Just days before the Hoffman Estates Village Board was set to vote on a controversial plan to rezone a patch of farmland for possible use as a data center, the developer withdrew his request.
The sudden reversal came after a flurry of opposition in the northwest suburb and several nearby towns.
Residents packed a Hoffman Estates village planning meeting in early June, giving hours of testimony against the project. They protested, filed public records requests and signed petitions to deny the rezoning. A new data center campus at the 186-acre Plum Farms, they feared, would use too much power and water, cause noise pollution and possibly raise utility costs.
When Karis Critical, the data center developer leading the project, withdrew its petition for rezoning on Wednesday, five days before a Village Board vote that was set to take place tonight, some in the community breathed a sigh of relief.
“This is a win for the whole community,” said John Altstadt, a South Barrington resident who lives next to Plum Farms and helped garner thousands of signatures on a petition. “It’s a health issue, and maybe that’s why they backed off. This was the wrong thing at the wrong time.”
Karis Critical said it got the message.
“After several weeks of conversations with the Village and residents, we’ve decided the right step is to withdraw the current rezoning request,” Karis spokesperson Patrick Skarr said. “We heard the feedback clearly, including the call for a more specific plan before any rezoning. We’ll take the time to get that right. Should we bring a proposal forward in the future, the Village and the community will have the details they need to evaluate it fully and on its merits.”
The reversal by Florida-based Karis — the same company that was behind a proposed data center the Naperville City Council voted down earlier this year — brought to a halt the latest chapter in an increasingly fierce debate about the location of data centers in the suburbs.
Data centers power the internet, and proposals for them started popping up more frequently across the Chicago region as cloud computing and streaming services such as Netflix grew in popularity. But proposed data centers also got bigger, sparking passionate opposition in many Chicagoland suburbs.
“Data center growth has increased exponentially in just the past three years,” said Nick Wallace, an attorney with the Environmental Law and Policy Center. “It’s definitely a step up from what we saw in 2023 and before that.”
Naperville City Council members voted 6-1 in January against Karis’ proposal for a data center on the former Alcatel-Lucent campus off Interstate 88, even though the developer had agreed to scale back the project. Many residents complained the center would be too close to their homes, and could pose a health hazard or generate noise.
Other suburbs are trying to balance worries about noise pollution or other hazards with the need to promote economic development.
Elk Grove Village residents packed a May 20 community meeting, where Mayor Craig Johnson had to defend the village, a national leader in data center construction, against concerns it was too friendly to developers.
And in some cases, data center projects get a green light.
The Joliet City Council approved in March a 24-building, 795-acre data center project by an 8-1 vote. Hundreds of residents came out to protest, but developer Hillwood Investment Properties promised up to 10,000 construction jobs and more than $2 billion in property taxes paid over the next 30 years.
In Hoffman Estates, controversy over the proposed data center erupted in May when signs went up around Plum Farms, located at the intersection of Higgins Road and Route 59, announcing a vote on a possible zoning change at the June 3 meeting of the Hoffman Estates Plan Commission.
“It’s a big property right by my house, and I was curious about what was going on over there,” said Amanda Pollard, a Barrington Hills resident. “I got on Google and found out a company called Karis had purchased Plum Farms early last year and that they developed data centers. So, I started texting friends about the meeting and writing letters.”
More Top Picks Best Hands Free Magnifiers For Reading
Several hundred residents from South Barrington, Barrington Hills and Hoffman Estates attended the planning meeting, where dozens spoke out against data centers. The plan commissioners voted 4-2 against recommending the proposal.
“The village was saying it’s just a zoning change, and not necessarily for a data center, that changing the zoning would help Karis market the property for sale,” Pollard said. “That’s when things snowballed. We thought they’re not telling us the whole story.”
Pollard and others obtained in June a trove of documents from the village through a public records request, including communications between the developer and officials who said they supported the possibility of a Plum Farms data center, subject to Village Board approval.
The released documents also included a project summary from Karis. The company stated it wanted to power up a large data center by 2028, using natural gas at first, and that it had a transmission service agreement with ComEd to potentially start supplying power by 2030.
“If it wasn’t for the (Freedom of Information Act request), we’d still be in the dark,” Pollard said. “I don’t think the public needs to be private investigators to figure this out.”
