In historic downtown Gallatin, it’s easy to step back in time. It’s home to the state’s oldest silent movie theater still standing in its original location. A few doors down is a former drugstore and soda fountain.
Noah Arai cuts hair at a barbershop on the square. He fears Gallatin’s identity is threatened by one of its newest corporate neighbors — Meta.
“I think it’s causing unwanted growth in our community,” Arai said. “Gallatin’s always been a small place and I feel like they’re taking that away from us and we didn’t really get a say.”
Four miles northeast of downtown is the Gallatin Industrial Center, home to a hyperscale data center for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms.
Meta Gallatin is a 900-acre campus with four buildings spanning nearly 1.7 million square feet, equivalent to 10 Walmart Supercenters. It’s similar in size to a data center proposed in Cave City, Kentucky, which is currently in litigation.
The campus is highly secure with perimeter fencing housing thousands of computer servers used for all things digital, everything from email and streaming to online banking and ChatGPT.
It’s the Fort Knox of Gallatin. A company representative denied a request to tour the facility, and a former worker who initially agreed to be interviewed later declined, citing an NDA that she signed.
Mayor Paige Brown says the data center is bringing in transformative revenue, but others aren’t so sure, citing a lack of transparency about how much revenue the city has received and where it’s gone. That, coupled with quality of life concerns, is a familiar narrative playing out around the country.
Neighboring Kentucky hasn’t seen a hyperscale data center come online yet, but Gallatin could offer a glimpse at what to expect.
Meta Neighbors Weigh In
Some of those closest to the facility are residents of Brights Lane. Elizabeth Holmes lives in a one-story brick ranch on the backside of the Meta campus.
“There was one time that I was almost knocked over. I was walking down my steps and a blast went off and my whole house shook. I complained to the city and they sent structural engineers to look at my house and determined a crack I have is from settling,” Holmes said. “Well, Facebook sent me a $2,500 check and I had to sign a statement that I wouldn’t sue them for anything.”
Another homeowner asked not to be identified out of fear of retaliation. Like Holmes, she said the biggest annoyance of the data center was the construction phase.
“The dust was unbelievable. You would look out and it would look foggy except the fog would be brown to the point the trees were hazy,” the homeowner said. “I couldn’t hang my clothes on the clothesline when they were stirring things up so bad down there. Couldn’t keep a clean car for anything. If you washed your car this morning, my white car would be brown in a couple of hours.”
Fast forward to today, both homeowners said the most noticeable impact from the data center is a low hum at night, likely from backup generators, cooling systems, or high-power fans.
“I wonder what are the effects of this humming, this buzzing. I don’t hear coyotes like I used to, insects too. Very rarely. I have a feeling that nature has gotten scared away,” Holmes said. “It’s not very loud, but I hear it. So be it, it’s here and we have to live with it.”
Neighbors to the data center say about five homes have been sold since Meta moved in and three are currently on the market. A majority of Americans would rather have a nuclear power plant in their backyard than a data center, according to a Gallup poll released in May.
Meta’s Impact on Water and Energy
Data centers use water to cool the heat generated by the server farms. Meta says the Gallatin campus uses 80% less water than typical data centers through its closed-loop cooling system that re-circulates water through sealed pipes. However, they also rely on chemical additives, creating wastewater and disposal concerns.
Utility records from 2025 show Meta Gallatin used more than 53 million gallons of water, accounting for about 2% of the city’s total water usage. For City Councilman Pascal Jouvence, that’s too much.
“It’s one entity and they can do more per the contract with the city, and they’re still building,” Jouvence said.
Mayor Paige Brown argues Gallatin residents with home sprinklers use more water than Meta during the peak summer months. Though not the city’s largest consumer of water, Meta ranks in the top five, according to utility officials.
“They are a very heavy water user, but we never would have agreed to serve them if it compromised our customers in any way,” Brown said during an interview at City Hall.
Despite the data center’s demand, city officials maintain that Gallatin Public Utilities has adequate treatment capacity to meet Meta’s current water needs and has several water system improvement projects underway.
The data center’s energy consumption is unknown, but it’s expected to require about 300 megawatts of electricity per day at full build-out, enough to power around 200,000 homes. The campus has four sprawling facilities with plans to expand to as many as 12 buildings.
According to Meta, the Gallatin site is powered by 100% renewable energy. Meta has an agreement with the Tennessee Valley Authority to bring enough solar onto the grid to match its consumption. Meta Gallatin purchases electricity directly from the TVA, and a spokesman said its load is confidential by contract.
The TVA Board of Directors voted Aug. 19 to create a new rate class specifically for data centers so that residential customers don’t foot the bill for the energy-guzzling industry. The increase, effective Oct. 1, will be phased in over the next three fiscal years.
