Franklin County, Missouri Rezoned 1,065 Acres for Two Data Centers

The Franklin County Commission voted Sept. 15 to rezone two tracts of farmland west of St. Louis from agricultural to industrial use, clearing the way for two data center campuses. One is Provident Data Centers' Gateway Digital Campus near Villa Ridge, about 575 acres off Interstate 44 and adjacent to the Shaw Nature Reserve. The other is Beltline's Meramec Valley Technology Park south of Pacific, roughly 490 acres. The same session adopted county data center regulations setting noise standards and construction hours and requiring a $20 million escrow, with fines of $20,000 a day for violations.

Both rezonings had been contested since March, when a planning and zoning hearing on the two applications ran close to 11 hours and drew more than 174 residents, most of them opposed. In April the planning commission recommended the Provident site 8-1 and rejected the Beltline site 4-5. The commission approved both anyway. Project trackers list the Provident campus at 2,000 construction jobs and 250 permanent positions, and the Beltline investment has been reported at $16 billion. Neither developer has published a megawatt figure.

The county vote lands on top of a state load pipeline that is already under contract. In its second-quarter 2026 results, Ameren reported 2.8 gigawatts of executed electric service agreements with large customers, primarily Google and Amazon, which broke ground during the quarter on a combined $25 billion of projects. Ameren expects those sales to begin in the second half of 2027 and to raise total Ameren Missouri sales 60 percent by the end of 2029 against 2025 levels. Behind that sit another 0.6 gigawatts under construction agreements without a service agreement and 4 gigawatts with completed interconnection studies. The utility's capital plan runs $31.8 billion from 2026 through 2030, $21.3 billion of it at Ameren Missouri, and more than $71 billion through 2035.

For commercial electricians, a greenfield campus at this scale is years of work before a server is racked. The early scope is underground duct bank, temporary power, and site substation and getaway construction, followed by medium-voltage distribution, switchgear lineups, busway, generator and UPS installation, grounding, and commissioning support. Roughly 1,065 acres across the two sites means the site electrical work alone carries multiple crews through multiple phases, and campuses of this size are typically built in blocks rather than all at once.

Missouri's licensing structure shapes who can bid the work. The state has issued a statewide electrical contractor license through the Division of Professional Registration since January 2019, requiring $500,000 in liability insurance and at least one statewide licensee employed at a supervisory level. That license does not replace local permitting or inspection, which counties and municipalities still handle. A contractor working in a political subdivision that does not require a local license is not required to hold the statewide one either. On pay, 2025 federal wage data puts the Missouri electrician median at $65,410 a year, or $31.45 an hour, against $63,190 nationally, with the 90th percentile at $104,060.

A rezoning is not a building permit, and neither campus has broken ground. What Franklin County settled Tuesday is whether the ground is available at all.