They Didn't Even Know Who Was Asking
Vol. III, No. 315 - The First in a Three Part Series Uncovering Data Centers
Publisher’s note: Over the past week, a few stories in the media have really caught my attention. There was this piece at cleveland.com that talked about some of the tactics used by data centers to wedge themselves into smaller communities throughout Ohio. Then there was this piece at dayton247.com that took a micro look at this issue with a family in Piqua.
The stories need more than just one day of attention. Rather, we are going to have a series of stories this week trying to synthesize what is happening with data centers in Ohio. How do these data centers come to town? How can local governments respond? And finally, how are residents pushing back?
The letter showed up like any other piece of mail. No corporate logo. No return address that meant anything. Just an offer to buy land that had been in the family for decades, for more than it was worth, from a company nobody had heard of.
John Bays farms 42 acres outside Manchester in Adams County. The county auditor values his land at $356,900. The letter offered $750,000. He threw it away. More letters came. Different company names, same pitch, same silence about what the land would be used for. His brother begged him to sell and move to Georgia. Bays stayed.
What he eventually uncovered is a pattern playing out across rural Ohio right now. Technology companies racing to build massive data centers — the facilities that power artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and everything else that runs on the internet — are quietly assembling land through shell corporations created specifically to hide who is buying. The offers are inflated to create urgency. Neighbors who sell put pressure on neighbors who haven’t. Landowners who want answers are asked to sign non-disclosure agreements before getting any.
A family near Piqua received their first contact in February 2024. They didn’t respond. The calls kept coming. By the time the Piqua City Commission approved a resolution for facilitating a 607-acre data center campus, the family had already sold. Not because they wanted to. Because, as they put it, they were too scared to stay.
This is the first move in what has become a recognizable playbook. Shell corporations with names like Buck Canyon Properties or DB Stu LLC show up in property records registered in Delaware, with no public trace of the company behind them. In Brown County, residents tried to research DB Stu LLC after it appeared in local records. “That’s where the trail dissolves,” said Austin Baurichter, a local attorney who began digging into these deals on behalf of residents. “If you Google them, you can’t find anything.” as reported in cleveland.com
The non-disclosure agreements are not a formality. They are the backbone of the strategy. When landowners sign, they cannot compare notes with neighbors. When local officials sign — and some do, early in the process — they cannot tell the public what is being planned on land adjacent to their homes, their farms, their schools. By the time a community learns what is coming, the developer already controls the land, has already engaged legal counsel, and has already begun working with utilities on electrical capacity. The public is not at the beginning of the conversation. It is at the end of one it was never invited to join.
“We’re being gaslighted,” said Emily Harper, was quoted in cleveland.com, a resident who helped form Adams County for Responsible Development after her community started hitting walls trying to get basic answers about what was being built nearby.
In Adams County, an AES Ohio regulatory filing in February 2026 revealed that a data center planned near the former Stuart coal plant could require 1,300 megawatts of electricity — enough to power a million American homes. Residents had been asking questions at county commissioner meetings for months. Commissioners swore at a March meeting they had signed nothing and knew nothing official. Two weeks later, they announced they had met with Amazon representatives earlier that month.
The community learned the company’s name at a public meeting. After years of letters, shell corporations, and silence.
Bays, who spent decades working at the coal plants that once anchored Adams County’s economy, talked to cleveland.com. He is not against development. His county has been bleeding jobs and tax revenue since those plants closed in 2018, taking 700 jobs and $8 million in annual revenue with them. He understands what economic desperation feels like. He just wants a straight answer.
“We need some growth here. We damn sure do,” he said. “We don’t need something that’s going to be rammed down our throats, sneaking.”
That is not an unreasonable thing to ask. It is, in fact, the minimum. And in community after community across Ohio, it is exactly what residents are not getting.
This is the first story in a three-part series on data centers in Ohio. Part 2 publishes Wednesday: what local governments need to do — and what happens when they don’t.
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