“We expect the average all-in billing impact of the data center rate to be 10% above what they pay today, and this will align them with their costs,” Chief Financial Officer Tom Rice said.
Data centers currently make up around 18% of the TVA’s overall industrial load, and that number is expected to double by 2030.
Lack of Transparency Then and Now
One of the criticisms of data centers is a lack of transparency from developers who typically use different legal names to buy land for data centers before they’re ready to announce the projects publicly. Meta’s Gallatin data center was pitched as “Project Woolhawk.” Some locals felt the wool was pulled over their eyes throughout development and even now, two years after the data center went live.
Councilman Jouvence said he’s never been told exactly how many employees Meta has at the Gallatin data center.
“I don’t know if anybody knows except them,” he said.
Mayor Brown estimated the workforce was over 100 employees, but a Meta spokesperson told WKU Public Radio that the Gallatin campus currently supports “approximately 65 operational roles.”
Mayor Brown defended the small workforce.
“We have workforce challenges, so what we have very pointedly meant to do is attract large capital investment, small number of employees, good wages, high skills,” Brown said. “Not all of their employees have come from outside the city. I know people from here who work there.”
According to Meta, the social media giant’s investment in the Gallatin campus is $1.5 billion.
To encourage economic development, Tennessee uses a program called PILOT, which stands for “payment in lieu of taxes.” Companies can receive a discount on how much they pay in property taxes based on investment and job creation.
The city approved a 20-year PILOT package worth an estimated $19.5 million in tax breaks for Meta.
Under a contract, Gallatin’s Industrial Development Board (IDB) is supposed to give half of the PILOT money to the city and the other half to the county. Jouvence said he didn’t know until just recently where any of the money had gone.
“The mayor this year removed a fire truck out of the budget because we didn’t have the money to pay for it,” Jouvence said. “If they were giving the city the money they are supposed to give us, maybe we would have the money to buy the fire truck.”
Mayor Brown said the IDB has discretion on how the money is directed, and records the IDB recently released showed much of the PILOT payments have gone to Sumner County schools.
Meta Gallatin paid an estimated $1.8 million in taxes to the local government in 2025. Critics contend that one of the richest corporations in America should be paying a lot more in taxes.
“Now I can’t tell you I wouldn’t go back and negotiate a different deal had I seen what was coming with the scrutiny on data centers, but it was very new to communities at that point,” Brown said. “I probably wouldn’t agree to a PILOT.”
Brown said Meta paid for several major water and sewer projects while developing the data center campus. And she pointed to the company’s charitable giving in the community, including pollinator gardens at local schools and the renovation of a community center gymnasium.
“I grew up overseas and discovered the system in the U.S. and said ‘only in America.’ They give $1,000 here and $10,000 there. It’s still a lot less than the millions of dollars they should pay each year,” Jouvence said. “It’s great. They get a tax break and they use the money from the tax break to get another tax break. They know how to use the system.”
Despite confusion on how the money has been spent, Mayor Brown says Meta is currently the largest revenue contributor to the city and county.
What’s Next?
Jouvence, who wasn’t in office when the Meta deal was approved, wants Gallatin to take a step back before taking another step forward. He’s pushing a one-year moratorium on data center development.
“The idea is to take a year and study and make sure if we approve another one, everybody’s protected,” he said. “We can’t make this kind of decision at the government level without having all the facts. I think it’s irresponsible.”
On July 28, the city council approved a 60-day pause on new data center applications. Commissioners are expected to consider a broader moratorium at a meeting later this month. Currently, the city lacks specific regulations on data centers beyond certain zoning requirements. The Gallatin Planning Commission voted Aug. 25 to recommend a 12-month moratorium.
The city recently approved annexing land near Meta, fueling speculation of a second data center in the town of 43,000.
Mayor Brown said last month that there are currently no data center proposals and any talk of a moratorium is “performative.”
“I don’t think that would be the proper posture,” she added. “I think it would be better to set safeguards around the demands any industry may have when they’re coming to the city.”
There are questions about whether temporary bans will hold up to court challenges. Local governments can’t outright ban a legal business, but they can restrict data center development and operations through zoning laws.
Two years into Meta’s operations, the community is still grappling with, “Did Gallatin get a good deal?”
“I can say they’ve been good to this point and they’ve certainly brought a lot to our community that we wouldn’t have had without their financial contributions,” Brown said. “I think time will still tell.”
This story is part of our series exploring the impacts of data centers in our region.
It was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky, and NPR. Sign up for the weekly Porch Light newsletter here for news from around the region.
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