Kalamazoo County Data Center, Kalamazoo, Michigan

Franklin Partners' planned data center on South 26th Street and East N Avenue in Pavilion Township, Kalamazoo County, Michigan, has been on hold since October 2025, when the real estate company paused it after residents objected. "Public displeasure is not a way we look at doing business. We want to make sure our interests are aligned with the community," co-founder Don Shoemaker said at the time, adding that the company was considering other uses for the site.

The land is an industrial-zoned plot Franklin Partners has owned for about three years. In August 2025 Franklin Partners and the economic development group Southwest Michigan First asked the township to add data centers as a special exception use in its Industrial-2 district; the company said it was marketing the property for data centers and might build on speculation to attract a tenant.

Franklin's Will Schumacker told planners a 138 kilovolt power line runs along N Avenue and said a data center would pose "zero cost" to the township. Franklin had not submitted formal site plans; the request was only for the zoning change, and the size and exact location of any data center were not shared.

A planning commission meeting on the change drew so many people that its chair, Stan Strzalkowski, counted the crowd to make sure it stayed within the fire code limit. "We are not all on the same side of a lot of issues. We're all here on the same side of this one because we all know that we can't live for seven days without drinkable water," resident Elizabeth Clark told Michigan Public.

Residents of Pavilion Estates worried about their already high water bills and about contamination, and Vicksburg resident Katelyn Clarey cited electricity costs and emissions from generators: "People felt very surprised and blindsided in that it was going very, very quickly." Township Supervisor John Speeter said a data center's bills should not spill onto neighbors: "If anything, there might be some economies of scale that their bills may go down because of the larger wires and additional usage."

Since then, other Kalamazoo County governments have paused data centers. Comstock Township adopted a one-year moratorium on accepting or processing data center applications on March 16, 2026, while it studies regulations.

The City of Kalamazoo adopted a one-year pause on data centers, battery storage, crypto mining and AI data centers by resolution on August 17, 2026, and is writing it into its zoning code; a public hearing and second reading are set for October 5, which would restart the one-year clock. The city's planning commission also recommended a cross-functional task force of residents, utilities and industry to help draft the eventual rules.

Any revival in Pavilion Township would start with the zoning change: the township planning commission would make a recommendation and the Pavilion Township Board would decide. Speeter said the item would be off the township board's agenda for the rest of 2025, and as of March 2026 the Pavilion Township project was "on hold until further notice," according to a notice on the township's website reported by WOOD TV.