$25B in Montgomery County, a pause in Minneapolis: America's AI data center split

Amazon and Google just committed $25 billion to Montgomery County, Missouri, even as Minneapolis halted new data centers and New York pushed through a statewide moratorium. The "compete now" and "pump the brakes" paths are now running in parallel across American cities, and the bills each one writes will not look the same.

Amazon's $10 billion commitment came first, on June 15, 2026. Google's $15 billion followed within roughly six weeks, both anchored in Montgomery County, MO, not in St. Louis proper. The regional economic-development organization Greater St. Louis Inc. framed the joint total as $25B "in just one month", and the Data Center Knowledge industry roundup for July 2026 tracks the pair alongside a separate buildout under negotiation in the city itself. Local TV covered the Amazon announcement the day it landed.

Minneapolis enacted a six-month halt on new data centers. New York's statewide moratorium now governs siting, water draw, and grid load. Both cities argue the same thing: the AI demand curve is bending local power and water budgets faster than regulators can price them, and the rules need to be written before the cranes show up.

The city of St. Louis has spent more than a year writing those rules. The framework covers land use, emissions, water draw, and neighborhood compatibility, and the Board of Aldermen is still weighing amendments. On July 30, 2026, the city's Board of Adjustment unanimously upheld a conditional-use permit for the Armory Innovation District data center, with binding conditions: no diesel-generator testing on poor-air-quality days, and at least 2% on-site renewable power. Specific water and energy consumption numbers have not been disclosed because the project has no tenant yet.

St. Louis has also done one thing the boosterish coverage rarely names. The city has explicitly banned crypto-mining tenants from new data centers. Crypto mining is the most power-hungry, water-light, low-jobs-per-megawatt use a data center can host, and the city drew the line before signing any tenants. The same ordinance that lets AI workloads in is keeping the worst-ratio workloads out.

Geography complicates the second piece. Montgomery County, where the $25B sits, is in a different tax jurisdiction, draws from a different utility, and answers to a different planning body than St. Louis city. The Fortune op-ed from regional civic leaders calls the bid a "St. Louis" win, and the regional economic-development convention is to bundle the metro into one sales pitch. The jobs, tax base, and grid load will land in Montgomery County, not in the city whose zoning board spent the year writing the rules. The county sits in a different tax jurisdiction, draws from a different utility, and answers to a different planning body. Treating the two as one place will produce one set of very wrong expectations on both sides.

Hyperscale commitments are not leases. They are utility-scale draws and tax-base locks that compound for decades. The pause-first cities buy time to price the social costs (power, water, noise, heat) into the siting rules before any concrete gets poured. The compete-now cities buy the construction window and negotiate the social costs as conditions on each permit, with the city holding the right to refuse tenants that do not meet the bar.

Either path can work. Neither path is free. The pause-first cities will have to defend a slower jobs and tax-base pipeline against political pressure to "do what St. Louis did." The compete-now cities will have to defend a regulatory framework the public only sees when a permit hearing goes sideways, and they will live with whatever tenants accept the conditional-use rules versus the ones that walk away to a county with fewer conditions. The reader's own city council will pick one path or the other in the next two years. The question worth asking is which one the local grid, water table, and tax base can actually carry for the next 30.