Project River: $11.3B Bradley County campus aims to revive logging, attract data center
The Wright family is proposing Project River, an $11.3 billion industrial campus in Bradley County, Tennessee, that aims to attract a data center by building on-site gas and biomass power plants. The project seeks to revive the local logging industry by fueling the biomass plant with pine trees and generate significant tax revenue and jobs. Developers plan to apply for rezoning and annexation into the city of Cleveland, while addressing anticipated community concerns about data center impacts.
The Wright family is proposing Project River, an $11.3 billion industrial campus on 850 acres in Bradley County, Tennessee. The ambitious plan aims to attract a major power customer, most likely a data center, by constructing a 1,000-megawatt gas plant and a 500-megawatt biomass plant. The biomass plant would be fueled by pine trees, processing 5 million tons of timber annually, which developers hope will revive the region's declining logging and pulp mill sectors.
Mitchell Simpson, president and CEO of Charleston-based Wright Brothers Construction, noted that the Project River facility would be self-contained, generating its own power and water (cooled by water from the biomass plant) and mitigating sound through the site's topography. The developers, including Lukas Salyer, president of Wright Industrial Group, anticipate creating 900 on-site jobs and 1,700 regional forestry jobs, with plans to break ground in late 2027 or early 2028. The investment includes $7.3 billion for data center buildings, $1.5 billion for the gas plant, and $1.25 billion for the biomass plant, with Azure Energy designing the power facilities.
Project River developers plan to apply for rezoning and annexation of the site into the city of Cleveland, which is necessary to access public services. These requests will go before the Cleveland Municipal Planning Commission and Cleveland City Council. This comes after the Bradley County Commission approved zoning measures earlier this year that significantly restrict where data centers can be built in the county. Developers will also seek a 360-megawatt interconnection with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) grid for backup power. Community meetings are scheduled for September 1 and September 12 at the PIE Center in Cleveland to gather feedback and address concerns.