200-Plus Pack Mercer County KY Zoning Hearing Against Panattoni's Project Bluegrass; Separate LPM Story Names Anthropic-Tied TeraWulf Project in Hancock County

Correction (2026-08-28): This entry originally conflated two separate LPM stories, published on consecutive days, into a single “Anthropic-tied Mercer County” event. They are about two different counties and two different developers. The Aug 17 story (Mercer County, Panattoni, Project Bluegrass) never mentions Anthropic. The Aug 18 story (Hancock County, TeraWulf, Justified Data Campus) never mentions Mercer County. See identify-mercer-county-ky-anthropic-tied-datacenter-developer for the full resolution. The corrected record follows.

More than 200 residents packed a Mercer County planning and zoning hearing in Harrodsburg, Kentucky in late July 2026 to oppose a proposed hyperscale data center, in a fight Louisville Public Media reported on August 17 as bipartisan — Republicans and Democrats in the same room against the same project. The grassroots group organizing the opposition, We Are Mercer County, claims more than 1,000 members in a county of roughly 22,000. LPM’s reporting was picked up across the regional public-radio network, including West Virginia Public Broadcasting, which is itself a signal about how far outside Kentucky the story was read as relevant.

The developer is named in the reporting: Panattoni Data Centers, a California-based industrial-real-estate firm (founded 1986, ~625 million sq ft of US logistics/industrial space developed) that entered data-center development in August 2024 with a stated 1 GW-by-2030 North American target. Panattoni’s Kentucky project, called “Project Bluegrass,” would sit on land northwest of Burgin (Mercer County) — reported acreage varies by outlet, 900 acres (Data Center Dynamics, four buildings) vs. 555 acres (a later secondary summary) — with a power request of up to 1.3 gigawatts (1,300 MW), per a Burgin school board member’s June 2026 email describing Panattoni’s transmission service request (TSR) to Louisville Gas & Electric/Kentucky Utilities, corroborated by an LG&E-KU spokesperson confirming the project is “proposed to be developed in phases to a capacity of 1,300 megawatts.” The project is grid-served, not behind-the-meter — it sits within Kentucky Utilities’ existing service territory and required a TSR to the incumbent utility, the opposite of the direct-pipeline/on-site-generation architecture found in some sibling counties. Panattoni says it will use a closed-loop cooling system to reduce water draw (no public water-draw figure in gallons was located) and will cover transmission-upgrade costs itself. No compute tenant or offtaker has been named for Project Bluegrass in any source located — not Anthropic, not any other hyperscaler. A Panattoni spokesperson’s only public comment is procedural (“we appreciate the thoughtful approach officials are taking”).

Mercer County is running three distinct instruments simultaneously, not one: (1) the Mercer County Fiscal Court passed a one-year moratorium on data-center construction in unincorporated county land on August 11-12; (2) the Mercer County Planning and Zoning Commission separately advanced siting/impact regulations (unanimous July 30 vote) that would still permit a data center near the county’s power plant; (3) the city of Burgin — which has no zoning body of its own — was separately weighing annexation of roughly 500-1,000 acres of unincorporated farmland into city limits specifically to place Panattoni’s project outside county zoning and outside the county moratorium’s reach; that annexation vote was delayed, not resolved, after residents packed a July council meeting during a thunderstorm. The moratorium’s carve-out (it does not bind Burgin) is the load-bearing fact: the county’s strongest instrument does not reach the site most likely to be developed.

Records obtained by Kentucky Lantern via open-records request to Burgin Independent School show a Burgin school board member who is also an LG&E-KU “Lead Electric System Coordinator” (Ben Bradshaw) advocated internally for the project using LG&E-KU/PPL Corporation talking-points material and Data Center Coalition (the industry’s national lobbying group) messaging, while telling the paper the power-demand figure came from public records rather than his utility employer. The Burgin superintendent then relayed the tax-revenue case to school district staff. This is a personnel-overlap pattern — a state’s dominant investor-owned utility’s own employee, serving in an elected local capacity, advocating for the load his employer would serve — distinct from, but structurally adjacent to, the corporate-shell-layering pattern found in other datacenter siting fights.

Separately, and one day later (August 18), LPM reported that Maryland-based TeraWulf — not Panattoni — submitted an energy plan to the Kentucky PSC and Energy and Environment Cabinet for its “Justified Data Campus” in Hancock County (not Mercer), built on the site of an idled Century Aluminum smelter, using an existing 482 MW power interconnection. TeraWulf has a 20-year contract with Anthropic for the Justified campus, with Anthropic’s investment in the facility estimated at $10 billion — this is the sourced, on-the-record Anthropic tie in the Aug 17-18 LPM reporting pair, and it belongs to Hancock County, not Mercer. TeraWulf is separately pursuing a second, larger Kentucky project — the “Muskie Data Campus,” pitched in May 2026 as up to 1 GW, sited near Ashland on the Boyd/Greenup county border — for which no energy plan or utility agreement had been filed as of August 18.

Mercer County is the demand-side counterpart to the supply-side fight already in canon: Louisville Metro Council’s six-month moratorium, passed 24-1 on August 13 (2026-08-13–fort-worth-louisville-consecutive-datacenter-moratorium-votes), froze new approvals in the state’s largest city while a rural county 60 miles southeast was fighting a single project through zoning. Kentucky has not enacted large-load tariff protections in statute; Gov. Andy Beshear’s August 6 executive order directs the PSC to deny utility rate-recovery requests tied to data-center construction/operations and directs the Energy and Environment Cabinet to deny permits with detrimental water/air impact, but a former PSC chair told Kentucky Lantern the order carries no enforcement mechanism absent statute. On August 27 Beshear went further, calling for the state to end its own data-center sales-tax incentive program (enacted 2024 for Jefferson County, expanded statewide in 2025) entirely, citing a Kentucky Center for Economic Policy estimate that four proposed data centers alone could cost the state over $2 billion in foregone sales-tax revenue. The bipartisan composition of the Mercer opposition is what the underlying unresolved cost question looks like politically: the cost falls on everyone regardless of party, regardless of which company eventually shows up as tenant.