A foreign-owned tech company wants to build a massive 79-acre AI Mega Factory that consumes as much electricity as 200,000 homes and requires enormous water resources in a county that has suffered drought conditions in 17 of the last 20 years.
They want to put it right in the middle of quiet family neighborhoods, houses of worship, parks, small businesses, nonprofits, schools, and a golf course, where it will generate industrial-scale noise, heat, light, and traffic around the clock.
To power it, they would erect 125-foot transmission towers carrying 230,000-volt power lines through residential streets.
And they expect the citizens of Birmingham to help pay for it over the next 20 to 30 years.
Does that sound like a good deal to you?
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The promises sound good. The reality tells a different story.
300 Megawatts is more than twice the annual residential electricity demand of the entire City of Birmingham. Enough to power about 200,000 homes.
Nebius wants us to believe that they can add that much to the grid without affecting our rates. Yet in Virginia, where the industry first hit its stride, Bloomberg found wholesale electricity prices have spiked as much as 267 percent in five years in communities near data centers.
On May 1, 2026, 100% of Alabama was in a drought. Hyperscale AI factories like the one proposed consume staggering amounts of water to cool the one Billion Btu of heat they produce every single hour.
Nebius claims their "closed-loop" system will use less water, but they refuse to share specific details to back up their claims. Why won't they tell us?
Residents in Newton County, Georgia found out the hard way that developer claims about "closed loops" don't always pan out, after the Meta facility there reportedly began to use 10% of the county's water, leading to a 33% increase in water rates.
Nebius claims their AI Mega Factory will generate $88 million a year for local schools.
But what they didn't tell you is they'll be getting more in tax abatements than they will pay in taxes.
Under a 30-year agreement with Birmingham's Industrial Development Board, Nebius will only pay 35% of the noneducational property taxes they would otherwise owe.
And just 20% of construction-related taxes.
Nebius will get a total of $3.2 billion in tax breaks over the next three decades. That's $661 million more in tax breaks than they will pay in taxes.
But even that figure doesn't count what taxpayers will have to fund in the way of services this kind of industrial-scale facility demands — road wear, emergency response, and infrastructure upgrades.
Any way you cut it, this is a bad deal for Birmingham taxpayers.
Nebius boasts that its AI Mega Factory will create 78 jobs on 79 acres.
That's less than one job per acre — an astonishingly low number.
Almost any other kind of development — the kind actually permitted under the zoning laws — would put hundreds or even thousands of people to work on a site that size.
The previous facility, occupying a small fraction of the 79 acres, employed 800 people. More than 10 times the jobs to be had at the AI Mega Factory.
So far, it doesn't sound like a great deal for Birmingham.
But then it gets much worse. Here's the deal Nebius has been handed by the City:
Nebius gets $41 million in tax breaks for every permanent job it creates — 78 jobs, $3.2 billion.
You read that right. A foreign corporation gets an enormous tax break, we (and our children and grandchildren) get stuck with a giant tax bill for all the things they should be paying for over three decades.
The respected watchdog group Good Jobs First says a reasonable incentive caps out at $50,000 a job. Nebius wants more than 800 times that.
When Apple built a data center in North Carolina, the public paid $6.4 million per job and critics called it a fleecing.
Now we are set to give more than six times that.
The good people of Birmingham may not always end up with the bigger end of the stick. But we do not care to be fleeced.
Cooling an AI factory of this size requires industrial chillers and fans that run around the clock, every day of the year.
Communities living near comparable facilities report a constant low-frequency hum that carries for miles, disturbs sleep, and never stops.
What no one has studied is what that sound does in the frequency ranges that dogs and cats can hear — ranges far above human hearing, and central to the GBHS campus next door.
Nebius has not publicly disclosed meaningful noise specifications for BHM01.
Oxmoor Valley today is quiet enough for dozens of bird species to thrive, for sick and injured animals to recover, and for homeowners to relax.
