# St. Louis Public Radio — "Documents link secretive St. Charles data center to Google" (2025-09-08) An STLPR/KCUR investigation documenting a **multi-state pattern of Google-linked data-center shell LLCs sharing the same two registered officers**, [[Michael Montfort]] and David Thomas — the cross-jurisdiction context for the wiki's [[T003 - Shell-LLC Principal Attribution for Forgelight and Willowbend|T003]] shell-attribution line. ## Source metadata - **Publisher:** St. Louis Public Radio (NPR), 2025-09-08. Companion piece on [[2026-06-03/kcur.org/google-missouri-data-center-st-charles-2025-09-08|KCUR]]. - **Archived:** 2026-06-03, by Invoke-WebRequest (sha256 logged). ## Extract (key passages) - "St. Louis Public Radio found **at least seven limited liability corporations registered in four states** that were involved in the early stages of various Google data center projects and with **at least one of the same two registered officers** ... In Arkansas, both **Spark Innovations and Groot** have the same two officers: **Michael J. Montfort and David Thomas**." - "In Missouri, AG Rose Solutions is the affiliate company behind a Google data center under construction in Kansas City. The company registered with the Missouri secretary of state's office, and a David Thomas signed the filing." ## Notes - **Tier 3.** This is the strongest external evidence on [[Michael Montfort]]'s role: he is a **recurring registered officer** (with David Thomas) across a documented set of Google-linked data-center LLCs spanning Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, and Virginia — i.e., a serial nominee/registered-officer function, not an operating-company principal. - **Firewall / T003 restraint:** this contextualizes the shared-Montfort-organizer pattern across [[Forgelight Ventures, LLC|Forgelight]], [[Willowbend Capital, LLC|Willowbend]], and [[Spark Innovations, LLC|Spark]]; it does **not** establish, as an Arkansas-agency-of-record fact, who the beneficial principal of those specific Arkansas LLCs is, and the wiki continues not to name a principal. The reported end-client (Google) is Tier-3 reporting, not an Arkansas-established fact.