The steel county powering Google’s AI with sunlight, on paper

Wilson, Arkansas, was owned by one company for 125 years. Lee Wilson & Company ran the town the way plantation empires ran the Delta: at its peak the estate covered more than 65,000 acres of cotton ground, with its own banks, gins, and stores, and workers paid in scrip that was good only on the plantation. In December 2010, the Wilson heirs sold the whole thing — town, farms, and all — to Gaylon Lawrence of Sikeston, Missouri, and his son, for an estimated $150 million.

On July 14, on roughly 11,000 acres leased largely from the Lawrence family’s holdings, construction crews broke ground on the Steel River Energy Center: 2.45 gigawatts of solar (the developer rounds it to 2.5 GW-DC) and 2.9 gigawatt-hours of batteries, to be finished by the end of 2029. Google has agreed to buy 100 percent of the output of the first two phases. Every trade outlet that covered the groundbreaking reached for the same phrase, with varying degrees of care: the largest solar-plus-storage project in the United States.

The name is not decoration. Mississippi County, in Arkansas’s northeast corner along the river, produces more steel than any other county in America, a title Site Selection saw coming when U.S. Steel’s newest mill was still under construction. Three big producers operate here: Nucor-Yamato and Nucor Steel Arkansas near Blytheville, and U.S. Steel’s Big River Steel works in Osceola, which U.S. Steel acquired in a roughly $1.4 billion deal begun in 2019 and then doubled with a $3 billion second mill. The solar farm will literally stand on the county’s own product: some 400,000 steel piles, formed by PACO Steel in Blytheville from Big River Steel made about ten miles from the site.

Cotton, then steel, now this. The through-line is land, flat and cheap as far as you can see, and a county that has spent forty years learning to sell what it has to whoever is building.

The same demand, two ledgers

Here is the uncomfortable frame. On the very day shovels hit dirt in Wilson, Fortune was reporting the PJM market monitor’s finding that expected data center demand was a primary reason for $23 billion in customer price increases across the mid-Atlantic and Midwestern grid region, costs that will persist through at least the end of 2028. AI load is the villain of this year’s rate cases, the thing state legislators and utility commissions keep holding hearings about.

In Arkansas, the same demand is the underwriter. Google announced a $4 billion data center in West Memphis last October, on 1,100 acres about an hour south of the Steel River site, served by Entergy Arkansas. Entergy’s leadership projected $1.1 billion in benefits for existing customers over the life of that supply contract; Google agreed to fund the associated solar costs and to curtail its load when the grid is strained. And it is the West Memphis buildout, plus an existing Google facility on Entergy’s system, that makes a 2.45-gigawatt solar farm financeable in the Arkansas Delta.

Financeable is the operative word. Cypress Creek Energy, the developer, closed $3.5 billion in debt in June from Barclays, BNP Paribas, Santander, and Wells Fargo. Lenders wrote those checks because an anchor customer had already committed to buy the output for decades. Kevin Smith, Cypress Creek’s CEO, described the business model to pv magazine with unusual candor.

“Big Tech is critical. We’re almost like hotel developers, we find markets where it makes sense to build. The difference is that when we build, we’ve sold out all the rooms for 20 years.”

The project also got in under a closing door. Cypress Creek locked in its federal tax credits before their July 4 expiration, Canary Media reported, after a year in which the budget law killed the solar credit, tariffs scrambled material costs, and executive actions squeezed development on public land. The supply chain reads like a hedge against all of it: 3 million panels from First Solar’s Alabama factory, batteries from LG Energy Solution’s factory in Phoenix, Arizona, and structural steel from up the road. “Solar right now is the most affordable electricity supply. It’s also fastest to market,” Smith told Canary Media. In a state where coal long anchored the fuel mix, the Arkansas Advanced Energy Association’s Lauren Waldrip put it more bluntly to the same outlet: “Coal used to hang its hat on being the cheapest. That’s just not the case anymore.”

Largest, with an asterisk

About that superlative. The claim deserves pressure, because everyone involved is leaning on it. Smith told Talk Business & Politics flatly that “Steel River is the largest solar project with energy storage in the country,” and Cypress Creek’s own release calls it the nation’s largest solar project to date.

The current US record-holder for solar-plus-storage is Edwards & Sanborn in California, completed in 2024: 875 megawatts of solar and 3.3 gigawatt-hours of batteries. Steel River’s solar capacity, at full build, would nearly triple that. Its battery bank, at 2.9 gigawatt-hours, would be smaller. So the honest version of the claim is the one pv magazine used: the largest project of its kind ever to break ground in the US. It is not the largest operating anything yet, and won’t be until the end of the decade, and only the solar half sets a record. Given how many gigawatt-scale announcements have quietly shrunk or died in interconnection queues over the past five years, “largest to break ground” is a real milestone that still has three years of construction risk between it and the trophy.

