A year ago, in a 4-3 vote, the Lowndes County Planning Commission approved property owner Pope Langdale’s request to rezone 719 acres of his land from residential to manufacturing in north Valdosta.
A week later, on July 8, 2025, the Lowndes County Board of Commissioners approved the rezoning from low residential (R-1) to light manufacturing (M-1), “to be developed into a large warehouse type campus,” according to meeting minutes. The vote was unanimously approved.
At both meetings, Valdosta residents, including those from the Foxborough neighborhood that borders Langdale’s land, objected to the request and approval.
The reasons echoed the same sentiments that Georgians across the state in counties like Muscogee, Troup, Monroe and Twiggs have all raised: pollution of local waters with “forever chemicals,” noise, flooding potential, loss in property value, removal of trees and habitat loss.
Since then, no application for a data center has been put forth, nor has an ordinance to regulate data centers been created.
All citizens know is data center developer DC Blox, a multi-tenant hyperscale company based in Atlanta, has been speaking with Langdale and asked him not to discuss anything by signing a non-disclosure agreement with the Southeast data center giant.
DC Blox has 11 hyperscale data centers, which include some co-location data center projects. In Georgia, two are in Atlanta: Douglasville with a 200 megawatt capacity and Rockdale County with a 154 MW capacity. The company recently secured an $850 million loan in assets to add to their valuation. The company is managed by Future Standard, with $93 billion worth of assets, according to a DC Blox May news release.
Over the course of the last year, while Langdale awaits an offer to sell his land to DC Blox or the two continue to strategize about bringing in a data center campus to Valdosta, data center activists have been building their own coalition, rallying hundreds to try to stop data centers from coming to their southern Georgia city.
“Langdale is a huge name in Valdosta,” Ann Kasun, an anti-data center activist, told the Ledger-Enquirer. “The family is old money; attorneys, pine tree manufacturing, things like that.”
To get any information about the project — how much power the data center needs, how large it’s going to be, how much water it’s going to need, or how much tax revenue it will bring — data center activists like Kasun and others in Lowndes County Against Data Centers (LCAD) have hosted town halls, and even invited Langdale.
They’ve sent open records request to the Board of Commissioners, held weekly meetings, created petitions, made yard signs and t-shirts, created a GoFundMe page and put up anti-data center billboards near Langdale’s land.
At one of the town halls in February, Langdale revealed DC Blox is the developer he is speaking with, but he wouldn’t say much more because of the NDA.
“Anytime he’s talked to us, it’s been ‘well, this is what the CEO (of DC Blox) is telling me, so he’s getting messages from the CEO, and he’s just believing it as truth, as opposed to what actually happens with these data centers,” said Joel Dion, a concerned citizen who lives in the Foxborough neighborhood.
The LCAD group was created in December 2025 and has since ballooned to 1,200 people in a Facebook group.
Michael Noll, one of the leading LCAD activists, helped organize town halls in February and April and plans to do another in August. The former cultural geography, geopolitics and ethnic conflict teacher at Valdosta State University was a geoscientist by trade, he told the Ledger-Enquirer.
Now, he anxiously awaits the results from a feasibility study currently underway by Terracon, a land assessment consulting company. He believes they will find that the site is mostly limestone and can give way to sinkholes, and therefore is not a feasible site, he said.
“I’m hoping that they will find out what we have already known for some time, that you are in an area where there was limestone, there’s a danger for sinkhole development,” he said. “If you have these forever chemicals, the PFAS, can potentially spill, and some of that goes directly into the aquifer and will literally pollute trillions of gallons of water.”
Nolls published a column in the Valdosta Daily Times earlier this month talking about the dangers of this project in an area known to have limestone.
When asked on the status of the geology report, Terracon’s Senior Communication Strategist Brenda Kramer said the company is not in a position to provide any remarks or information regarding the project or site.
Neither Langdale nor DC Blox have responded to multiple requests by the Ledger-Enquirer for results of the Terracon study or other project details.
While the amount of electricity and transmission to power a data center is unknown, Georgia Power received permission from the Public Service Commission to expand thousands of megawatts of gas plants, and some battery plants, to supply its electricity over the next 10 years. The company testified with the PSC last fall that 90% of their new load requests are for data centers.
Noll is “horrified by the energy consumption that comes with the data center development, because most of it is connected with the burning of fossil fuels,” he said.
“If you look at the measurements that’s going on (at the Mauna Kea observatory), we have now 432 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere,” Noll said. “We have these extreme weather events like Helene, and now we’re still in a drought. If (the power and build out) would be done smart, it could actually be done to a degree, but it’s not about being smart; it’s about making money.”
When asked about the potential Valdosta project, Georgia Power spokesperson Mathew Kent said they generally don’t speak to specific customer projects and could not provide any details.
The stonewalling from Georgia Power, Langdale and DC Blox hasn’t stopped LCAD. They continue to meet weekly and show up at council or commission meetings.
“There’s people that are going to every single county commissioner meeting, and there’s someone, one or two people from the committee, who speak for citizens to be heard,” Kasun said.
Noll said at the end of June, he and others from LCAD submitted an ordinance to the Lowndes County Commissioners with suggestions for noise decibel levels, backup generator use, cooling equipment and more. But they received only “silence” from the commissioners, he said in an email.
In June, LCAD produced a one-minute video showing their love for nature and the outdoors. The billboards near the data center are funded by GoFundMe donations, according to Noll.
“You have to be on top of it the whole time until that monstrosity is going,” Noll said.
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.
