<div class="page-hero-kicker">A public-records investigation · Arkansas · 2026</div> # Arkansas Data Centers Wiki <p class="page-hero-tagline">Who pays for the new generation — Arkansas residential ratepayers, or the hyperscale customers driving the demand?</p> <div class="page-hero-meta"> <span>~$50B announced</span> <span>6 hyperscale sites</span> <span>11 Arkansas FOIA requests</span> <span>Phase 1 complete</span> </div> This wiki documents Arkansas's hyperscale data center buildout — approximately **$50 billion in announced investment**, with AVAIO's Project Leo alone projected at $21 billion and 1 gigawatt of electrical demand (about 5% of state generating capacity). It covers the Act 548 of 2025 tax-exemption framework (which lowered the qualification threshold from $500M to $100M), the Entergy Arkansas rate case at APSC Docket 26-001-U, and the cooling-water + air-permitting + property-tax-PILOT regimes governing each site. The corpus is built from FOIA productions at AEDC, APSC, DEE/DEQ, county assessors, and the Governor's Office, plus the publicly-docketed regulatory filings. ## What's here As of 2026-05-24, **Phase 1 (FOIA filing) is complete** and the regulatory-docket corpus has been substantially built out. Eleven Arkansas FOIA requests have been filed (nine on 2026-05-19, two follow-ups on 2026-05-22); five agency productions have been ingested (Crittenden County Assessor's Google / "Project Pyramid" records; Department of Agriculture's hyperscale water records; Pulaski County government's AVAIO Project Leo planning file; APSC dockets retrieved from the public e-filing system; Ironwood Order No. 9 retrieved 2026-05-24). The wiki layer applies the Karpathy-Hegelion Methodology — three tensions filed (CIAC classification of Google's SRC payments; Ironwood Strategic Investment designation; shell-LLC principal attribution for the Conway and Port of Little Rock developers), four dialectics complete (D001-D003 plus a follow-on D004 on T002 after corpus retrievals closed documentary gaps). Browse the entity, event, source, tension, dialectic, and synthesis pages below. ## Investigation thesis The buildout's electrical demand will require substantial new generation. Cost allocation among customer classes — residential, commercial, industrial, and the new hyperscale class — is decided at APSC. The Act 548 framework provides full sales-and-use exemptions on data-center equipment and electricity. PILOT agreements at the county level provide additional property-tax relief to host communities. Together, these mechanisms can shift the marginal cost of new generation onto residential and small-commercial ratepayers — *unless* the cost-of-service study allocates that cost to the customers driving it. The wiki documents what the records show about how cost is being allocated, what host communities are being compensated, and what the permitting regime requires. ## Browse - **People** — AEDC officials, APSC commissioners ([[Doyle Webb]], [[Justin Tate]], [[Katie Anderson]]), Entergy executives ([[Laura R. Landreaux]], [[J. David Palmer]], [[Matthew S. Klucher]], [[John P. Bethel]]), host-county officials, developer representatives ([[Michael Montfort]], [[Tom Nesel]]), ALJ [[Bridgette M. Frazier]], APSC Staff witness [[Mark Herring]]. - **Organizations** — [[Arkansas Economic Development Commission]], [[Arkansas Public Service Commission]], Arkansas Department of Energy and Environment (DEE/DEQ), [[Entergy Arkansas]], [[AVAIO Digital Partners]], [[Google LLC]] (via Delaware shells [[Altitude Capital, LLC]], [[Forgelight Ventures, LLC]], [[Willowbend Capital, LLC]]), [[Serverfarm]], [[DC Devco]]. - **Concepts** — [[Strategic Investment]], [[Generating Arkansas Jobs Act (GAJA) rider]], [[Ironwood]] / Lake Catherine Unit 5, [[Jefferson Power Station]], [[Arkansas Cypress]], [[Project Pulse]], [[Cost-of-service study]], [[Special rate contract]], [[Water-Use Registration]], [[Sparta Aquifer]], [[Site plan review]], [[Nationwide Permit]]. - **Events** — Datable milestones and FOIA-correspondence events from 2024-09 through 2026-05, including [[2026-02 Entergy Arkansas Files Its Base Rate Case]], [[2026-04 APSC Evidentiary Hearing on the GAJA Rider]], [[2025-11 GROOT LLC Conveys the Project Pyramid Site to the City of West Memphis]], and the FOIA response events for each agency. - **Sources** — per-document pages organized as `wiki/sources/<agency>/<production>/`. Production overviews are available for the Crittenden County Assessor's Project Pyramid records, the Department of Agriculture's water records, the Pulaski County Project Leo planning file, the City of Conway and [[city-conway/conway-corp-stratus-2026-05-29/_overview|Conway Corporation]] Project Stratus productions, the Little Rock Port Authority's Project Boar production, the Pulaski County data-center-moratorium records, and ten APSC dockets (base rate case 26-001-U, GAJA rider 26-008-TF, three CECPN dockets — Ironwood 24-072-U, Jefferson 25-047-U, Cypress 25-054-U — plus the Altitude Capital SRC docket 25-055-P, the