Adams County Commissioners Believe Amazon Is Behind Local Data Center Interest

Adams County commissioners publicly identified Amazon as the company they believe is driving interest in building what could become the largest data center in Ohio, at the former J.M. Stuart and Killen power plant sites along the Ohio River, even as no formal application has reached county offices.

Commissioners Barbara Moore Holt, Kelly Jones and Jason Hayslip told the People's Defender they believe Amazon, or firms working on Amazon's behalf, are the parties behind months of outreach involving local officials, state economic partners and developers. The disclosure puts a nationally recognizable name to a project that has consumed public meetings in West Union and surrounding communities since early February.

The numbers attached to that project are difficult to absorb at the county scale. A Feb. 3 filing by AES Ohio projected that a data center near the former Stuart plant would require 100 megawatts to open in 2028 and ramp to 1,300 megawatts by March 2032, making it larger than any existing data center in Ohio. Adams County's total energy consumption in 2025 was 366,401 megawatt hours. At 8,760 megawatt hours per megawatt of capacity annually, a 1,300 megawatt facility would consume roughly 11.4 million megawatt hours per year, 31 times what the entire county currently uses. The critical and unresolved question for commissioners is who pays to build the transmission infrastructure required to deliver that power to the site.

Water presents the same math problem. Large data centers can consume up to five million gallons per day for cooling, the equivalent of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. The Stuart and Killen sites have been promoted by Economic Development Director Paul Worley in part because of Ohio River access, but what agreements, if any, have been reached with the Adams County Regional Water District or the Manchester Board of Public Affairs has not been publicly disclosed.

Much of what is known came through records requests rather than official briefings. Worley signed nondisclosure agreements in January 2024 and November 2025; commissioners have stated they have not signed NDAs and will not. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers quietly issued a Nationwide Permit No. 39 on Feb. 18 authorizing development near the Stuart site, with conditions protecting endangered bats, mussels and butterflies and a 100-foot construction buffer around three nearby cemeteries. Buck Canyon Properties, a Kentucky firm, paid $2.65 million in 2024 for 1,016 acres north of the Stuart plant and has applied for permits, with its owners citing NDAs to decline comment.

Community opposition has grown into formal structures. Sprigg Township, which encompasses the Stuart plant, passed a one-year voluntary moratorium on data centers on March 2. Monroe Township, covering the Killen site, established a new zoning commission the same day for its 27-square-mile jurisdiction. The group Adams County for Responsible Development, led by Danielle Kinhalt, is pursuing an Ohio constitutional amendment that would ban data centers drawing more than 25 megawatts statewide. Petitions circulated at the West Union Walmart called for rural zoning rules that would make large-scale projects harder to site in the county.

Commissioners hold public meetings every Monday morning, and public comment periods have become a standing exchange over project details. A formal application, when and if it arrives, would trigger zoning change hearings, utility extension negotiations, environmental review and public disclosure of any state incentive packages under discussion. The specific terms of those incentives have not yet been made public.