We need to keep it that way. Sign the petition.
At full operation, BHM01 would release roughly one billion Btu of heat every hour. That is the equivalent of running 85,000 home air conditioners at full blast, continuously, in the middle of a residential neighborhood.
You cannot repeal the laws of physics. That heat does not just go away. It alters the local climate around the facility for as long as the facility runs.
A March 2026 study from the University of Cambridge, drawing on 20 years of NASA satellite data across more than 6,000 hyperscale data centers worldwide, found that heat island effects extend up to six miles from these facilities. Surface temperatures in the surrounding areas rose by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, with worst-case increases reaching 16 degrees.
Whether the heat comes from the chillers running around the clock or from replacing 79 acres of trees and green space with industrial buildings and asphalt, the outcome is the same.
The area gets hotter. Cooling costs go up. Property values come under pressure. Summer becomes harder on the people, animals, and ecosystems that have to live through it.
Alabama summers are plenty hot enough as it is. We do not need to make them hotter within a six-mile radius of the facility.
Protect Oxmoor is a nonpartisan coalition of citizens and organizations united by a simple conviction: our community deserves transparency, accountability, and a real voice in decisions that will shape its future for decades.
We are not anti-technology. We are not anti-business. And we are certainly pro-Birmingham.
We stand for transparency, standard zoning practices, environmental stewardship, fiscal responsibility and the rule of law.
The decisions being made now will shape this community for decades.
Make sure your voice is heard. Join with us today by clicking the button.
Oct 11, 2026
Nebius has launched a paid ad campaign inviting Birmingham to “Ask us anything” about its AI Mega Factory in Oxmoor.
We read every answer on the page the ads point to.
The problem is, Nebius’ own numbers contradict each other, and the most important facts are missing altogether.
It’s time for answers.
Sep 23, 2026
Bessemer's four-term mayor signed a secrecy agreement with a data center developer, and voters replaced him in Tuesday's runoff.
Read more →
Sep 22, 2026
The Verge has published a long report from Loudoun County, Virginia, the place its residents now call Data Center Alley. About 250 data centers have been built there, the densest concentration on earth, and the first of them arrived nearly 30 years ago.
The story is not about a fight over a single project. It is about what a community looks like after the fight is over and the data centers have won.
Neighbors describe a low-frequency hum from rooftop cooling systems that does not stop at night. A homeowner has spent $2,600 on window inserts and was quoted $15,000 for new siding to keep the sound out.
Another neighbor keeps her bathroom door shut so the data center's lights stay out of her bedroom. A third has pink ribbons on the trees along her creek, marking where a 185-foot transmission tower would go through her backyard.
Oxmoor Valley has heard the warnings about what an AI Mega Factory can do to a neighborhood. Loudoun County is what it looks like when the warnings are ignored.
Sep 21, 2026
Every community that faces what Oxmoor Valley faces was quiet once. Here is the record of what came after the earthmovers, in the towns that already said yes to a data center, and the few that managed to say no in time.
Read more →
Sep 11, 2026
A new lawsuit asks a court to void the May 29 vote by The Industrial Development Board of the City of Birmingham that surrendered $3.2 billion in public tax revenue.
The complaint alleges that no notice of the meeting was given, and that the public did not learn of the vote for four weeks, until a news organization published a story sourced to an anonymous tipster.
The filing describes the Board as a public corporation with no office of its own, no staff, no published address, no published minutes, and, until four days after the vote became public, no website.
Sep 10, 2026
AL.com and WBRC are reporting that a Regions Bank shareholder has sued the bank’s own officers, Nebius, and the executive chairman of Hoar Construction over the sale of the land beneath the AI Mega Factory.
Regions sold the 79 acres for $17.2 million.
By lunchtime the same day, a Nebius company had paid $83.5 million for it. The shareholder alleges the difference should have gone to the bank.
