Jun
11
Town Hall Held
Residents packed the June 11 town hall and pushed back. The decision now sits with the Prichard City Council, with no set date.
11
Town Hall Held
Residents packed the June 11 town hall and pushed back. The decision now sits with the Prichard City Council, with no set date.
Everything here traces back to a named source. If something isn’t confirmed, it isn’t stated as fact. Items still unverified are flagged so no one repeats a guess as the truth.
Mayor Davis stated after the June 11 town hall that the decision is now in the hands of the Prichard City Council, with no set date for a vote. The site is a former city 911 data center on city-owned land, which likely means the Council controls the land deal itself, a sale or lease, not just zoning.
Developer: Edged (Edged Energy), part of parent company Endeavour; cooling is built by sister company ThermalWorks. Investment: roughly $93 million (sometimes reported as “almost $100 million”). Edged calls it a “networking” data center and insists it is “not an AI data center.”
Edged is part of Endeavour, a company founded by the founder of Aligned Data Centers and backed by large private-equity investors. It is expanding quickly, with a $1.3 billion bond sale in April 2026 helping fund new sites. None of that means Edged is in financial trouble. It does mean the building would be owned by a heavily financed company in a fast-moving industry, which is the reason to ask for a decommissioning bond, for the commitments to bind any future owner, and for any penalties to be held in escrow that would survive a bankruptcy. The site is, after all, already an abandoned data center.
Address: 214 Telegraph Road, Prichard, AL 36610, a derelict warehouse on the footprint of a former 911 data center, on the Prichard side of Africatown. Size: about 9 acres. The parcel sits mostly in Prichard, with about 11% in the City of Mobile. Edged can avoid Mobile’s permitting and residential zoning simply by keeping the footprint inside Prichard, which has no comparable protective zoning. That gap is the key vulnerability here.
8 megawatts, which is “small scale” by data-center standards. Alabama’s 2026 data-center law reaches only the largest sites — its utility-contract review kicks in at 150 MW, and even its sales-tax provision starts at 100 MW — so this 8 MW project escapes it entirely. Edged’s draft service agreement with Alabama Power states there will be no local rate increase, no new substation, and that Edged self-funds line extensions “at our sole expense.”
About 18 months to construct; could break ground as early as late 2026.
The on-record promise is about 20 permanent jobs paying over $70,000/year, plus hundreds of temporary construction jobs. It is a real promise, but nothing is signed. It is also worth knowing why the number is 20: that is the minimum a data center needs to qualify for Alabama’s data-center tax abatement under Act 2012-210. At the town hall, a resident named Mike Booker argued that those roles are network, systems, and storage engineers that “are not going to stay inside Prichard” without local training. That is one resident’s view rather than a proven fact, but it points at the real questions: where the promise is in writing, who actually gets hired, and what the claw-back is if Edged does not deliver.
That “about 20 jobs” figure lines up with Alabama’s Act 2012-210, the state’s data-center incentive. It lowered the hiring threshold to 20 new jobs at $40,000 or more, and it lets a qualifying data center receive an abatement of state and local non-educational sales, use, and property taxes. In plain terms, the same program that the 20-job promise satisfies also lets the company avoid much of the local tax that would otherwise go to Prichard and Mobile County. The 30-year version of that abatement requires a $400 million investment, which this roughly $93 million project cannot reach, but it can still qualify for an abatement of up to 20 years.
The site is the former city-owned 911 data center, so the Council also controls whether the land is sold or leased, and on what terms. A below-market sale or lease of public land is a public subsidy in the same way a tax break is.
It also helps to keep the scale in mind. Even if Edged paid every local tax in full, with no abatement at all, the revenue would be a small fraction of the roughly $400 million Prichard’s water system needs over the next 20 years. This project is not a fix for the water crisis, with or without a tax deal. The honest question is narrower: what does Prichard actually get, and is it guaranteed in writing?
Cooling is a closed-loop glycol/water system built by ThermalWorks. Heat is moved by circulating coolant, not by evaporating municipal water. On-site water use is roughly that of a building with a dozen people. MEJAC verified this first-hand on a tour of Edged’s Atlanta facility. Edged’s written claim is that the design “saves 23 million gallons annually, equal to 200 Prichard households.”
Edged’s Atlanta facility runs Volvo Penta diesel generators for backup, and MEJAC estimates the Prichard site could require 15 to 25 diesel units plus on-site fuel storage. Even with no outages they must be test-run every month, producing NOx and fine particulate matter. That is likely enough to require what is called a Synthetic Minor Source air permit: the permit a facility takes when its generators could otherwise be a major polluter, and it stays under the line only by accepting an enforceable cap on run-hours. (For scale, the federal “major source” line is 100 tons of NOx a year.) To be fair to the engineering, MEJAC judged that with modern, well-controlled units the routine monthly test-runs would emit fairly little, comparing them to a year of neighborhood barbecues. But that is the brochure case, not the worst case. It assumes the cleanest engines and short run-times, and right now neither is promised in writing. The honest worry is the part that is not yet on paper: 15 to 25 diesel units in an airshed already ringed by permitted polluters, running hardest and longest for days during the Gulf Coast hurricane outages that are a near-certainty here, close to homes, with no binding cap on run-hours, no requirement for the cleanest (Tier 4) engines, and no independent monitoring yet committed to.
At the town hall, Edged’s spokesperson said the company is “open to a community benefit agreement.” This is where any binding protections and financial claw-backs would attach, if one is ever actually drafted and signed.
Named in local coverage as Garland Christopher (FOX10, WKRG) and as David Garland (NBC15). On record: “a networking data center, not an AI data center”; “water is for drinking, not for data”; “open to a community benefit agreement.”
Mayor of Prichard. Toured Edged’s Atlanta site and was reassured, but concluded “the community has spoken very loudly.” Says the decision is now the Council’s.
City Council, District 1. “The people don’t want it, and I work for the people.” The only council member on record opposing.
A resident who spoke at the June 11 town hall and argued the ~20 jobs would not stay in Prichard without local training, and that Edged should invest in local schools and IT. He said he works in the field. Either way, it is one resident’s argument, not a verified finding.
Alabama State Senator (D-Mobile). At the June 11 town hall she sided with residents opposed to the project, saying that if it were in her own backyard she would not want it either.
Edged representative who answered questions at the town hall. She said the facility would draw power from local distribution lines, that Prichard was chosen for its nearness to a fiber network, and that Africatown “would not be negatively impacted.”