Applied Digital Pledges Partnership at First Town Hall on $3.2 Billion Brookwood Data Center
The company building a $3.2 billion data center in Brookwood held its first community town hall on Thursday night, one week after county officials approved the project, and its top external affairs executive spent the evening laying out new detail on water usage, power consumption, noise generation and job creation while also answering for why Applied Digital stayed quiet through months of public frustration.
The Dallas company's project, a campus it calls Delta Forge 2, cleared one of its last local approvals on September 24, when the Tuscaloosa County Economic Development Authority voted to grant roughly $314.5 million in tax abatements and accept a $270 million community benefit agreement to draw this project to part of the 1,300 acres Applied Digital owns in Brookwood.
The town hall was the company's first direct conversation with residents, many of whom had spent the summer packing meetings to demand answers that the city and the company had not provided.
A partner's promises
Mayor Joe Barger opened the meeting by framing Applied Digital as a long-term partner rather than a one-time development.
"A $3.2 billion investment is significant. A $270 million community commitment over the next 20 years is significant," Barger said. "But ultimately, the success of this partnership will be measured by more than dollars and buildings. It will be measured by the opportunities we create for our children and our grandchildren."
Nick Phillips, Applied Digital's executive vice president of external affairs, then took over for the bulk of the night. Phillips, who said he has worked in the industry for about 20 years and was the fifth employee at the company, opened with a set of commitments: that the company would communicate in plain language, return for more town halls, stand up community feedback groups, and follow through on what it promises.
"We are experts in data centers. But we are not yet experts in Brookwood," he said. "You are the experts in Brookwood. We are here to learn from you."
Phillips said the company would hire a community engagement coordinator who lives in Brookwood, ideally someone who grew up there, whose job would be to advocate for the company in the community and for the community back to the company.
They also said their outreach arm, Applied Digital Cares, would pour back into the community to support local nonprofits and add amenities such as pickleball courts or playgrounds.
Answering for the absence
The forum also saw Phillips directly answer the question that has hung over this story since the summer: why a company planning a multibillion-dollar project in Brookwood said nothing for months. His explanation was that they could hold public meetings before the project was "real," not just a proposal for land they own.
"Until a project is actually a project, we cannot do public meetings like this," Phillips said. "If I come up here on this stage when we're thinking it might be a project but don't yet know the answers of what that would look like, I can't really answer the questions. I don't know how much water, I don't know how many workers, I don't know when it's going to start, every one of you is going look at me and think I'm withholding something."
He said the project officially became "real" when TCEDA voted on September 24, and that the company convened the town hall almost exactly a week later.
Phillips also recounted showing up at a county commission meeting in another community four years ago to ask exploratory questions, after which, he said, a local media outlet reported a facility was being built and invented figures for it despite the project never advancing.
"To this day, four years later, I still get phone calls about that project," he said. "I got a call from the federal Department of Energy asking how that project was going. There is no project there."
Dollars over decades
Phillips put new numbers on the project that had not been public before.
At Delta Forge 2, Applied Digital will install and maintain a hyperscale data center and lease its use to a so-far-unnamed tenant requiring that much infrastructure.
Of the $3.2 billion total investment, he said the tenant's share is roughly $800 million and Applied Digital's is just under $2.5 billion. Over 20 years, he said, the project is expected to generate about $440 million between taxes and community benefit payments.
The $270 million community benefits commitment is a fixed figure, he said, $13.5 million per year for 20 years, with the remaining roughly $170 million coming from sales taxes, property taxes allocated to education and other taxes.
That annual community benefit payment will be split among governments in Tuscaloosa County, including the county commission and the cities of Tuscaloosa, Northport and Brookwood.
The campus will be a single AI factory building with generator buildings to support it, running up to 210 megawatts of computing capacity. Phillips said the company is developing 160 acres of the just under 1,300 it owns on the site, and he was explicit that the remaining land is buffer for now, although he did not rule out future expansion.
Construction is expected to take 12 to 16 months and bring at least 1,000 workers, most of them in the trades, with more than 100 permanent jobs once the facility opens.
Water worries, power promises
On water, the issue that has driven much of the opposition, Phillips described a sealed, closed-loop cooling system rather than the evaporative systems some older data centers use.
He said the system takes about 1.4 million gallons to fill at the outset, a 500,000-gallon fire suppression tank plus roughly 900,000 gallons in the cooling loop, and that the loop water is expected to stay in the sealed system for about 30 years.
Ongoing water use, he said, would be roughly 750,000 gallons a year, most of it for restrooms and kitchens, which he compared to the consumption of "seven to eight households."
Asked what happens if the cooling fluid ever has to be drained, Phillips said the food-grade glycol mix would be trucked to a wastewater treatment facility.
On power, Phillips said the facility would draw from a substation just off Brookwood Parkway at about 34,500 volts, and that Applied Digital would pay for all the improvements needed to bring power to the site rather than passing those costs to other customers.
He said that, as of October 1st, Alabama Power is prohibited by law from letting a large industrial user drive up rates for other consumers.
Sound and setbacks
On noise, Phillips said the loudest equipment, the rooftop cooling fans and the diesel backup generators, are the only part of the operation audible outside the building, and that the company already has sound monitoring equipment on the property recording a baseline before construction.
He said Applied Digital has an internal rule against building within a half mile of a home, school, church or similar use, and that the project sits about 4,405 feet from Brookwood Middle School.
"I have stood this close to our loudest equipment and had a normal conversation at a normal voice level," he said.
Caring for the creek
Hurricane Creek, the impaired waterway that residents and Hurricane Creekkeeper John Wathen have warned about for months, drew one of the more direct answers of the night, calling environmental worries "nonsense."
"We're not going to destroy that creek," Phillips said. "You care about the community, you care about the Creek, you care about, the quality of life here. That's very important to us."
He said he could not yet detail how the company would protect it because the project was only confirmed the week before, but that most of the company's permitting conversations with the state had been about the creek, its setbacks and its silt fencing.
He pointed to North Dakota, where he said the company spent more than a year and millions of dollars hauling stormwater away by truck, rather than discharging it into a ditch even though state law there allowed it, to avoid flooding neighbors.
"We will protect that Creek. We want to leave that situation better than we found it," Phillips said. "I don't know what that means yet but it's probably working with a non-profit in the area trying to figure out how can we make improvements to it that would make a lot of sense for the community."
Hiring at home
The Q&A session of the night was short, and although Brookwood set up 300 chairs in the G.G. Hardin Center for the Town Hall, at least half were empty.
One resident told Phillips he'd be OK with the project is its 1,000 construction jobs and 100 full-time positions were hired locally whenever possible.
"We just don't want a bunch of people coming in from Texas and California, making the money, and leaving," the resident said.
Phillips said the company's general contractor is BCCG and urged local trades workers and contractors to register at bccgp.com to qualify as subcontractors. He said the company prefers local workers because they stay on the job, but cautioned that demand can outstrip the local supply.
In North Dakota, he said, the company ran out of locally available electrical workers despite drawing heavily from the state.
Phillips said the company's remaining steps are permitting, site preparation, construction and commissioning, and that permit packages have been submitted to the city and are under review.
Permanent jobs are posted at applieddigital.com, he said, and the company plans to hire the Brookwood-based community engagement coordinator soon.
Delta Forge 2 is the largest and most advanced of at least three data center projects the Tuscaloosa Thread has tied to the Brookwood corridor. The others are a proposed campus tied to the New York firm Youngwoo & Associates, land for which which the city council rezoned in September, and a third site tied to the Dallas firm Provident Data Centers.
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