RICHMOND HILL – After its Tuesday meeting, the Development Authority of Bryan County shot down a potential land sale to a company interested in building a data center in Richmond Hill.

“The consensus of the DABC board is that it is not willing to sell the property to LN Compute,” Ryan Purvis, CEO of the DABC wrote in an email to the company, Tuesday, that was shared with the Bryan County News.

This Board consensus came after an executive session at its Oct. 13 meeting. Purvis said this was his first time discussing the inquiry with the board.

Purvis first received an email from the Georgia-based digital infrastructure and Bitcoin mining company on Oct. 1. Eric Yao, the CEO of LN Compute Inc. emailed the Development Authority about interest in buying a roughly 19-acre parcel, owned by the authority, at 901 Commerce Dr. in the Belfast Commerce Park, to build an Artificial Intelligence/High Performance Computing data center. Purvis didn’t respond to the inquiry until after meeting with the board, Tuesday.

Yao also sent an inquiry to Brian Crooks, the Richmond Hill planning and zoning director, on Oct. 1, about the city’s data center use allowances and zoning requirements for the site.

The summary of the proposed data center read it would be a 30 megawatt facility, a single phase build, an approximately $150 million capital investment, create 20 permanent job positions, and have no process emissions and no cryptocurrency mining.

Yao wrote that the facility “would use closed-loop liquid cooling with dry coolers, with no municipal water used for cooling and no groundwater withdrawal; water demand would be limited to sanitary use for approximately 20 staff.”

In the Oct. 1 email, Yao wrote that LN Compute had been in touch with Purvis last year regarding a data center adjacent to the Coastal EMC Belfast substation. He also inquired about land pricing and PILOT terms for a project of the proposed data center’s scale.

PILOT, or payment(s) in lieu of taxes, refers to federal payments that help local governments offset losses in property taxes due to tax-exempt ownership or use of real property.

“We understand the Authority's interest in seeing land put to use: we would accept a repurchase right in the Authority's favor if construction has not commenced within 18 months of closing,” he wrote in the email to Purvis. “For the abatement period, we are open to the Authority's standard bond-for-title / PILOT structure, with title reverting to LN at the end of the term.”

Purvis said this is the first data center inquiry his office has received in about a year-and-a-half. He said the Development Authority isn’t pursuing data centers.

“We try to vet every single project fairly,” he said. “A company may express interest in a project, and we ask them, ‘What are the jobs? What are the investments? Is this environmentally safe?

Is it a safe procedure for our local communities? Is this something that matches the mission of our community?’”

Crooks responded to the inquiry in an email that the proposed data center is not an allowed use under the 2013 Belfast Commerce PUD and would require an appeal in front of the Board of Zoning Appeals.

Richmond Hill does not currently have a specific data center ordinance. While the facilities are prohibited under the city’s unified development ordinance, there is more flexibility under the 2013 Belfast Commerce Center planned unit development.

Under the PUD, data centers aren’t a listed use, but any “other future new or unclassified uses, subject to meeting the intent of this planning area and approval by the City of Richmond Hill, could be allowed” but would require an appeal before Richmond Hill’s City Council to determine its applicability.

LN Compute’s catch phrase on its website is “Powering Bitcoin today. Engineered for AI tomorrow.” The company builds and operates 100% liquid-cooled digital infrastructure with five operational Bitcoin mining sites across several rural Georgia counties.

In March, LN Compute was denied permission to build a cryptomining data center in Blackshear, after strong opposition from local residents, according to the Blackshear Times.

The facility proposed for Richmond Hill represents the company’s “next cycle” of Artificial Intelligence and High-Performance Computing.

In order to fill out an application for the Board of Zoning Appeals, LN Compute would have to secure authorization from the land owner, the Development Authority, before submitting an application.

Purvis said when it came to responding to LN Compute’s inquiry, the board wanted to be “very direct and say no.”

Lucille Lannigan is a Growth and Development reporter with Morris Multimedia. Reach her at llannigan@morrisnews.com.