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That's smaller than other data center proposals in the ×îÐÂÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ region, which range in size from 50,000 square feet to hundreds of acres. 

"This is not going to be a mega system," Mayor Adrian Shropshire said during the city council meeting Monday night.

The Ferguson City Council discussed the building details after advancing a bill that would grant up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks to turn the 217-acre site into a tech hub and data center. 

Officials said the developer plans to convert a 100,000 square foot warehouse near Payne Avenue and Woodstock Road into a data center that would be added to an existing data center already on site near Emerson Boulevard and West Park Drive. 

The developer, attorney and real estate investor Jim Onder, confirmed the plan after the meeting. Onder said the warehouse would be converted to house computer racks and equipment for a cooling system. The existing data center is 35,000 square feet, he said. 

The Ferguson City Council is expected to take a final vote on whether to approve tax incentives for the project next week. 

If passed, Ferguson would issue up to $22 billion in bonds to help finance the project at West Florissant Avenue and Lucas and Hunt Road. The move would grant up to 15 years of tax abatements on real estate, personal property and sales taxes through 2050. The site is zoned for industrial use. 

City records call for a "center for technology, energy innovation, advanced manufacturing and research," involving a renovation of the existing buildings, including an existing data center on site, and as much as $19.5 billion in equipment purchases. Copeland Electric, an air conditioning and refrigeration company that has owned the campus since Emerson moved to Clayton in 2022, would remain on site.

The project would be among the largest economic development projects in the ×îÐÂÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ region but comes amid local and national opposition to data centers over concerns about energy consumption, rising utility bills, pollution and tax breaks.

The City of ×îÐÂÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´, which recently approved a $3.1 billion, 525,000-square-foot data center at the old Famous-Barr warehouse near ×îÐÂÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´' historic Armory venue, has long had smaller data centers that fit into one city block or an office building. A data center spanning several blocks in Berkeley has been under construction since 2024.

But with a boom in artificial intelligence and cloud computing, tech companies have pushed for more space to grow. And the majority of about a dozen proposals for data centers locally have been for "hyperscale" facilities that would occupy hundreds of acres at a time, mostly in rural areas.

In Ferguson, the Library District and the Ferguson-Florissant School District both published letters calling on the city to renegotiate for more tax revenue. The ×îÐÂÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ County NAACP called on Ferguson to pause its "aggressive" timeline to renegotiate benefits for residents and environmental protections. And Ferguson residents have packed meetings in recent weeks to oppose tax breaks for the project and raise concerns about its impacts on neighboring homes.

On Monday, Councilman Jamil Franklin called for the council to withhold approval of the incentives until they could get more details about what exactly the data center buildings would look like. 

The concept plan only identifies the buildings that would be used for data centers and their square footage, he said. The 200 megawatts called for in the plan would be difficult to fit into just the two buildings and would still use diesel generators for backup power, which is a concern for residents.

"We haven’t gotten a detailed facility plan of what is going to go into those buildings," Franklin said. "If you just give them a blank check, they can do anything they want to do." 

Councilman Nick Kasoff said the data center would be limited in scope because the site can't be modified to bring in more electrical or gas power. The council doesn't need to demand building details to decide whether to incentivize redevelopment of the campus, which can already house a data center without council approval because it's zoned for industrial use, he said.

Architectural drawings would hinder the project by costing Onder "hundreds of thousands of dollars," Kasoff said.  

"The one thing council has to consider here is will we grant them a tax abatement and under what terms will we do so," he said. "And for that I don’t see why we would have architectural drawings..."

The council later advanced the bill to a final consideration without a vote. 

The council reintroduced the bill after Mayor Shropshire was sworn into office last week, after his predecessor had already introduced the bill for public consideration. Shropshire, who was elected April 7, succeeded Ella Jones, whose administration had negotiated the incentives. 

As a condition for the tax breaks, Ferguson is requiring Onder to create an additional 100 full-time jobs and invest at least $175 million in the campus by 2029.

The former Emerson campus, at 8000 West Florissant Avenue, neighbors the Norwood Hills Country Club, Westfall shopping plaza and hundreds of homes along Bermuda Drive and Woodstock Road. It features 11 buildings in all that span nearly a million square feet of space.

That includes the 35,000 square-foot data center Emerson installed in 2009 at a cost of $50 million as part of an effort to consolidate its infrastructure and make it more energy efficient. 

Emerson left the campus, which it had occupied since the 1940s, last year and moved to a new high-rise in Clayton. The company transferred the campus to Copeland in 2022.