Missouri leaders are celebrating Google’s announcement that the company will build a $15 billion data center in Montgomery County. According to Gov. Mike Kehoe, the project is the largest single investment in the state’s history.
The massive center will be just over an hour’s drive west of St. Louis.
“This data center will create thousands of construction jobs as it is being built and hundreds of full-time jobs once it is operational,” said Ruth Porat, Google’s Chief Investment Officer. “Importantly, every one of those full-time jobs supports another nine jobs in the area.”
In an effort to ease local residents concerns about electric bills, the company said it will pay for 100% of the power it uses through an agreement with Ameren Missouri. A state law passed last year already requires data centers to pay 100% of the cost of power use and infrastructure.
An email from Google also stated that the data center will use “air-cooled technology, limiting water consumption to domestic uses like kitchens to preserve local resources.”
Gov. Kehoe said the data center project will help everyday Missourians.
“I know there’s a lot of controversy sometimes about various projects,” he said. “But at the end of the day, again, if we put faces and names with what this means and real homes and real jobs and the ripple effect — that’s the hardware store guy selling the drill gun down to the person who didn’t have a job before but now has a job, buys one and the truck driver that brought it to him and everything that goes along with it.”
Google’s data center will be located close to Amazon’s planned data center along I-70 near New Florence.
Meanwhile, opponents to the planned Google and Amazon data centers in Montgomery County have filed a lawsuit that is designed to stop the building of these centers. The lawsuit is scheduled to be heard in Cole County Circuit Court on June 1.
Copyright © 2026 · Missourinet