Bradley County Made Data Centers Almost Impossible in April. In August, 850 Acres Asked to Join the City Instead, Where the Proposed Setback Is 500 Feet Rather Than 3,000.

Bradley County was thinking about data centers well before this project existed. In spring 2026 the commission moved to draft rules, in part to settle rumors about an unnamed AI site. On April 20, 2026 it adopted them unanimously. Data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations may not be adjacent to, or within 3,000 feet of, any Forestry Agricultural Residential, R-1 or R-2 zone, nor within 3,000 feet of any existing residential dwelling, school or church. Commissioners had been asked for an outright ban and declined, on the view that a ban would be constitutionally suspect. Commissioner Milan Blake's summary was that the rules make it "99.9% impossible" for a data center to be approved. Before that vote the county had no data center regulation at all.

On August 18, 2026 the Cleveland Municipal Planning Commission took up a different Wright Brothers request: annexation of nearly 400 acres on Lower River Road. Residents filled the room because they assumed it was a data center. Planning Director Robert Varnell told them the zoning sought "would not allow for a data center. It's not allowable," and said the intended use was a travel center or large service station. The commission recommended approval of all three related items and a motion to delay failed. That parcel is a separate matter from Project River, and we say so plainly because the two have been conflated in local discussion since.

On August 25 the 850 acre Project River tract was submitted for annexation into the City of Cleveland and for rezoning. On August 26 the project was announced. Two public meetings followed at Cleveland's PIE Center, on September 1 from 6 to 8 p.m. and September 12 from 10 a.m. to noon. On September 15 the Wright family said it would accept the city's proposed conditions, subject to the final text. The final draft of PUD 77 was released at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 18. The Planning Commission takes a presentation and a rezoning discussion on Monday, September 21 at 6 p.m. at the Cleveland Municipal Building, with no vote scheduled that night. A council vote is expected in October at the earliest.

At the September 1 meeting Lukas Salyer, president of Wright Industrial Group, was unambiguous: "It is not a data center and what we can say today is we do not have a contract with an off taker of the power or a user of the power." Mitchell Simpson had put it the same way in August: "We definitely know we're developing a power plant. We don't know what it's going to power yet." He named advanced manufacturing, robotics and semiconductor manufacturing as possibilities, then added that with that much power on site "it's very likely going to be that," meaning a data center. Asked for detail, Simpson said the team has "20, 30% engineering drawings, and it's simply not time for that yet."

Taken at face value, that is a truthful statement about a contract. No tenant has signed. It is also, read against the project's own numbers, a very narrow truth:

What the project itself publishes	Figure
Data center buildings, of $11.3 billion total	$7.3 billion (65%)
Gas generation	$1.5 billion
Biomass generation	$1.25 billion
Transmission technology	$750 million
Site work and buildings	$500 million
Permanent jobs in data center operations, of 900	525 (58%)
Permanent jobs in power generation	250
Permanent jobs in biomass handling	125

The company's own August 26 release describes a campus "anchored by an on-site power plant and data center." The City of Cleveland's draft ordinance sets a setback and a noise limit for "the data center." Local outlets from the Times Free Press to NewsChannel 9 describe it as a data center project in their headlines. The honest reading is that both statements are accurate and they answer different questions: there is no signed customer, and the campus is designed and costed around one. A resident who hears "it is not a data center" and stops there has been told something true and learned something false.

Project River's most striking promise is water. The project site says "zero local utility water day-to-day," describes water reclaimed from the biomass drying process circulating in a closed loop, and contrasts that with a typical industrial user consuming "up to 5 million gallons" a day. Simpson has said the plant needs no river intake and no discharge pipes, and that the campus "will not raise power or water bills or affect the water level of the Hiwassee River." On the Chattanoogan's account and in an interview with Mix 104.1 WCLE, the figure behind the promise is 200 gallons per minute of usable internal water recovered from drying wood.

That number can be checked, so here is the check. Our arithmetic, not the developer's: 200 gallons per minute is 12,000 gallons an hour, or about 288,000 gallons a day. A thermal power plant of 1,500 MW running on conventional recirculating wet cooling, the kind that uses cooling towers, typically needs makeup water in the low thousands of gallons per minute to replace what evaporates. Against that benchmark, 200 gallons per minute is on the order of a few percent of the requirement, not all of it.

There is a design that reconciles the two, and it is the obvious one: dry cooling. Air cooled condensers reject heat to the air instead of evaporating water, cut water consumption by roughly ninety percent or more, and are used at plants that have no water to spare. They cost more, take more space and lose some efficiency on hot days, which is why they are worth asking about rather than assuming. No source we found states what heat rejection equipment Project River intends to use. The registry note on this site records the same gap: the sources describe a recirculating circuit and do not state the equipment.

So the question for September 21 is not "will you use a lot of water," which invites the answer already given. It is narrower and harder to deflect: what is the heat rejection design, what is total plant makeup water demand in gallons per minute at full load on a 95 degree day, and what supplies the difference between that number and 200? Our guide to how much water a data center actually uses explains why the answer usually arrives through a utility service agreement or a state withdrawal permit rather than voluntarily.

