A 235-acre data center project near Grand Rapids is stalled after residents shut down the first planning commission meeting over rezoning the site to light industrial.
The site, in Lowell Township’s Covenant Business Park, would likely host large-scale compute, but no public specs yet on megawatts, GPU footprint, or operator identity beyond the shell entity Franklin Lowell LLC.
Local pushback before any technical detail suggests power, water, noise, and tax questions will be central, and could delay or reshape the build.
For AI infra planners, this is another reminder that site control and community alignment can be as fragile as supply chains for GPUs and transformers.
Vendors and cloud operators counting on Midwest capacity growth should treat this as signal that greenfield builds face rising political risk and timeline uncertainty.
Energy availability alone is not the gate; local perception of “mystery” data centers is becoming a real permitting constraint.
Worth a read for anyone modeling AI data center rollout assumptions against real-world entitlement risk.
Source: Data center near Grand Rapids uncertain after residents shut down meeting
