100 Billion Dollars Sounds Like a Lot. How Much Actually Stays in McCracken County?

ProtectMcCrackenCounty

Aug 11

5 min read

One hundred billion dollars is headed to the old uranium plant in the form of a giant AI data center. Officials are calling it one of the largest investments in Kentucky history, and they may be right. But underneath that number sits the question nobody at the podium is answering, and it is the only one that matters for the people who live here: how much of that money actually stays in McCracken County?

The honest answer is: not much.

What a hundred billion dollars really buys

A data center is not a factory. A factory buys steel and parts from local suppliers and runs for forty years with a floor full of workers. A data center is mostly a warehouse full of expensive machines. Look at how these projects break down, and about two-thirds of the cost is computer and mechanical equipment. The servers, the AI chips, the cooling systems, the giant gas turbines, the batteries. None of that is made here. The chips come from overseas. The turbines come from a handful of national manufacturers. The money for all of it leaves the moment it is spent.

That leaves construction, which is the only slice that can really land locally. But Paducah has never built anything like this, so most of the specialized crews get brought in from out of town. Studies of other data centers find only about a fifth of construction materials are bought locally. Run realistic numbers on the whole thing and you land somewhere around two to four cents of every dollar staying in the local economy. And even that is a one-time event that ends when the concrete is poured.

The real, lasting local money is not the hundred billion at all. It is the payroll from the permanent jobs, which the companies put at about 600 for the entire hub. That is a real number, and a modest one, next to a hundred billion.

The land is rented from Washington

One detail got very little attention. Brookfield is not buying this land. It is renting it from the federal government.

That changes things. When a company buys land, at least a local seller gets paid, and the county gets to collect property tax on it for years to come. Neither happens here.

The lease payments go to Washington, not to anyone in McCracken County. The county cannot tax federal land, so that revenue stream is off the table before we even start. And the lease terms, how much and for how long, have not been made public. So the single biggest piece of ground in this deal generates no local land sale, no local property tax, and no public disclosure. It is a rental agreement between a global investment firm and the federal government, and we are the neighbors.

The contamination is a discount for them and a liability for us

Now for the part that turns the story on its head. We are told the developer is doing us a favor by taking on a contaminated Superfund site. The truth runs the other way.

The cleanup of that site is projected at seventeen billion dollars and runs through 2065, and federal taxpayers pay for it, not the developer. The site already has the heavy power and water infrastructure from its uranium days, all built at public expense, sitting there ready to reuse. Our own county officials said that the existing infrastructure is exactly what makes the site attractive. So the contamination is not a burden the company is bravely absorbing. It is the reason the site is cheap. Federally funded cleanup, prebuilt infrastructure, and a low-cost federal lease all add up to a discount.

The risk is a different story, and it stays here.

The EPA's own guidance from this year warns that building on a Superfund site can disturb capped soil and groundwater, spread contamination, and set back the very cleanup that has kept those chemicals out of the Ohio River for thirty years. Five million people downstream drink from that river. If something goes wrong, the developer can be shielded from liability by taking the right legal steps. The community cannot be shielded from the consequences. The discount is theirs. The liability is ours.

What we are actually asking for

None of this means the answer is no. It means the answer should not be a blind yes.

We are asking for the real numbers before the county commits to anything it cannot undo. Show us what stays local after the machines and the land payments leave. Show us the lease terms and the tax deals instead of hiding them. And fund one independent study of what all of this costs residents, on their power bills, their home prices, their roads and water, and who pays for it. A company managing over a trillion dollars can easily afford that homework. We are the ones who cannot afford to skip it.

A hundred billion dollars is a big number. Our community deserves to know how much of it is really for us, and how much of it is just passing through on its way somewhere else.

Protect McCracken County is a group of local residents asking for transparency and an independent, cumulative environmental review of the data center and nuclear projects proposed on and next to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant Superfund site.