Indian River State College has reportedly canceled plans to build a controversial data center in Okeechobee County after a spokesperson with the Florida Department of Commerce accused the college of lying when it applied for and received a $1.5 million state grant in 2024.
IRSC’s Vero Beach campus is the only four-year college in Indian River County and programs at the school are supported by island philanthropists, in part because it provides extensive workforce training, graduating nurses, hospitality and construction workers, tradesmen and others whose skills are needed in the area.
In a news release last year, IRSC announced its plans for “Okee-One,” which it called “an innovative data campus” combining “an operational data center and a specialized learning environment” to be built on 205 acres on U.S. Highway 441 N in Okeechobee.
The news release also announced that the college had received $1.5 million from the state’s Rural Infrastructure Fund, a $22 million fund created to encourage job creation in rural Florida communities. The release said the college would use the grant to “complete comprehensive property assessment and planning” to develop “the nation’s most sustainable data campus.”
However, the Tampa Bay Times recently reported that Emily Hetherington, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Commerce, sent the newspaper an email accusing IRSC of “deceiving state officials into funding the campus,” saying that the project’s stated plans were “based on falsehoods and pretenses about energy and water.”
Heatherington also told the paper that the state had declined IRSC’s application for a second round of funding. Officials with Okeechobee County have since reported that IRSC has canceled the project.
“The data center is not going to be built,” Okeechobee County Commissioner Tim Borroughs said last month.
Area officials initially welcomed the project, saying it would be a boon to the local economy and would also benefit students who would learn forward-looking data and AI skills. But as residents heard more about it, opposition began to grow, spurred on by reports of massive data centers springing up in rural communities across the country.
These “hyperscale” data centers drain huge amounts of power from the communities and require millions of gallons of water per day to cool the data networks. Some data centers generate a low-frequency drone that can reach 100 decibels and be heard up to 2 miles away.
That level of sound – which is equivalent to a nightclub dance floor or a shop with power tools running – “poses clear, measurable risk to human hearing,” according to U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Okeechobee residents feared Okee-One would overburden the community’s energy supply and extract millions of gallons of water from sensitive state-managed wetlands and wildlife preserves that surround the site.
Andrew Treadwell, IRSC’s associate vice president of government and community relations, tried at the Feb. 26 Okeechobee County Commission meeting to assure residents that Okee-One would be miniscule compared to a mega data center, but they did not take him at his word.
Wyatt Deihl, an Okeechobee native with a master’s degree in social and behavioral sciences from Yale University, started an online petition at Change.org to stop the project. More than 500 people signed the petition on the first day, a number that eventually grew to 3,286.
“This project became a wake-up call for our community,” Deihl told Vero Beach 32963. “People realized how quickly massive industrial-scale data center developments can move forward without meaningful public awareness or input. I think communities across the country are increasingly asking whether these projects truly serve local residents or primarily benefit outside corporations.”
Many who signed the petition angrily accused commissioners of welcoming the project without first doing their homework. But because the site is owned by the college, a state entity, IRSC does not need local approvals or permits for the project.
Treadwell admitted to commissioners at the Feb. 26 meeting that the college wanted to increase the size of the data center and was seeking additional funding from the state and private partners to increase power at the site to more than the 9 megawatts, which is the maximum wattage Florida Power & Light said it could provide.
“We want to make sure that Indian River State College reserves computer power and has the ability to store our data here in Florida and not send it somewhere else,” Treadwell said.
Treadwell said that J. Alex Kelly, Florida’s secretary of commerce, supported the project and had introduced the college to “a contact very high up” at Nvidia – a $5 trillion “global technology powerhouse that stands as the foundational engine of the artificial intelligence revolution and a pioneer in accelerated computing,” that provides a full suite of hardware, software and networking gear needed to operate massive hyperscale data centers.
“We will be engaged in discussions about how we can power up more of the site,” Treadwell told commissioners.
Two months later at the commission’s April 23 meeting, Burroughs told attendees that he had spoken to Kelly that morning and that Kelly told him that IRSC had canceled the data center project. The audience cheered loudly.
Burroughs said Kelly also told him that some of what the college was doing had violated the terms of the grant application and that IRSC would be required to return almost half of the $1.5 million Rural Infrastructure Fund grant.
The property where the data center was planned is the site of the former Florida School for Boys at Okeechobee, a state-operated juvenile detention center that housed hundreds of young men and boys who for decades reported suffering physical and psychological abuse by staff members.
The state closed the facility in 2020, and Florida lawmakers established a $20 million compensation fund for victims. Gov. Ron DeSantis transferred the reform school property to IRSC in June 2023.
But some protesters objected to the college developing the site, which stands as a somber reminder of its painful history. Rumors persist that some of the mistreated boys may be secretly buried on the property. Dozens of bodies were unearthed at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, which was a sister campus to the Okeechobee reform school.
Andrew Treadwell, IRSC President Timothy Moore and IRSC Public Information Officer Kathleen Walker did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
