Dogs in the fight: Birmingham humane society CEO says AI factory cut $18 million from fundraising

For more than a decade, Alabama’s oldest and largest animal shelter has been working on a plan to expand its Birmingham footprint with a $67 million medical campus.

But now, a massive AI factory being constructed next door is thwarting the Greater Birmingham Humane Society’s fundraising efforts and plans for its site in Oxmoor Valley, said chief executive Allison Black Cornelius.

“We spent a fortune on this land. We’ve already sunk millions into it. Millions,” she said in a recent interview with AL.com. “Do y’all realize what it would take for us to go and start this process over? We have to get new construction documents, new architectural designs, on a piece of land that we don’t even know where it is.”

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And it’s not the first time the humane society has felt pushed out by a new data center coming to town.

The main concern is about noise that can be generated by data centers that the humane society fears would be disruptive, as dogs can hear sound at lower frequencies than humans. But Black Cornelius – and the humane society’s key donors, she said – have other worries, too: about the “heat island effect” that data centers can emit waste heat from their cooling systems that initial research has found can increase temperatures for surrounding neighborhoods, as well as the impact of spiking electricity demand on local resources.

Since more details emerged about Nebius’ plans for the site earlier this year, more and more donors have shied away from backing the humane society’s planned campus there, with more than half of the $34 million goal being retracted, Black Cornelius said.

The humane society has already spent $8 million on the site in Oxmoor Corporate Park, which it has owned since 2021, she said.

Now, GBHS is suing Birmingham and Nebius, the company that’s building the $36 million AI factory, mirroring other fights by local homeowners playing out in Jefferson County courtrooms.

The humane society is hoping to either keep its land or recover the financial pledges from its fundraising plans. It’s asking a judge to rule that the city illegally allowed the Nebius site to proceed, to suspend its construction permits and to restart the public review process for Nebius, as well as to reimburse the humane society for the costs from the lawsuit.

“Working together, the City and Nebius Entities have rendered the law and the ordinances of the City of Birmingham an illusion of due process,” the humane society alleges in its complaint. “GBHS has never been afforded an opportunity for substantive relief from the City.”

Nebius spokesman John Sutter said the company has met with humane society representatives and has gone over the sound study conducted by a certified acoustician at engineering firm AEI, which he said shows the data center won’t increase background noise at the site.

“Nebius is proud to be investing in Birmingham and its residents through this important project,” Sutter said in an email to AL.com. “The project was permitted lawfully in this commercial district and Nebius has followed the same rules that apply to everyone else in Birmingham.”

The city declined to comment for this article.

Black Cornelius maintained that she didn’t find the sound study sufficient. In the meantime, the humane society is looking for a backup site away from the data center. If they have to move, it’ll be the second time in a decade that a data center has foiled the shelter’s plan for expansion.

“Unless they stop, we’ve got to go,” she told AL.com. “It’s overwhelming to think about it. We’re in a pickle.”

The humane society has been working since last year to fundraise enough to start construction on a new campus in Oxmoor Valley – the latest version of its plan for a campus like it that’s been in the works since 2016, Black Cornelius said. That site would expand its veterinary care and training, rehabilitation and foster and transport programs for animals.

The nonprofit started the silent phase of its fundraising campaign in 2017. By the time they purchased the land, they had raised enough to also hire architects and start the design process. At that point, Black Cornelius said the organization had spent about $8 million on the site when they started seeing real estate transactions for the 75 acres located at 201 Milan Parkway. Fundraising picked up, and the goal was $34 million.

She wrote a letter to a Nebius executive in November, she said, asking for details of what they were planning to build. Then, news broke in February: the site wasn’t just going to be a regular data center, but what the company calls an AI factory, which specifically hosts AI-specific chips and computing capabilities.

Frantic emails and calls from donors poured in. Black Cornelius said canine audiology experts warned her about the noise levels that data centers can create for animals.

“After that week, everything just stopped,” she told AL.com. “Every pledge, people that had pledges here for this project called and said, ‘Listen, I have real reservations. I’m not trying to let you down. We’ll still let you keep the money, but you got to find somewhere else to go.’”

A $10 million donor pulled out their pledge, she said. Another $8 million pledge vanished. That was half of the money needed to reach the shelter’s fundraising goal.

“That’s when we said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do,’” Black Cornelius told AL.com.

The humane society’s team showed up to public hearings at Birmingham City Hall, attended protests and collaborated with locals to form the Protect Oxmoor Coalition.

Nebius executives have emphasized their plans to benefit the community, including up to $87 million in tax revenue for local schools, plans to hire for 1,000 construction jobs and 78 full-time positions, and their commitment to minimize their impact on the surrounding neighborhood.

