ST. CHARLES — A series of farm fields along Highway 370 in the floodplain here could soon be transformed into a sprawling 440-acre data center.
The plan is sparking environmental and operational concerns from city leaders and residents, who filled the St. Charles City Hall meeting room on Tuesday night.
They worry the data center’s high water usage could strain the city’s water system and its power demands could overwhelm the region’s electrical grid. And, some worry, the diesel fuel needed to power generators could contaminate nearby wetlands, farms and the city’s drinking water.
The developer wants to build the data center in a largely industrial area between Huster Road and Harry S Truman Boulevard. The campus would consist of five 285,000-square-foot warehouses that would be architecturally similar to Amazon’s fulfillment center in St. Peters, according to city documents.
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Tim Kline, a third-generation family farmer, raises soybeans and corn on more than 200 acres adjacent to the proposed data center. The land has been in his family since 1939, and he is worried that runoff from the data center could doom his farm.
“Please don’t ruin our farm. We are downstream of this. ... We’re not a very big farm, only a couple hundred acres,†Kline said. “We worry about the people of St. Charles and the drinking water for years to come.â€
Fred Semke, a former Orchard Farm school board member and area business owner, said he was shocked that “St. Charles would even consider†the proposal.
“I am worried that it is going to go through — but I am also optimistic that it can be stopped,†Semke said.
Developer CRG Cumulus, which is affiliated with Berkeley-based building and development giant Clayco, did not speak during the meeting and declined interview requests. It will host a town hall at 5 p.m. on Aug. 14 at the City Foundry Centre, 520 North Main Center in St. Charles.
The city council will take up the data center plan and CRG Cumulus’ request for conditional use permits at its Aug. 19 meeting. It will need seven of 10 votes to pass, because the city’s planning and zoning board has recommended denial.
Origins of Data Centers
The earliest data centers date back to the 1940s when the U.S. military opened one on the University of Pennsylvania campus to house massive early computers. Today, companies like Google, Microsoft or Amazon rely on data centers to house their IT operations and to host websites, store data, stream media, mine cryptocurrency and train artificial intelligence models.
Google opened a 1.3 million-square-foot hyperscale data center in 2006. The search engine company now has 29 large data centers throughout the world and is building more, including a $10 billion, 500-acre complex near Kansas City.
CRG Cumulus told city officials that it does not have a “future user†of the property. City staff noted this “is not uncommon for projects of this scale and nature.â€
The proposed warehouses, which are designed to operate around the clock, would require a steady flow of electricity and water to keep the indoor temperature stable. Each would have a large equipment yard — up to 175,000 square feet apiece — to house tools and supplies for monitoring and maintaining the buildings’ cooling, water and electrical systems.
St. Charles is classifying the buildings as warehouses because “they store digital goods rather than physical goods,†according to a memo from the city’s planning and zoning staff. The plan also calls for three 34,000-square-foot office buildings on the campus.
A power substation would likely need to be built on the property, the city said, and St. Charles has hired an engineering consultant to review its water system and to identify any needed upgrades. City officials declined interview requests.
The campus would be built over the next 10 years. One of the first phases of construction would be to elevate the building site by 15 feet to get it out of a 100-year floodplain, city staff said in documents.
Data center boom
The U.S. had 5,426 data centers as of March 2025 — up from 1,000 such facilities in 2018, according to the bipartisan Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
The data center building boom is happening across the country: a $33 billion data center spanning 3,300 acres is proposed near Phoenix and similar facilities are being built in Iowa and Illinois. Statewide electricity provider Georgia Power has announced plans to spend $15 billion to add 8,000 megawatts of power at three gas-fired power plants to power a wave of data centers being built in the state.
There are dozens of data centers in Missouri and more than 20 in the ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½ region. Many of those are in and around downtown ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½.
Internet service provider Cogent has a data center on Chouteau Avenue; tech company Netrality has centers in the city, including at 900 Walnut and at 210 North Tucker, where the company stores data for multiple Fortune 500 companies and major corporations in healthcare, social services, biotechnology, finance, education and manufacturing.
If approved, the CRG Cumulus project would be the eighth data center built in St. Charles County. BJC Healthcare and companies such as MasterCard, Enterprise Mobility and the financial business Citi all have data centers there, according to the county’s Economic Development Council.
Environmental concerns mount
Despite assurances from the developer and the city that the proposal “does not include the use or storage of any hazardous substances†and that no hazardous materials would be produced at the facility, some area residents, like Kara Elms, remain unconvinced.
“I’m cynical and nothing is ever 100% safe,†she said. “You can only give so many guarantees, so many assurances, but sometimes all it takes is for one little thing to go wrong that is out of the ordinary and suddenly you have a disaster on your hands.â€
Specifically, Elms is worried about up to 1 million gallons of diesel fuel needed to power on-site generators that developers want to store on the property in 150 fuel tanks.
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Elms, one of the leaders of the St. Charles Clean Water Advocates group, is worried that the fuel may leak and contaminate the city’s drinking water. CRG Cumulus’ selected site is near the city’s wells, which provide drinking water for a significant portion of the city. St. Charles, which has sued Ameren Missouri over existing water contamination concerns, also buys drinking water from ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½. Water contamination has long been a concern in St. Charles County, where Ameren has worked for years to follow directives from the federal Environmental Protection Agency to clean up the contamination caused by cleaning solvents used years ago at a nearby substation.
The EPA has also attributed contamination in the area to the defunct Findett Corp. chemical facility that operated decades ago. That property is now a registered EPA Superfund Site.
Federal and Ameren officials have long said the city’s drinking water has been and remains safe, but the city has shut down some of its wells as a precaution over the past three decades. In court documents, lawyers for both the city and St. Charles County have argued that the local economy is being hurt by a public perception of drinking water problems.
“The city has screamed and shouted for years now about protecting the well field, but now they’re introducing a data center that is going to have up to a million gallons of (diesel fuel) on it,†Elms said. “It just doesn’t make any sense.â€