Residents kept pushing, holding a protest on June 24 at Plum Farms, before marching over to a nearby shopping center to collect signatures on a petition.
“Plum Farms can be anything but a data center or an Amazon warehouse,” said Bill Kratohvil, who has lived in Hoffman Estates for decades. “Put in some stores or some restaurants — anything but a data center.”
A previous owner had proposed building new residences and possibly retail on the farm.
That still sounds like a good plan to Altstadt, who said hundreds of Hoffman Estates residents have signed the petition about Plum Farms.
“What we’ve said to (Karis) is yes, we want you to make money on the land, we just don’t want a data center,” he said.
Hoffman Estates Village Manager Eric Palm maintains that Karis was asking for a simple rezoning. Its project summary was an early concept, he said, and any detailed plans for a data center campus would still need to go through a public approval process before the Village Board.
“There have definitely been discussions about a data center at Plum Farms, but nothing official was submitted,” he said.
Palm added that data centers are already an important part of the suburb’s economy.
Dallas-based Compass Datacenters bought in 2023 much of the vacant Sears world headquarters at 3333 Beverly Road and is currently building a massive data center campus.
The project attracted no opposition and will eventually bring about $10 billion of investment, Palm said. It also removes a white elephant that is no longer useful, and won’t use local water supplies or be a drain on village resources.
“No one is going to come in and say I want 2 million square feet of office space,” he said. “When Compass came in to buy the property there was no pushback. And they don’t require any services. There are no cops going out there, and we don’t need to plow the streets after it snows.”
“We certainly have been supportive of data centers,” Palm added. “That being said, it appears that over the last year public sentiment has changed.”
Pollard pointed out that the former Sears complex is somewhat isolated on the village’s far western edge while Plum Farms sits near residential subdivisions in South Barrington and Barrington Hills.
“I understand the need for data centers, but they don’t belong in communities next to homes,” she said.
Wallace said he expects community opposition to data centers will continue growing throughout Illinois and many other states. That’s partly because the industry is growing so fast, and the data centers needed to run AI applications are so massive, that utilities are finding it difficult to manage the surging demand and keep prices down.
And it can take several years for a power provider such as ComEd to build out the infrastructure needed to hook a data center up to the grid, he said. To bridge that gap, some data centers use diesel generators or natural gas for power, kicking off even more public opposition.
More Top Picks Best Electric Spiralizers
“Then you’re not talking about just a data center, you’re talking about a power plant,” he said. “That’s no joke to have in your neighborhood.”
Max Leichtman, ComEd’s director of economic and workforce development, said about 100 large-demand projects, primarily data centers, are currently in the pipeline in northern Illinois. If completed, the facilities would consume more power than all of northern Illinois does at peak demand.
An analysis of proposed data centers nationwide by Carbon Direct, a New York-based energy firm, found community opposition was most likely when nearby residents felt there was a lack of transparency from municipal officials or developers.
At least 46 proposed data centers were canceled or delayed by community opposition between January 2024 and May 2026, the company said. The investment value of the blocked projects totals $170 billion.
“Developers and capital partners who treat responsible community engagement as a foundational input, the same way they treat site selection, grid access, and financing, are the ones most likely to see their projects reach operation,” said Grant Gutierrez, head of community impacts at Carbon Direct.
Lawmakers across the state are getting involved, restricting where developers can build new data centers, requiring strict energy efficiency standards or delaying projects altogether.
At least six counties and nine cities in Illinois have either issued moratoriums on data center construction or imposed new regulations, including Aurora and north suburban Lake County.
State Sen. Darby Hills, a Republican whose district includes Plum Farms, introduced legislation in 2025 that would strengthen the ability of counties and municipalities to set standards for data centers, including their size, height and design. The pending bill would also prevent developers from building a data center within 3 miles of residential communities or another municipality without that municipality’s approval.
“My phone is ringing off the hook with concerns about this,” Hills said. “Obviously, I want there to be development in Illinois, but the issue is whether we retain local control.”
Pollard said the community which sprung up in opposition to the rezoning won’t go away.
“We’re all staying vigilant, and we’ll be ready when a new plan for the property comes along,” she said.