The strongest argument for Project River has nothing to do with computing. Eleven pulp mills have closed across the South since 2022. Resolute Forest Products shut its Calhoun mill in December 2021, taking 350 jobs, and International Paper closed its Cleveland mill in December 2024, taking 115. When mills close, the market for pulpwood collapses and standing timber stops being worth cutting. Tennessee pine stumpage is now under $4 a ton. Simpson's framing is direct: "We're revitalizing a timber industry that's died." For a landowner with pine and no buyer, that is not a talking point, it is the difference between an asset and a liability.

The scale deserves the same scrutiny as everything else. The project's own site says roughly 6 million tons a year of forest timber and residuals are available within a 200 mile radius. The Times Free Press reports the biomass plant would process about 5 million tons of timber annually. Our arithmetic from those two published figures: one plant would take roughly 83 percent of the regional supply the developer itself describes. That is a coherent number for a 500 MW biomass plant, and it is the whole ballgame for everyone else who buys wood in that radius. It is also, to be fair, exactly the point: the argument is that the supply currently has no buyer at all.

The questions that follow are ordinary forestry questions and nobody has answered them publicly. What happens to pulpwood prices for other buyers when a single consumer takes four fifths of the supply. What the truck traffic looks like, in loads per day on which roads, to move 5 million tons a year. What the fuel supply contract says if timber prices rise and burning wood stops penciling out, and whether the gas plant simply runs harder. PUD 77 requires traffic, environmental, emergency management, hydrology, lighting and spill response studies before permits issue, which is where several of those answers should appear.

The city's proposed conditions, which the developer has accepted subject to the final text, are more specific than most communities extract. As published before the September 18 final draft, PUD 77 would require:

• A 500 foot setback for the data center from the property line.
• A 60 decibel limit at the property line, with continuous noise monitoring.
• 75 percent of directly used power generated on site.
• 90 percent of process water produced on site after initial filling, with a closed loop cooling system and no direct utility connection to the Hiwassee River.
• Annual reporting on water and power use.
• Limits on emissions, dust, glare, exhaust and heat crossing the property line.
• At least 20 percent green space.
• Land and funding for a combined fire station, EMS facility and police precinct near Exit 33.
• Traffic, environmental, emergency management, hydrology, lighting and spill response studies before permits.
• A Community Benefit Agreement supporting Cleveland and Bradley County schools, projects and infrastructure in Cleveland, Bradley County and Charleston. No dollar amount has been announced.
• Binding effect on current and future owners and operators.

Continuous noise monitoring with a numeric limit at the property line is the single most valuable clause in that list, and residents elsewhere would trade a great deal for it. The pattern our noise limits guide describes is a facility that is permitted, compliant on paper, and intolerable at the fence line because nobody agreed in advance on where and when to measure. A 60 dBA limit at the line with continuous monitoring answers that in advance. What the published summary does not say is who holds the monitoring data, how often it is reported, what happens on an exceedance, and whether a resident can obtain the record. Those are the questions to put to the final text.

The Community Benefit Agreement is the other place to look. An agreement with no number in it is a promise to negotiate, not a commitment, and the time to fix that is before the vote rather than after. Our guide to data center tax abatements covers how these packages are structured and where they are renegotiated. No PILOT, abatement or industrial development board agreement has been named in any source we reviewed for Project River, which is itself notable for a project of this size and worth confirming rather than assuming.

No lawsuit has been filed and there is nothing yet to sue over. A court will not enjoin a city council from voting, and no decision exists to challenge. What exists is a land use proceeding at the stage where public records and specific questions still change outcomes. Our guide to fighting a proposed data center covers the general playbook; these are the Cleveland specifics.

• Read the final PUD 77 text. It was released at 5 p.m. on Friday, September 18. Everything above is drawn from the city's published summary of the proposal. The binding document is the ordinance, and the differences between a summary and an ordinance are where these fights are won and lost.
• Monday, September 21, 6 p.m., Cleveland Municipal Building. A presentation and rezoning discussion, with no vote scheduled. This is the meeting to ask the heat rejection question, the monitoring enforcement question, and the Community Benefit Agreement dollar figure question.
• The council vote, October at the earliest. City Manager Joe Fivas has said it could be "October, November, December, January." Annexation and rezoning are legislative acts of the City Council, so that is the decision point, not the Planning Commission.
• Ask for the annexation and rezoning file. The application, the staff report and any fiscal impact analysis are public records. So is any correspondence about the county's April rules and their application to this site. That last request is the one that would settle, one way or the other, the question this piece has declined to answer.
• If it is built, the record starts now. The claims that reach a courtroom in these cases are about what a finished facility does to the people beside it. If you live near Exit 33, dated photographs, a written log and baseline noise readings taken before construction are worth more than anything gathered afterward, because they establish what the place was like. Our guide to documenting data center harm explains what to keep, and what it takes to get an injunction explains why that record decides whether a court will act.

One more thing worth saying to the reader who asked us to look. The complaint we heard was that the fight "isn't swaying our elected officials at all." On this record that reads less like officials ignoring residents and more like a process that has not reached its decision point: the county already passed the strictest rules it believed it could defend, the city has drafted unusually specific conditions, the developer has accepted them, and no one has voted on anything. The leverage that remains is in the text of PUD 77 and in the questions asked before October. That is a narrower fight than stopping a project, and it is the one actually available.