Hybar SRC 23-025-P, the LPHLDS tariff docket 22-032-TF, and the [[docket-24-072-u-order-9-2026-05-24/_overview|Ironwood Order No. 9]] CECPN grant). - **Tensions** — Contested-mechanism claims tracked as first-class objects with explicit Statement A / Statement B / Resolution status per the Karpathy-Hegelion Methodology: [[T001 - CIAC Classification of Google Generation Payments]] (bracketed pending Commission ruling on Google SRC classification under § 23-4-1304(x)); [[T002 - Ironwood Strategic Investment Designation Requirement]] (bracketed pending Commission ruling on whether UFEEPA CECPN findings substantively satisfy § 23-4-1303(10)(A) Strategic Investment purposes); [[T003 - Shell-LLC Principal Attribution for Forgelight and Willowbend]] (resolved-via-D003: asymmetric verdict — strip "leading candidate" framing from Conway, downgrade Willowbend to Tier-3-uncorroborated). - **Dialectics** — Three-phase Hegelian arguments (thesis → antithesis → synthesis) authored by fresh-context subagents under call-isolation discipline. Each dialectic produces an explicit verdict on its source tension's status. Synthesis pages: [[D001 Synthesis]] (CIAC parallelism), [[D002 Synthesis]] (Ironwood designation), [[D003 Synthesis]] (shell-LLC attribution), [[D004 Synthesis]] (follow-on on T002 with completed corpus). Each dialectic's thesis and antithesis phase files are preserved alongside the synthesis as immutable historical record. - **Synthesis** — Cross-cutting narrative essays (see the [[README|synthesis index]]): [[Who Pays for Entergy's New Generation]], [[The Conway Data Center Project]], [[The Port of Little Rock Data Center]], [[Pulaski County's Attempt to Regulate Data Centers]], [[Documentary Minimization in the Arkansas Data-Center Record]], [[Identifying the Unnamed Cooling-Water Data Centers]]. ## Reference - [[About This Wiki]] · [[How to Read This Wiki]] · [[Methodology]] · [[License]] ## Methodology Every claim on every page traces to a raw source document. Wiki pages are LLM-compiled artifacts — **useful for navigation and synthesis, but never citeable as primary evidence**. The wiki does not provide regulatory, investment, legal, or environmental-engineering advice; it documents what the records show. See [[Methodology]] for the full Karpathy-Hegelion Pipeline — the persistent-compilation layer over an immutable raw corpus, and the call-isolated three-phase dialectics used to adjudicate contested mechanisms. ## Outstanding FOIA responses and pending corpus retrievals Several FOIA responses and dispositive documents remain outstanding as of 2026-05-29: - **AEDC** — Hyperscale developer correspondence ([[AVAIO Digital Partners|AVAIO]], [[Google LLC|Google]], [[Serverfarm]], [[DC Devco]]); Act 548 qualification certifications; community-benefit / PILOT agreements. **FOIA filed 2026-05-19; second-round escalation sent 2026-05-28; no production yet.** Most-leveraged remaining custodian for shell-LLC principal identification (see [[T003 - Shell-LLC Principal Attribution for Forgelight and Willowbend]]) — and now **known to hold Project Stratus records** (AEDC's [[Raven Johnson]] attended the Oct 2024 Conway site visit). - **DEE / DEQ** — Air, water, stormwater, NPDES permits for the hyperscale sites. **FOIA filed 2026-05-19; second-round escalation sent 2026-05-28; no production yet.** - **DFA** — Act 548 data-center tax-exemption administration. **FOIA filed 2026-05-19; second-round escalation sent 2026-05-28; no production yet.** - **City of Conway / Conway Corporation** — Conway data-center records. **Both halves now produced and answered:** the City's land-use production (2026-05-26) and Conway Corporation's utility production ([[2026-05 Conway Corporation Produces Project Stratus Records|2026-05-29]]); City Clerk [[Denise Hurd]]'s 2026-05-29 clarification resolved the FOIA-2026-126 PLACEHOLDER questions. Remaining: the [[Black & Veatch]] Final Engineering Report and Rate Analysis memorandum (referenced, unproduced) — a follow-on target. - **Little Rock Port Authority + City of Little Rock** — City of Little Rock's Project Boar response. **FOIA filed 2026-05-22; statutory deadline 2026-05-28 now past with no City response** (the Port Authority produced on 2026-05-26). - **Little Rock Regional Chamber of Commerce** — the NDA-of-record holder on Project Boar. **FOIA filed 2026-05-26; § 25-19-105(e) window ran to 2026-05-29; no production yet.** - **APSC documentary follow-ups** — 24-072-U Cunningham / Fielder / Cullipher direct testimony; 25-049-TF Order No. 4 (Palmer's "prior recognition" anchor); 26-008-TF hearing transcript (held physically at Commission Secretary's office via Veritext). The Commission's substantive rulings in 26-008-TF (Ironwood inclusion) and 25-055-P (Google SRC CIAC classification) are the dispositive external evidence for [[T001 - CIAC Classification of Google Generation Payments|T001]] and [[T002 - Ironwood Strategic Investment Designation Requirement|T002]]. ## Compiler The wiki is compiled by **Joshua Dunlap**, an Arkansas citizen FOIA requester.