Kentucky Industrial Alliance LLC Data Center, Cave City, Kentucky

Kentucky Industrial Alliance wants to build a $4.8 billion, 1,200 megawatt data center campus called Cave Point Commerce Center just north of downtown Cave City, Barren County, Kentucky, the gateway town to Mammoth Cave National Park. After Cave City passed a 12-month moratorium on data centers in May 2026, the company sued the city, its council and the joint city-county planning commission on June 8, 2026. The two lawsuits, over the moratorium and over a 2024 annexation, have been combined, and the next status conference is set for November 23, 2026.

The joint planning commission had drafted rules for where data centers could go, but the city council voted those down on May 11, 2026 in favor of a pause, and passed the moratorium on second reading on May 20, halting all zoning, conditional-use, building and site-plan approvals for data centers in the city for a year. "A moratorium was our only option to get something passed quickly in a special called meeting," said council member Leticia Cline, who said rewriting the zoning ordinance the normal way could have taken up to 120 days.

The company's plans were not public when the council acted; they came to light through the lawsuit and describe a 600 acre campus of ten 200,000 square foot buildings, half powered by a gas-fired plant Kentucky Industrial Alliance would build on site and half by Farmers Rural Electric Cooperative. The company says the project would pay $45.2 million in property tax, give Cave City about $2.9 million a year, which city documents show as more than three quarters of the city's operating budget, and create about 360 direct and indirect jobs.

Cave City's lawyers argue the company filed only a two-page application on May 11 with no development plan attached, calling it "a woefully incomplete (and potentially inaccurate) development plan application" filed in "an apparent rushed effort to frustrate Cave City's legitimate authority to attend to the health, wellness and safety of its residents."

Angie Dawn Herald, whose family farms just southeast of the site, has counted seven sinkholes on her own land: "With the constant vibration of a data center and a power plant above, I feel like we're going to have more and more of these sinkholes that keep falling in. I don't want my home to end up like the Corvette Museum," a reference to the 2014 sinkhole collapse under the National Corvette Museum in Bowling Green. Council member Leticia Cline said her own worry is eminent domain for new substations or transmission lines: "There's going to have to be land taken from somewhere," and added, "I'm 100% against a data center being the identity of the entrance to Mammoth Cave."