A site in rural Osceola is being scouted for a new data center that could rival the nation’s largest and bring hundreds of millions of dollars in new investment to the county.

The project would rise on 434 acres on U.S. 441 just north of the Florida’s Turnpike interchange with State Road 60 in Yeehaw Junction, according to a report in GrowthSpotter. To the south lies the 27,000-acre DeLuca Preserve, one of the state’s largest nature preserves. Although the project site is located well outside of the county’s urban growth boundary, more than 100 acres already have been designated for future industrial use because the property was previously zoned for a warehouse distribution center.

A company using the name “US Development” is scheduled for a pre-application meeting with county planning on Oct. 15 to discuss rezoning the balance of the property from agricultural to industrial for a new data center. The land is owned by two groups: Yeehaw Ranch LLC and Patricia and Clyde Luke.

County Manager Don Fisher told GrowthSpotter the county has been working on a master plan to locate potential data center sites and has had conversations with Duke Energy. But he was not familiar with the Yeehaw Junction project.

A preliminary plan from Kimley Horn calls for nine data center buildings, each three stories with 675,000 square feet and an adjacent equipment yard, for over 7 million square feet. That would make it slightly smaller than the nation’s largest planned data center. Switch is building the first phase of The Citadel campus outside of Reno, Nev., which would be 7.2 million square feet at buildout and run entirely by green power.

Switch has not put a specific pricetag on that campus, but separately has announced a $5 billion financing deal to fund the development of four data center campuses.

Data centers are buildings used to house infrastructure and components critical to cloud computing; they tend to employ a relatively small number of people but consume a large amount of electricity to power the servers they contain. The size of the Osceola project would classify it as a Hyperscale Data Center, the type that services clients like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. These centers are primarily located in rural areas.

The plan also calls for a 15-acre electrical substation and onsite water and wastewater treatment center. According to the site plan, Florida Power & Light would be the electrical provider. Last year, FP&L paid $212 million for the 40,000-acre El Maximo Ranch in southwest Osceola County. While it’s expected to house a future solar farm, the utility did not identify any plans for the property in its latest 10-year plan.

The utility does have five preferred solar farm sites in nearby Okeechobee County and is building its first clean hydrogen energy plant there.

Toho Water Authority is named as the water provider on the plan. The fiber network would be serviced by AT&T, Century Link and Lumen.

This isn’t the first time the Yeehaw Junction area has been eyed for transformational development projects. Decades ago developers proposed a massive new city called “Destiny” on the 34-square miles south of S.R. 60. That property was later gifted to the University of Florida and became the DeLuca Preserve.

More recently, Maitland-based Sun Terra Communities sought to create a Villages-like destination retirement community on the 14,212-acre Rohde Ranch, just opposite U.S. 441, that would have had over 30,000 homes and a dozen golf courses. The developer withdrew the application in 2023 due to opposition from county staff and elected officials.

Have a tip about Central Florida development? Contact me at lkinsler@GrowthSpotter.com or (407) 420-6261. Follow GrowthSpotter on Facebook and LinkedIn.