St. Lucie County

The Sentinel Grove Technology Park was designed for approximately 1,218 acres of former citrus groves on the east side of Minute Maid Road, about 2,600 feet north of Orange Avenue (State Road 68), south and east of the South Florida Water Management District's C-25 Canal. The land was purchased for $15 million in July 2024 by Epic Estates 68 LLC, a Tallahassee-based land-banking investment firm. Architect and planning firm HJA Design Studios submitted the application alongside real estate firm Timberline Real Estate Partners.

The scale of what was proposed is difficult to overstate. The applicant's notice described total buildout of 15 million square feet across multiple phases — with 5 million square feet in the first phase alone and an initial capital commitment of approximately $13.5 billion for the first 1,000 megawatts of data center capacity. The buildings would have been around 60 feet tall. The developers projected more than 6,000 high-wage specialized jobs at full buildout, though officials noted the jobs-per-square-foot ratio was lower than typical industrial use.

In late 2025, the St. Lucie County Planning and Zoning Commission voted 4–2 against recommending the comprehensive plan amendment needed to rezone the agricultural land for industrial use. County staff had recommended approval. Residents raised concerns about water consumption (the parcel is already allocated 2.2 million gallons per day), stormwater management, generator emissions, noise, and the transition of productive agricultural land to industrial use.

Commissioner Jamie Fowler called it "the hardest vote to date" and said commissioners planned to visit existing data centers in Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia before making a final decision. That decision never came. On February 26, 2026, the developers voluntarily withdrew the land-use application. St. Lucie County officials said the withdrawal was a response to advancing state legislation — specifically SB 484, SB 1118, HB 1007, and HB 1517, which collectively would create Florida's first statewide framework for regulating hyperscale data centers. The parcel remains zoned agricultural. Epic Estates 68 LLC still owns the land.

A much smaller, separately-sponsored project is in early planning within St. Lucie County. Atlas Compute, a Miami-based company, has obtained zoning verification for a proposed site within the Midway Industrial Park in Fort Pierce. The planned facility is designed for an initial capacity of 240 MW with expansion potential up to 1 GW, intended for large-scale AI, cloud, and machine learning workloads.

The design emphasizes closed-loop, water-free cooling — a significant differentiator from projects that rely on evaporative cooling towers. Atlas Compute is partnering with Penguin Solutions for a facility specifically engineered around NVIDIA GPU-based compute. No formal development application had been submitted as of early 2026. Operational target: 2027. Given the early stage and the industrial-park siting, Atlas Compute has not drawn the same community opposition as Sentinel Grove.