At the intersection of U.S. Highway 80 and Alabama Highway 21, in a wooded corner of northeast Lowndes County, a Houston-based developer has been quietly assembling the land for what could become one of the largest industrial projects in county history.

The developer is Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a two-year-old company that raised $300 million from private equity firms. Its proposed Lowndes project, code-named “Project Red Clay,” is an 800-plus-acre site being positioned for an as-yet-unnamed data center tenant.

The company has been in talks with the Lowndes County Economic Development Board, municipal leaders, and the county commission.

The story was first reported earlier this month by The Lowndes Signal.

For 23 years, Judge Adrian Johnson has lived on twenty acres in a quiet corner of Lowndes County.

His back fence, he said, sits about 900 yards from a stretch of timberland now at the center of one of the largest industrial proposals in the county’s history.

“The reason they’re focusing on this particular piece of property is access to power,” Johnson said in an interview with Yellowhammer News. “There’s a transmission line that runs through it. The adjacent property is a rural home, they have a pasture and cattle. There’s another 700-acre property adjacent to it that they’d like to purchase, but I don’t think the owner of that property is interested.”

The site sits in the northeast corner of the county, near the unincorporated community of Burkville, and is ringed by residential areas on every side, Johnson said.

“This is not off in some distant, out-of-the-way place,” he said. “It’s literally in the middle of a fairly heavily populated rural community. We’re a very small rural county. We have about ten thousand people. But within a two or three-mile radius, there are probably four or five hundred people who live in that radius around this facility. So it’s a pretty significant issue to a lot of our neighbors.”

Cloverleaf does not build, own, or operate data centers.

It describes itself publicly as a developer of clean-powered, “ready-to-build” sites, acquiring land, securing power interconnection with utilities, and then selling to a hyperscale operator that will ultimately build and run the facility. 

To Johnson, that structure is the heart of the problem.

“They’re a developer,” he said.

“What they do is locate sites that have the power capacity they might need for an end user. They work out all the deals with the local government, they secure the rights to the land, and then at some point they’ll work with an end user to build a facility. At this point, we don’t know what that agreement even looks like, whether there’s privity clauses between them as the developer and the ultimate owner. So our conversations with the developer may not have any bearing on what the end user may ultimately do.”

Cloverleaf’s other publicly announced projects include a roughly 2,000-acre campus in Port Washington, Wisconsin, and a 900-plus-acre site in Monroe County, Georgia, neither of which has a named end tenant.

On Monday night, roughly one hundred Lowndes County residents packed the Highway 80 Cafe for a community meeting, convened on under a week’s notice.

“It is definitely growing,” Judge Johnson said of the opposition.

“There have been Facebook groups started devoted to stopping a data center in Lowndes County. It’s been going like wildfire throughout our community. We’re a small, rural county where most everybody knows everybody else, and concerns are getting shared far and wide. I’ve seen people express reservations who live in far southeast Lowndes County and far southwest Lowndes County. We had folks from the Mosses community, from Fort Deposit, from all across Lowndes County.”

At a county commission meeting earlier this month, Commissioner Dickson Farrior moved to deny any tax abatement for the project before a formal abatement request had been made. The motion failed.

“I’ve been getting calls and emails about a data center coming into north Lowndes County from the community,” Farrior told The Lowndes Signal. “It’s going to affect the people’s health, the property values, the quality of life… everything. I want to go on record denying them any abatement.”

Commissioner Robert Harris offered a different view, recommending the commission wait and consider abatements only when and if developers formally requested them.

The Lowndes County Commission meets at the county courthouse in Hayneville. Johnson said many residents plan to attend the next meeting and have requested to be placed on the agenda.

“At some point there will have to be a public hearing scheduled by the county commission,” he said. “I’m sure the developer will be present and have an opportunity to present whatever they would like to present.”

Grayson Everett is the editor in chief of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on X @Grayson270.