Beau Savoir

A Beautiful Data Center along a Beautiful River

A brownfield on the Ohio River at Marietta, OH that already has a 138 kV substation, gas, a barge dock and rail. The noisy parts sit behind a working smelter.

The problem

Data centers get called ugly and loud. The server hall isn't the problem; the power plant around it is: turbines, chillers, substations. Memphis proved the point. Speed won (Colossus 1 in 122 days), but the turbines drew community objections and Clean Air Act litigation.

The site

Two zones, split by SR 7, south of Marietta, OH.

Power zone: open land behind Eramet's manganese smelters, past the ore piles and a multi-track rail yard, screened by a hillside. It needs no architecture.
River campus: the 51-acre SEOPA Gorsuch tract (former AMP coal plant), 25 developable acres at Ohio River mile 176. Quiet halls, a public riverfront park.

Power

AEP 138 kV substation already on the Gorsuch site.
Assumption: a Colossus 1-equivalent load. The layout fits 35 turbine packages and 168 Megapack 2 XLs, the Memphis counts, to scale.
Burn math (1,037 Btu/cf):
- 150 MW: 34.7 MMcf/d (12.7 Bcf/yr) in simple cycle at 10,000 Btu/kWh, or 24.3 MMcf/d (8.9 Bcf/yr) in combined cycle at 7,000 Btu/kWh.
- 421 MW: 97.4 MMcf/d simple cycle, 68.2 MMcf/d combined cycle.
Gas under foot: the Utica/Point Pleasant shale sits under the county, cored at about 7,800 ft in the wet-to-dry gas window. But Washington County produced only 2.35 Bcf in 2025, so supply means new wells plus pipe. Enbridge serves the site; Texas Eastern, Rover and Columbia run in the region.

Logistics

One barge carries 1,750 tons, the same as 16 rail cars or 70 trucks. Barges move 675 ton-miles per gallon, versus 472 for rail and 151 for truck (Texas A&M TTI).
Route: the Ohio, then the Mississippi, then the Gulf of America, then the Intracoastal Waterway to its end at Brownsville, next to Starbase.
A BIPR rail spur connects to CSX. Turbines, transformers and Megapacks arrive by water.

Room to grow

Phase 1: the SEOPA tract.
Phase 2: the Eramet riverfront tracts on both flanks.
Phase 3+: land assembled with the State of Ohio, JobsOhio and SEOPA (port authority lease-back and revenue bonds, the Intel playbook), plus quiet option deals with willing private owners: Union Carbide's 180 acres, Energizer and Eramet.

Recovery mining upside

AMP's capped ash landfill, about 3.0M cubic yards of Appalachian coal ash. Appalachian ash has a median of 431 mg/kg of rare earths.
Eramet's tailings pond: smelter waste that could yield manganese, a battery cathode input.
DOE put $75M into coal-based critical-minerals pilots in 2026. No site assays exist yet.

Honest gaps

Fiber: no long-haul route confirmed.
Ohio paused new data center sales tax exemptions on May 27, 2026.
Washington County is in EPA nonattainment, so turbine permits will be tighter.
Gas rights ownership under the parcels is unknown, and local gas volumes fall short of the load.
Grid headroom at 138 kV is unverified; the dam's flood zone versus the power zone is unchecked.
The land assembly beyond Phase 1 is still to be negotiated.

The ask

A 30-minute call with xAI's infrastructure team to test Beau Savoir as the next powered site: substation, gas, river and rail already in place.