A publicly traded company wants to build a large-scale data center in rural Logan County near Latham, about 30 miles northeast of Springfield, while local residents scramble to find out more details and delay what could be a mid-January vote on a zoning change that’s needed for the plan to proceed.
“There’s a huge lack of public information,” Franklin Rager, 32, a Latham resident, told Illinois Times. “I’d like to postpone this for a few months.”
Miami-based Hut 8 Corp. is asking the Logan County Board to change zoning on 250 acres of farmland in Laenna Township from agricultural to industrial to accommodate the data center.
It’s unclear how large the center would be, according to Allan Green, the county’s zoning officer, but he said the company is expected to provide more details in the next few days.
Green said an intermediary representing Hut 8 told him the center would create 100 full-time, permanent jobs – about the same number as the $500 million, 636-megawatt data center proposed for rural southwestern Sangamon County by CyrusOne, a privately held company based in Dallas.
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One hundred jobs is a large number for Logan County, Green said. In recent years, the community has experienced the loss of hundreds of jobs through the 2024 closure of Lincoln Christian University, the 2022 closure of Lincoln College and the 2019 closure of Ardagh Group’s glass container production plant.
“I understand the benefits – everyone needs jobs,” Rager said of the Hut 8 project. “I would just like to know more about it.”
Unlike CyrusOne officials, who have been relatively open in speaking with the news media and the public about the company’s plans, Hut 8 hasn’t responded to repeated requests for comment.
Little is known about the proposal other than a terse notice published in legal advertisements earlier this month in two online-only newspapers, the New Herald News and Lincoln Daily News, that lists the four parcel numbers for properties affected by the rezoning.
The notice invites people to a Logan County Zoning Board of Appeals public hearing on the proposal at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 8 at the Oasis Senior Center, 2800 Woodlawn Road, Lincoln.
Green said he was told the data center, which would be built in unincorporated Logan County a mile west of Latham along a two-lane township road, would rent space to technology companies for computer servers that power the internet.
That’s the same business model described by CyrusOne for its data center campus in Talkington Township. The CyrusOne facility would use 636 megawatts of electricity and consist of six one-story, 232,000-square-foot buildings.
For the Hut 8 proposal, the Logan County Regional Planning Commission, an appointed group, is scheduled to meet at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 7 at the Oasis Senior Center to discuss the matter and hear comments from the public before making a nonbinding recommendation.
The county’s Zoning Board of Appeals, a five-member appointed group, will meet the next night to conduct the public hearing and make a nonbinding recommendation to the County Board. More time for public comment on the proposal will be available at this meeting than at any other meeting, Green said.
The Logan County Board is tentatively set to gather for a meeting at 6 p.m. Jan. 15 at the County Courthouse when the proposal could be discussed and scheduled for a final vote.
The soonest that a final vote could occur would be the tentative 6 p.m. Jan. 20 County Board meeting at the courthouse, Green said.
Rachel Smith, 48, who lives with her family just outside Latham and would like more information about the proposal, said it has been difficult to gather information on the project during the end-of-the-year holiday period.
Sydnee Usherwood, 23, who lives outside the Logan County community of Atlanta, said she worries about the data center contributing to climate change by prolonging the need for power plants that burn fossil fuels.
The main beneficiary of any additional property tax revenue from the data center site would be the Mount Pulaski School District, and not the Warrensburg-Latham School District, which serves children in Latham.
Kevin Knauer, a Mount Pulaski resident, sits on the 12-member, all-Republican County Board and represents the area that includes Latham and the proposed Hut 8 site. He said he hasn’t made up his mind about the proposal, which county officials learned about two or three months ago. But he said the current schedule should provide ample time for the public and county officials to pose questions and get answers.
Rager disagreed.
He is a bartender in Latham, a village with no stoplights and no gas stations with a population of 350 people in a county of about 28,000. He recently started a petition against the proposal. The petition is available for signatures at the Latham post office.
Rager and other area residents said they wonder whether the data center, which would support the growth of artificial intelligence, will put a strain on local water supplies, boost rates for Ameren customers, harm wildlife through low-frequency noise, take prime farmland out of production and otherwise disrupt their rural lifestyle.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere, and it’s quiet,” Smith said. “That’s going to be a huge, huge disruption to our lives. It’s like the equivalent of taking a small town and moving it to an industrial section of a large city. … I would have to see proof that the noise would not affect the town.”
Green said local water supplies for Logan County communities wouldn’t be at risk from the Hut 8 data center because, as Hut 8 and CyrusOne have proposed, cooling for computer servers would be handled by a closed-loop system with recirculated water.
Hut 8 is planning to truck in water for the closed-loop system and dig a well at the site for water for its employees because municipal water pipes aren’t available, Green said.
Hut 8 would purchase land for the site – all owned by members of a family who once lived in the area but now are out of state – if the rezoning is approved, Green said.
The data center would get power to operate through an Ameren substation near the site, he said.
Latham Village President Theodore Allen, 68, said he only has heard opposition from village residents, and he is opposed, too.
“We’re a small community,” he said. “It doesn’t benefit us in any way.”
