Data center underway in Webster County

Last edited 10:59 a.m., May 12, 2026 [Editor's note: This story has been updated to correct erroneous information about the size of the data center site.]

A data center is under construction just outside the city limits of Marshfield.

Webster County Presiding Commissioner Paul Ipock verified the development in an interview yesterday, noting that members of the community have expressed concern about it.

The development is happening on a 5-acre site on Rifle Range Road, across Interstate 44 to the north of the city. The owner of the project is Lumon Solutions LLC, formed in October 2025. The articles of organization filed with the Missouri secretary of state say the purpose of the entity is to provide AI data centers.

A news release from the Webster County Commission states that people from both inside and outside of the community have expressed concern about potential environmental impacts that could arise from a hyperscale data center – that is, a very large-scale center with hundreds of thousands of servers. That isn’t what the county is getting, according to the statement.

The statement says commissioners reached out to the developer, described as “very open and forthright in sharing information about the project.”

Ipock said the property’s developer, Trent Overhue, visited with commissioners May 4. Overhue is the 2025 buyer of Plaza Towers in a foreclosure sale, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. Overhue has since made multiple upgrades to the 55-year-old Springfield building.

An additional principal with Lumon Solutions is Ashton Owens. In his LinkedIn profile, Owens describes himself as the founder of Lumon Solutions. Owens, a consultant, is involved in multiple businesses, including Dropshots LLC, an Ozark pickleball center he owns with his brothers, Aaron and Austin Owens, according to past SBJ reporting.

The Webster County Commission statement said Lumon officials describe the project as a “small-scale, high-performance computing facility.” The building housing it is designed to be 14,000 square feet.

Citing Lumon officials, the statement says the facility will be cooled by a closed-loop system with water usage estimated at a few hundred gallons per month. It adds that the water will be supplied by a standard residential-style well with an approximate depth of 500 feet and a capacity of 20 gallons per minute.

The statement cites Lumon officials as saying there will be no chemical discharge or hazardous materials released, and there will be no air pollution or emissions.

“The project described will have a lesser environmental impact than many standard commercial facilities or residential subdivisions,” the commission statement says.

The statement also addresses concerns about noise, noting the developers have said the noise level will be comparable to standard commercial HVAC equipment. Plans are to mitigate noise through construction of an earthen berm around the facility with strategic equipment placement and buffering.

“In short, this particular development does not appear to be one of the massive, resource-consuming hyperscale data centers that have been built elsewhere in the country,” the statement says.

Ipock put it more colorfully.

“I don’t believe it’s a big 400-pound gorilla that people are afraid of,” he said. “I think people google what’s out there about data centers, and there are some very scary stories out there. This is not what the guy’s bringing to Webster County. We don’t have the electrical power that could handle such a thing.”

Ipock said the 5-acre site where the data center is being built is next to another 5-acre site, not owned by Lumon Solutions, that Ipock characterized as an undevelopable, heavily wooded ravine. He said the trees should serve as an additional sound buffer for the center.

Developer weighs in
In an interview this morning, Overhue said he was a partner in Lumon. Asked if there are other partners besides him and Owens, he declined to disclose that information.

He also declined to disclose the potential customer for the site, citing security concerns and nondisclosure agreements. However, he noted that a facility like the one Lumon is building – he described it as a small-edge, high-performance computing facility – often works with single tenants.

Overhue also declined to disclose the cost of the facility.

Despite being mum about those operational factors, Overhue weighed in on the plans for the data center, including its projected completion date of June 1.

“It’s going to be a pretty quick turnaround,” he said. “Most of our infrastructure work will be in in the next few weeks.”

The scaled-construction building is being assembled off-site, Overhue said, and will arrive largely intact, speeding processes.

Overhue said he has heard the concerns about the data center.

“I would just want to educate, all uses within this field are not created equal,” he said. “There are data centers that are very environmentally harsh, but the large majority of them have a lot of energy efficiencies and fit within a lot of the existing grid with most people not even knowing that they exist.”

He characterized data centers as important to the country as a whole.

“This is where tech’s going,” he said. “We have to keep up on the capacity, or we lose competitive edge as a nation. It will take a whole host of small and large data centers to keep up with the day-to-day demands that we have within the U.S.”

He said facilities like the one Lumon is building do analytical research for uses like medical logistics, engineering, artificial intelligence models and banking.

