CloudCenters LLC Proposes Major Data Center Expansion at Former Lockformer Site

A 256,000-square-foot data center doesn’t just appear on a zoning map; it lands—with weight—on a community, a power grid, a real estate market, and increasingly, on a region's clean energy calculus. That's exactly what CloudCenters LLC is betting on with its proposed development at the former Lockformer Company property, a site that carries its own complicated history before a single server rack gets installed.

The project is big, but the real story isn't the square footage.

What CloudCenters LLC Is Actually Proposing

The former Lockformer Company site is not a blank slate. The metal fabrication firm left behind a legacy that goes well beyond manufacturing—the property is known for significant environmental contamination, which makes CloudCenters LLC's choice of location either bold, pragmatic, or both.

Proposing a 256,000-square-foot facility on a brownfield site signals a specific development thesis: that remediated industrial land can be repurposed for high-value digital infrastructure. That's not a new idea, but it's one that's gaining serious traction as greenfield sites near urban power nodes become harder to secure and more expensive to permit.

CloudCenters LLC is essentially making the case that yesterday's industrial liabilities can become tomorrow's infrastructure assets—and the data center market's appetite for power-proximate land is strong enough to make that math work.

For context, 256,000 square feet puts this facility in the mid-to-large range for a single-campus data center. Hyperscale campuses from AWS, Microsoft, or Google routinely exceed a million square feet, but those are outliers. A facility this size can realistically support 20–50 megawatts of critical IT load depending on design density—meaningful capacity that would serve enterprise colocation customers, cloud service providers, or a mix of both.

Local Infrastructure and Economic Ripple Effects

Data centers have a reputation for being economic miracles on paper and quiet neighbors in practice. The jobs numbers look impressive during construction—hundreds of trades workers, engineers, and project managers—but stabilized operations at a facility this size typically employ somewhere between 30 and 100 full-time staff. That's not a factory floor. It's a highly skilled, well-compensated workforce, but communities expecting a data center to solve broad employment challenges are often disappointed.

What actually moves the needle locally is the tax base and the utility relationship.

A facility of this scale will generate significant property tax revenue and, depending on state incentive structures, negotiate directly with the utility for dedicated power infrastructure—substations, transmission upgrades, and potentially new interconnection agreements that benefit the surrounding grid, not just the data center itself.

The effect on local real estate is more nuanced. Industrial land values near large data center developments tend to increase, particularly for parcels with existing power infrastructure. But residential neighbors don't always celebrate. Cooling systems generate noise. Backup diesel generators—a standard feature of any Tier III or Tier IV facility—create air quality and aesthetic concerns. Community relations aren't an afterthought in data center development; they're a permitting risk.

Energy Efficiency and the Technology Stack

The data center industry measures itself in Power Usage Effectiveness, or PUE—a ratio of total facility power to IT equipment power. A PUE of 1.0 is theoretical perfection; every watt goes to computing. Legacy facilities built in the 2000s often ran at 1.8 or higher. Modern hyperscale facilities routinely hit 1.2 or below. The difference isn't trivial: at 30 megawatts of IT load, dropping from 1.5 to 1.2 PUE saves roughly 9 megawatts of continuous demand—enough to power thousands of homes.

Any facility proposed today, particularly one seeking permits in an environmentally conscious regulatory environment, will need to demonstrate a credible efficiency roadmap. That means liquid cooling infrastructure—either direct-to-chip or immersion cooling—rather than relying solely on traditional computer room air conditioning units. It means advanced power distribution architectures that minimize conversion losses. And it increasingly means designing for flexibility, because the AI workloads now driving data center demand have very different thermal profiles than the enterprise applications that dominated five years ago.

The facilities being designed right now will spend 20-plus years processing workloads that don't exist yet—which means adaptability isn't a feature; it's a survival requirement.

Renewable Energy and the Clean Power Question

This is where data center development intersects directly with InfraSale's core readership. A facility consuming 30–50 megawatts continuously needs a serious answer to the clean energy question—not just for ESG optics, but because major enterprise and hyperscale customers increasingly require documented renewable energy matching as a condition of doing business.

The options aren't simple. Renewable Energy Certificates are the easy path but the least credible. Power Purchase Agreements with local solar or wind developers are stronger but require offtake certainty that a new facility can't always guarantee in its early years. On-site generation—rooftop solar, parking canopy arrays—can offset a meaningful percentage of load but rarely covers the full demand of a facility this dense.

The most sophisticated operators are now pursuing 24/7 carbon-free energy matching, which requires not just renewable generation but storage—and ideally, proximity to grid-scale battery assets that can deliver clean power during evening hours when solar generation drops. A brownfield site redevelopment that integrates battery storage infrastructure alongside the data center itself would represent genuinely advanced thinking.

Whether CloudCenters LLC's proposal includes a serious renewable integration plan is a critical detail that will shape both regulatory reception and customer interest.

Why Brownfield Data Center Development Matters Beyond This Project

Step back from the specifics of this proposal and you see a broader pattern forming. Data center demand is growing at a pace that has surprised even optimistic forecasters—AI infrastructure buildout, cloud migration, and edge computing are all contributing simultaneously. The constraint isn't capital or technology. It's land with power.

Brownfield sites—former industrial properties with existing utility connections, road access, and often favorably zoned land—are increasingly attractive precisely because they can compress development timelines. Securing new grid interconnection for a greenfield site can take three to five years in many markets. A site with existing substation infrastructure and established utility relationships can cut that dramatically.

The data center industry's turn toward brownfield redevelopment isn't just an environmental narrative—it's a practical response to a real infrastructure bottleneck.

The Lockformer site's contamination history adds complexity, but it also adds a compelling story: remediation investment, community benefit, and infrastructure modernization wrapped in a single project. Regulators and municipalities that might otherwise resist large data center developments have shown more flexibility when the alternative is a stagnant contaminated site.

Long-term, expect more of this. As prime urban and suburban land with clean power access gets absorbed, developers will push further into industrial brownfields, decommissioned power plant sites, and former manufacturing corridors. The economics work when data center demand is strong enough—and right now, demand is exceptionally strong.

For investors, landowners, and infrastructure developers tracking opportunities in this space: the Lockformer site proposal is worth watching not just for its own outcome, but as a signal of where data center development is heading. Brownfield-to-digital-infrastructure conversion is a strategy, not a one-off. If CloudCenters LLC executes successfully here, expect similar projects to follow—and expect the brownfield premium that industrial landowners can command to increase accordingly.

[INTERNAL LINK: brownfield redevelopment] [INTERNAL LINK: data center demand] [INTERNAL LINK: renewable energy solutions]

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