\u201d Oct. 13, 2026<\/a>; The Lowndes Signal, Lanell Downs Smith, \u201cResidents tell developers, \u2018We don\u2019t want you!\u2019,\u201d Oct. 9, 2026<\/a>; Cloverleaf Infrastructure release, \u201cProject Red Clay Data Center expected to generate $124 million annually for Lowndes County,\u201d Oct. 9, 2026<\/a>; Project Red Clay Commissioner Briefing Packet, October 2026 (PDF)<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014 Theo Ashford-Lindstr\u00f6m<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Oct. 13 the Lowndes County Commission voted 3-2, with no public speakers allowed, to approve a development agreement and 20-year, 50% tax abatement for Cloverleaf Infrastructure\u2019s Project Red Clay data center near Burkeville. The developer projects $2.85 billion in county revenue; a district judge called it a $2.4 billion break for an unnamed end user.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":401,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-news"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/theo-redclay-tenant-abatement-1013pm.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":402,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/400\/revisions\/402"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/401"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thetheolowgen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}