Project Lincoln: OC Data Center (second version), La Grange, Kentucky

Western Hospitality Partners' fallback site for its Oldham County data center was the Sauerbeck Family Drive-In, and that plan ended the way the first one did, with the company withdrawing its application. The company, known as WHP, had moved there in June 2025 after opposition drove it off 267 acres at 3557 North Highway 53, cutting a $6 billion, 600 megawatt project called Project Lincoln to a $1.5 billion one just south of the original land.

The drive-in occupies 30 acres at 3210 DW Griffith Lane between LaGrange and Buckner, next door to Louisville Gas and Electric's Buckner substation and East Kentucky Power Cooperative's Bluegrass Generating Station. The company said the new plan would include its own electric substation, and County Judge-Executive David Voegele said it would have two buildings instead of eight. Voegele called the site zoned industrial, but the county property valuation office listed it as commercial. The company meant to seek the same conditional use permit as a "private utility" from the appointed board of adjustments, a route that bypasses a rezoning vote by the elected fiscal court. That route was what residents had objected to at the first site: "The fact that this was submitted as a conditional use permit, rather than going through planning and zoning, was extremely intentional. It was to take it out of the hands of elected officials," Sarah Little said at a packed technical review committee meeting in May 2025. State Senator Lindsey Tichenor said then that "there's really not a place that I've been able to see that is already prepared to welcome a data center", while the company's representative, Cliff Ashburner, said it had tried to keep communication open through community meetings and a project website.

On July 1, 2025 the fiscal court passed a 150 day moratorium on all data center developments, after an exemption for projects already in progress was taken out of the draft, which put the drive-in plan on hold. Nathan Oberg, president of We Are Oldham County, called it "a win for the group" and said: "It's very reasonable for the county to establish a true moratorium, inclusive for all data centers." The vote was 4 to 2, with Voegele and several other officials recused. The vote came amid a dispute over a May 22, 2025 meeting between officials and the developer, which the deputy judge-executive, Joe Ender, had secretly recorded; he was fired, and accused Voegele and others of corruption and bribery, saying the developer had offered to build the county a sports complex in exchange for zoning approval. Voegele denied it and asked the Attorney General's office to investigate, and state investigators found no evidence of bribery or other criminal wrongdoing. WHAS11 later reported that the developer "ultimately withdrew its application for the Commerce Parkway site as well, ending the Project Lincoln proposal."

The county has since written its own rules: two weeks' notice to anyone living within 1,000 feet of a proposed site, data centers only in commercial or industrial zones and set away from schools, farms and hospitals, and a 10 megawatt cap on power that would keep out hyperscale campuses. "The regulations that we put together and proposed, that I expect to be passed by the court, are all reasonable regulations that will control any small data center that might want to come here in the future," Voegele said. Some magistrates wanted them tougher; at an August 2026 special meeting Stephanie Hawkins said, "We don't know the detriment they'll bring. We don't know the low hum that is present and how that will affect school children and people at work and people in their homes moving forward." The county's moratorium was still in effect then, and the proposed rules had gone back to the planning commission. The fiscal court is scheduled to vote on them on October 6, 2026.