Project Spade data center, New Florence, Missouri

Construction is under way on Project Spade, a Google data center campus on the former Hoette Farms tree farm off Interstate 70 at New Florence, in Montgomery County, Missouri. The developer for the Google project is Related Digital. The county completed its administrative review in January 2026 and delivered construction permits in March, and by June excavators and dump trucks covered the site.

The campus sits in the southeast quadrant of the I-70 and Highway 19 interchange, on about 780 acres in unincorporated Montgomery County and 130 acres inside New Florence. The plan was amended from three buildings of 1,080,920 square feet to two of about 800,000 square feet each, with a closed-loop air-cooled system, two on-site wells mainly for employee use, and both an Ameren substation and an applicant-owned substation. Related Digital says the campus will deliver 1.2 gigawatts of utility capacity. Google has pledged $15 billion for Missouri infrastructure including the New Florence data center, and says it will work with Ameren to add 500 megawatts of new power capacity to the state grid; the company expects 2,000 construction jobs.

Across the interstate, Amazon Web Services is building Project Green, which would span roughly 1,000 acres. Amazon plans 17 buildings there; together the two campuses cover 1,900 acres of land the county made shovel-ready in 2023 with $5 million in COVID-19 recovery funds. Montgomery County agreed to a plan for Google to pay all of its real estate property taxes in exchange for a 70% abatement on personal property taxes.

As late as December 2025 the company behind Project Spade had not been disclosed, and county commissioners had signed a non-disclosure agreement for the south site. “We signed an NDA, looked at over by legal council for the south project. Why? Because the people that are over here screaming right now, they would have been over there screaming at the land owners because they wanted to sell their properties,” Presiding Commissioner Ryan Poston told a heated December 2025 town hall. “Is it going to affect our well pressure? We have a lot of irrigation systems around here and they say sometimes that can affect things,” resident Tammy Ridgley asked at the same meeting. Brenda Buechele, who lives less than 3 miles from the Google site, said she had trouble with road conditions until she asked the county commission to limit traffic: “I feel like we win little battles every day, all day long.”

The residents' group Preserve Montgomery County sued the county and the Missouri Department of Economic Development in February 2026 to halt the Amazon data center, claiming inadequate public notice, Sunshine Law violations and a failure to weigh the tax abatement. In September 2026 Cole County Circuit Judge Cotton Walker ruled the group has standing and can pursue most of its claims, including that the county did not adequately inform the community about the data centers' water and electricity use, while dismissing the state department from the case. More than 100 people came to the group's town hall in the Montgomery County High School gym in September.

Harry Cope, a longtime resident, is running this fall for presiding commissioner against Poston, who supports the projects. The lawsuit continues against Montgomery County in Cole County Circuit Court, the latest development as of late September 2026, while construction goes on.