Aug 5, 2026
AL.com: Nebius AI Mega Factory Has Already Cost GBHS $18 Million in Fundraising
An AL.com story published this morning puts a number on what the Nebius AI Mega Factory has already done to the Greater Birmingham Humane Society's plans for a new Oxmoor Valley campus: $18 million.
GBHS CEO Allison Black Cornelius told reporter Hannah Denham that the nonprofit had been raising money since 2017 toward a $67 million medical campus on land it bought in Oxmoor Corporate Park in 2021. The fundraising goal stood at $34 million.
In February, word got out that the project next door would not be a routine data center but a 300 MW, industrial-scale AI Mega Factory.
“After that week, everything just stopped,” Cornelius said. A $10 million donor pulled a pledge. Another $8 million pledge vanished. That is half the money GBHS needed to build.
“That’s when we said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’” she told AL.com.
Cornelius said her donors raised the same concern Protect Oxmoor has raised from the start: canine audiology experts warned her that a continuous low-frequency hum is a documented stressor for dogs, who hear ranges humans cannot.
GBHS is now suing the City of Birmingham and Nebius, joining Oxmoor Valley homeowners already in Jefferson County courtrooms.
The complaint does not mince words. “Working together, the City and Nebius Entities have rendered the law and the ordinances of the City of Birmingham an illusion of due process,” GBHS alleges. “GBHS has never been afforded an opportunity for substantive relief from the City.”
It is not the first time a data center has cost GBHS a home. Years earlier, the shelter lost a planned Titusville site to a different data center developer after spending $300,000 on design work there. “How’s that for being struck by lightning twice?” Cornelius asked.