Sep 2, 2026
We recently told you Independence, Missouri would hold one of the first recall elections arising from a data center project.
Now, the verdict is in.
On Tuesday, 68 percent of voters in the city's First District removed Councilor John Perkins from office over his vote to give Nebius an estimated $6.26 billion in property tax breaks.
It is the first successful recall of an elected official in the city's history.
Of the five council members who approved the incentives, three are now gone.
Aug 27, 2026
For the first time, the full sweep of Alabama's data center buildout is visible in one place.
AL.com has gathered every site it can document onto a single interactive map: two dozen data centers in a dozen counties, with an estimated $63 billion investment.
Aug 24, 2026
A report by Lee Hedgepeth, published on WBHM.org, found more than a dozen data centers proposed across Alabama, from Bessemer to the Black Belt. Built out to full capacity, they would consume more electricity than all the homes in the state combined.
Alabama Power says none of that will raise residential bills, because large customers pay the full cost of serving them. That claim rests on the electric service contract, and the company has filed the one covering the proposed AI Mega Factory in Oxmoor Valley with the Public Service Commission.
The only problem is, nearly every number in it is redacted.
Aug 21, 2026
The New York Times traveled to Independence, Missouri, another American city where Nebius is building an AI mega factory. What they found was nothing short of a voter revolt.
On September 1, Independence will hold one of the first recall elections in the country motivated by a data center.
The councilman on the recall ballot voted to give Nebius an estimated $6.26 billion in property tax breaks over 20 years. Two of his colleagues who voted the same way have already lost their seats.
Aug 15, 2026
AL.com is reporting that the lawsuit brought by Oxmoor Valley residents Robert and Gail Sansome against Nebius, the City of Birmingham, and Hoar Construction will go to trial next March.
Wednesday's ruling does not pause construction.
It does guarantee that the questions Oxmoor Valley has been asking since the beginning will be answered where they should be: in a courtroom.
A status conference is set for August 27. The class action brought by neighboring homeowners, also before Judge Crayton, holds a status conference September 24, and the Greater Birmingham Humane Society's lawsuit is pending as well.
Aug 5, 2026
AL.com is reporting that the Nebius AI Mega Factory has already cost the Greater Birmingham Humane Society $18 million in donor pledges for its planned Oxmoor Valley campus, according to GBHS CEO Allison Black Cornelius.
The story reads, in part:
“Everything just stopped,” Cornelius told AL.com. “Every pledge, people that had pledges here for this project called and said, ‘Listen, I have reservations. I’m not trying to let you down. We’ll still let you keep the money, but you got to find somewhere else to go.’”
Birmingham residents and businesses are speaking out on why the AI Mega Factory has no place in a peaceful neighborhood.
GBHS is economic development. We've been serving the community for 143 years and we'll be here perhaps after AI is done, perhaps after Nebius is gone.
If on one side there is nothing but private benefit, and on the other there's nothing but public cost, that is absolutely relevant to the decision you're making.
I'm no stranger to technology, and I absolutely agree that artificial intelligence is the wave of the future. What I'm concerned about is where these AI Factories are placed.
We should be taking steps as a city to reduce pollution and increase health and quality of life — not allowing 300-megawatt facilities to come and take advantage of our land and water and air.
When we talk about compatibility, we are not just talking about land use — we are talking about whether two fundamentally different environments can coexist without harm.
We live between two mountains — Red Mountain and Shades Mountain — and sound travels. The site they're building on is in the neighborhood. It's not in the industrial park.
Oxmoor Valley is a beautiful, verdant neighborhood today, rich in wildlife—including birds, pest-eating bats, and other pollinators.
If an AI Mega Factory is allowed in our neighborhood, that could change forever. Noise, heat, and electromagnetic radiation can all drive out wildlife living in our neighborhood today.
Click to Hear Neighborhood Birds
Here is a list of birds recently heard in the Oxmoor neighborhood.