“We don’t just build haphazardly,” Nebius representative Leah Davis recently told AL.com. “When we picked Birmingham, we saw not just a site with power and water available. …We saw a site where we could actually grow with the community.”

The company has started construction, and the site is slated for two data center buildings with 300 megawatts of electrical capacity, provided by Alabama Power.

“This company seems to just act like, ‘It’s gonna be fine,’” Black Cornelius said. “If my donors don’t think it’s fine, it really doesn’t matter what you say.”

It’s not the first time that the Greater Birmingham Humane Society has felt pushed out by a data center.

Years earlier, the animal shelter had a potential agreement to receive the Trinity Steel property near the former Golden Flake Factory in Titusville as a donation, co-owned at the time by the city and the county.

By 2018, the nonprofit group had spent about $300,000 on the site for soil testing, zoning, surveys, lawyers and design, said Black Cornelius.

But then the organization heard there was an issue with the property, and that the city and county no longer supported the humane society’s plan for it, she said. Leadership then informed her that they planned to sell the land instead, to DC Blox, an Atlanta-based data center company, for the site.

“How’s that for being struck by lightning twice?” Black Cornelius told AL.com.

DC Blox touted the development as a $785 million investment over 10 years, and it’s currently expanding that site.

The humane society lost money, but ultimately the organization’s board decided not to sue and instead focused efforts on looking for a new site — one that it searched through 80 properties to find, she said. At the time, the humane society had recently taken over animal control operations for Jefferson County, and now serves 44,000 animals per year.

“As we traveled around the country, we realized that shelter systems that were co-located had better live release rates,” Black Cornelius said. “Shelters that were not put in the old sense out by a dump, out in a rural area, shelters that were put in dense areas had higher live release rates, higher volunteerism, and improved property values.”

The humane society finally landed on its current property in Oxmoor Corporate Park, purchasing the land in 2021. The site has a document that lists 44 pages of restrictions, conditions and promises that properties within it have to adhere to.

“It had covenants. We read those covenants. We paid a lawyer to read those covenants,” she said. “And we thought, ‘Okay, we’re protected.’”

But now the humane society is asking a judge to determine whether the construction of the $36 billion hyperscale data center is legal.

“We don’t have a choice,” Black Cornelius said. “We can’t do like we did in Titusville and walk away from it. We can’t. It’s too much money, and the donors deserve better, and the animals do.”

Black Cornelius said the nonprofit started reaching out to attorneys this spring after not getting answers from Alabama Power and Nebius about their plans for the AI factory. Her team went through dozens of law firms across Alabama before she found one.

“I was in a panic,” she said. “I went through 41 law firms. From Mobile to Huntsville, from Montgomery to Birmingham, 41 firms before I could find a firm that was not conflicted out for data centers.”

Every firm she called told her that they were for Alabama Power, a data center company or a developer, she said. Now, the humane society is represented by attorneys Brian Cash and Wade Merritt of Spain & Gillon, LLC in Birmingham.

So far, no hearings are scheduled in that case, per court records. But parallel fights are playing out in Jefferson County court for local homeowners suing Nebius and the city.

“The facility has also been thoughtfully designed and responsibly developed with measures including acoustical sound walls, grid power, and closed-loop cooling, among other areas,” Sutter said. “We’re grateful for the Court’s time and attention and look forward to continuing to present our case.”

Two hundred miles away, a similar battle that’s caught national attention, including from country music stars, is playing out between the Nashville Zoo and DC Blox.

DC Blox is planning a 69,200-square-foot, 10-megawatt facility — much smaller than the two buildings with 300-megawatts of power capability planned by Nebius — in an office park next to the zoo. The zoo has pushed back against the data center proposal over concern about the impact of its sound on the animals, with supporters flooding city meetings and prompting a temporary pause on permits for data centers.

Since then, DC Blox has agreed to certain sound level maximums at its property lines.

“The whole country is up in arms about Nashville,” Black Cornelius said. “We’re 300 …[megawatts], and we’re, at times, 200 feet away, and 1,100 feet away, depending on where you are. We didn’t have Brad Paisley doing a video, unfortunately.”

Over the last six months, Black Cornelius has devoted herself to extensive research on how other local governments are handling data centers, including in Northern Virginia’s Data Center Alley, Michigan, Missouri, and elsewhere.

“The question that’s begged to be asked is where do you put them?” she said. “When people say to me, ‘Why don’t they just put them out in the middle of nowhere?’ Lowndes County’s in the middle of nowhere, but those are people that have rights, too.”