Nebius plans a $6.6 billion hyperscale data center in Independence, MO, with four buildings over 2 million square feet on 400 acres, positioned as its first fully owned U.S. site.
The city is weighing a Chapter 100 bond and tax abatement package that would give Nebius more than 90 percent tax relief on equipment, servers, and infrastructure, effectively trading at least $6 billion in foregone taxes for about $640 million in PILOT payments over 20 years.
This stacks on top of Missouri’s existing data center sales tax exemptions on construction materials, equipment, and utilities, making the facility’s core AI and GPU infrastructure effectively shielded from most state and local taxation.
Local residents are organizing hard against the project, citing noise, long construction timelines, depressed property values, and a sense that the city is bearing environmental and community costs without a proportional fiscal return.
Nebius is signaling that without the full incentive package, it may scale back or cancel the project, using the standard “no abatement, no build” leverage common in hyperscale and AI data center siting.
The site will use closed-loop cooling with a multi-million-gallon initial water fill and ongoing replenishment, raising questions about long-term utility load, while details on total power draw and grid impact are not yet transparent.
For anyone tracking where AI compute lands and who pays for it, this is a sharp case study in how GPU-era data centers intersect with local tax policy, utilities, and neighborhood resistance, and worth reading in full.
