Data Center Deal Put Bessemer’s Public in the Dark

When Bessemer, Alabama, considered approving a massive new data center project earlier this year, there were very few public details about what, exactly, was being proposed — or how local elected officials in the historic, majority-Black city were negotiating with the project’s backers. 

That’s because a number of city leaders, including Mayor Kenneth Gulley, signed a strict non-disclosure agreement with the developers behind Project Marvel, a proposed 4.5 million square foot facility set to become one of the largest data centers in the world. 

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Now that the agreement has been made public under threat of a lawsuit, the details show how much authority the developers had over city officials, and how thoroughly they wanted to keep the public in the dark. 

Plans Kept Under Wraps

Besides banning the public release of site plans or related reports or studies, the non-disclosure agreement city leaders signed blocked the public disclosure of any information about Project Marvel’s developers. It also requires the city to destroy any information related to the project that the developers deemed confidential — including any official city documents or notes.

Gulley signed it, along with his chief of staff, Christoper Warrer, and city attorney Aaron Killings.

The disclosure agreements became public when two environmental groups, the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Alabama Rivers Alliance, sued, forcing the city’s hand. Alabama has public records laws that run contrary to the disclosure agreements.

It was recently reported that QTS Data Centers is one of the companies behind the project. According to the company’s website, it has headquarters in Overland Park, Kansas, and Sterling, Virginia, and is a major developer of hyperscale data centers. 

In a statement, Charles Miller, policy director of the Alabama Rivers Alliance, said it’s “absurd” that three of Bessemer’s top officials — including two elected officeholders — agreed to a document “that makes an entire city government more accountable to out-of-state developers than their own constituents.” 

“In Alabama, our elected officials should work for us, not Silicon Valley AI companies and their associates,” Miller said. 

 Ryan Anderson, attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement that it’s “deeply concerning when it takes legal threats for a government to comply with basic transparency laws.” 

Even worse, “the city refused an open records act request for a document that’s very purpose is to shield information from the public about a highly controversial data center,” Anderson said. 

‘Committed’ to Transparency

Since it came to public attention earlier this year, Project Marvel has drawn widespread opposition from residents who say it would worsen pollution, strain local resources and deepen environmental inequities in a predominantly Black community. The fight has also taken on symbolic weight because the project is planned for Bessemer, a historic steel town near Birmingham that played an important role in the Black freedom struggle and the rise of Black political power in Alabama.

Even though it compelled city leaders to keep project details under wraps, QTS Data Centers said in a statement that it is “committed to engaging transparently as planning continues, including water, energy, infrastructure and community considerations.”

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The project’s scale is enormous, slated to occupy a 1,600-acre stretch of forest. The city recently rezoned the property from agricultural land so that it can be developed for industrial use. 

The data center campus would have the collective footprint of 18 Walmart Supercenters, and would use up to 1,200 megawatts of power per year — 90 times more than Bessemer’s roughly 25,000 residents use per year. The facility would also consume at least 2 million gallons of water per day.