Worth saying in its favor: groundbreaking here is not a rendering. The debt is closed, the tax credits are locked, the piles are ordered, and the first two phases (1.6 gigawatts of solar and 1.9 gigawatt-hours of storage, the portion Google has contracted) are the part with a committed buyer. Phase three, another 0.85 gigawatts and 1 gigawatt-hour, is the part to watch.

What “100 percent” actually buys

Now the fine print, because the headline math invites a misreading that Google, to its credit, does not quite commit.

Google’s contract is a virtual power purchase agreement. No wire runs from Wilson to a Google server hall. The electrons flow into Entergy Arkansas’s grid and the 15-state Midcontinent Independent System Operator market, indistinguishable from every other electron on the system. Google pays a fixed price for the project’s output and gets the clean-energy attributes that come with it; the actual power serves whoever in Arkansas happens to be running a dryer. Will Conkling, Google’s head of data center energy, described it to pv magazine in exactly those terms: “The investment supplies the grid at large, and passes along the benefits from the local power plant to all customers in Arkansas.” Google’s own announcement says the project can store the sun’s peak daytime output and “feed it back into the grid exactly when it’s needed most.”

So does the deal deserve the additionality credit Google will claim for it? Our read: yes, more than most. The standard critique of virtual PPAs is that tech buyers snap up attributes from projects that would have been built anyway, greening their books without changing what gets constructed. That critique bites hardest on contracts signed with operating or fully permitted projects. Here the causality runs the right direction — the $3.5 billion in construction debt closed because the offtake existed, and 1.6 gigawatts of the buildout is directly creditable to the contract. What the deal does not do is make it literally true that Google’s AI runs on Delta sunlight. Its Arkansas data centers will draw Entergy’s mix, gas and nuclear included, at 3 a.m. like everyone else’s. The headline on this story is accounting, not physics. Google knows the difference; readers of its sustainability reports should too.

One more wrinkle the press releases skip: batteries make the accounting genuinely better. A solar-only VPPA piles clean attributes into hours when the grid least needs them. Nearly two gigawatt-hours of storage in Google’s contracted phases shifts output into evening peaks, which is the direction the company’s 24/7 carbon-free framing has been pushing the industry. That part is substance, not garnish.

The ledger in Osceola

Whatever the deal means for Google’s carbon math, its meaning in Mississippi County is denominated differently.

This is a county that lost 8,000 people and more than 9,000 jobs in the wave of farm mechanization and the 1992 closure of Eaker Air Force Base, according to Talk Business & Politics’ reporting on the steel boom. Steel rebuilt the tax base: about 3,000 direct mill jobs paying $125,000 to $165,000 a year. It did not rebuild the population. So many workers commute in and spend their wages elsewhere that the county launched a homebuying incentive program and celebrated when it produced 25 new houses in eight months, more than had been built and sold there in the previous 15 years.

Steel River’s local terms, from the groundbreaking coverage: roughly 700 construction jobs per phase, and an estimated $300 million in tax revenue over the project’s life, flowing to the Rivercrest School District, the county, and the town of Wilson. Google has committed $5 million to community programs: weatherization in Mississippi County, community solar subscriptions for low-income households in West Memphis, efficiency projects in K-12 schools. Cypress Creek added another $3 million, starting with $400,000 for a Rivercrest Elementary playground. Lease payments matter here too. Arkansas led the nation in farm bankruptcies last year, and steady per-acre solar rent is the kind of income that keeps a family farm solvent through a bad soybean cycle. At Steel River, though, most of that rent flows to the Lawrence Group, the same family operation that bought the old Wilson empire.

“People are realizing the generational impact that these projects can have in these rural communities that so desperately need a shot in the arm,” Waldrip told Canary Media. Across the river in West Memphis, Mayor Marco McLendon said of the data center driving all of it: “This project is more than just jobs, buildings and technology. It’s about the future of our city, opportunity, investment and education.”

Mayors say such things at ribbon-cuttings. The $300 million is checkable, and Rivercrest’s school board will know soon enough whether it arrives.

The national fight over AI and electricity bills is not wrong, and Arkansas is not exempt from it; a $4 billion data center’s demand has to be met by something, and every ratepayer advocate in the state will be watching whether Entergy’s $1.1 billion customer-benefit projection survives contact with actual rate cases. But the Delta version of the story runs opposite to the PJM version, and both are true at once. In one region, AI load is a $23 billion bill. In this one, it is the reason four banks financed the biggest solar farm ever attempted in America, on cotton ground, held up by 400,000 piles of local steel.

The mills in Osceola run around the clock. Starting in 2029, some of the power on the wires that feed them will come from panels standing on their own product — sold, on paper, to a data center an hour downriver that will never receive a single one of those electrons.