A Bad Deal for Birmingham

Our Electric Bill

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.

Our Water

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.

Our Tax Dollars

Nebius claims the facility will generate $88 million a year for local schools. But AI factories often negotiate aggressive tax abatements that reduce these projections.

Current Alabama law allows abatements of up to 30 years for this project and can include some property taxes, sales taxes, and use taxes associated with equipment and construction.

And that doesn't count what we will have to spend on the services this kind of industrial-scale facility demands — road wear, emergency response, infrastructure upgrades.

Our Economy

Nebius boasts that its AI Mega Factory will create about 100 permanent jobs. For a facility occupying 79 acres — the equivalent of dozens of city blocks — that is an astonishingly low number.

A mixed-use development of the kind permitted by the zoning laws could generate hundreds or even thousands of permanent jobs.

The previous facility, occupying only a fraction of the site, employed 800 workers.

Our Peaceful Neighborhood

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.

Our Future

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.