“If you don’t have these facilities, your day-to-day life becomes impacted,” he said. “There would be no cellphones, no computers, no banking, no healthcare – it all relies on this technology.”

Overhue also stressed that the Lumon company is made up entirely of local people.

“That’s a massive asset compared to some of these other companies that come from the East and West Coasts and don’t really care about what people think or what we’re doing,” he said. “That’s a very important part of this.”

Overhue said the data center is Lumon’s first, though he noted he personally has a long history working with memory chips and similar technology. He also said Lumon will own and operate the facility.

“It should be a good thing for Webster County,” he said, noting the facility will fit within the existing power grid.

“The power’s there, the substation’s in place; we can cohabitate without having the utility companies have a large expense to get everything up and going,” he said.

He added that the project is a great fit for the Webster Electric Cooperative, which uses about 15% of the power capacity of the substation adjoining the data center site.

“In a business reference, they have 85% of unrealized revenue,” he said. “It costs them nothing to do – it’s already there.”

The result will be that the facility brings money into the co-op and stabilizes rates, Overhue said.He added that the facility will occupy a small footprint.

“There’s not enough power or land to do any large hyperscaler site,” he said. “It should fit in great and bring a lot of benefits to the county and people round the area.”

Genesis of company
In a phone call today, Owens talked about starting the company, saying he loves technology.

“I live for this,” he said.

In his consulting business, Owens works with professional athletes and travels all over the world – about 100 days a year, he said. He gradually became interested in the data center industry.

“As I started looking, I thought, there’s a more effective and better way to do this that doesn’t tear down farmland and doesn’t harm the environment,” he said. “That was the journey.”

He added that the data centers provided an opportunity to partner with local co-ops, where power is sitting as unrealized revenue in substations.

“That’s honestly our mission here, and it’s why I wanted to bring it to Springfield,” he said.

Owens said he also wanted to spend more time at home and with his family, rather than on airplanes. He saw the expansion of AI and the accompanying lack of infrastructure for it as an opening.

“That’s why I started the company,” he said.

Owens said he finds it hard to be villainized by opponents of data centers, but he is experiencing some of that.

“It’s hard to be painted as an evil person. A lot of sad things are being said,” he said.

He noted he has found a good person to run the Marshfield center – someone who lives in Buffalo, Missouri, and has 40 years in the data industry. He said the site will hire 12-15 people, and he will also use local contractors for everything from fencing to security.

“There’s a right way to do this that is beneficial to communities and economies,” he said.

Staffing the center
Lumon Solutions had recent LinkedIn posts looking to staff the data center with a site operations manager, facilities technicians and a part-time, on-call technician.

“This is a hands-on, operations-focused environment,” the post states. “You’ll be monitoring infrastructure, maintaining uptime and handling day-to-day facility operations.”

The post seeks people with backgrounds in facilities and maintenance; industrial or plant operations; electrical and heating, air conditioning and ventilation service; and military or technical service.

A separate post for a site operations manager is no longer accepting applications with 13 received.

No P&Z
Ipock, who is in his 28th year of service on the Webster County Commission, said commissioners first learned of the data center a week ago, on April 29, through a Facebook post. He was at a regional county commissioners’ meeting in Carthage when Northern Commissioner Dale Fraker called him about it.

Ipock said he felt concerned at the time and noted that Webster County does not have a planning and zoning board to vet developments. The county made attempts to establish a zoning board with ballot measures in 2005 and 2007, he said, but those were heavily defeated.

However, he said, the concerns about the data center may revive interest in establishing a board.

“I believe that this will spur a movement of planning and zoning again for the county,” he said.

Ipock said the commission has hired a Springfield attorney, Christiaan D. Horton of Carnahan Evans PC, to help with the data center issue. He described Horton as a well-known attorney.

“We have hired outside legal counsel to study and be a voice for us to help us know what we’re dealing with,” Ipock said, although he praised Webster County Prosecuting Attorney Ben Berkstresser as top-notch. “This we thought might be better. There are hard feelings both ways, so we thought we’d better get an outside attorney to give us an opinion.”

On a personal note, Ipock said he loves Webster County.

“Webster County’s my home,” he said. “If it’s something that I think is going to harm the environment, harm the water – I’m definitely against it.”

If a large-scale data center were to come around, Ipock said he might be worried.

“That’s not what we’re dealing with right now,” he said. “If you google AI centers, they don’t talk about small ones – they talk about big mega units that take millions of gallons of water daily. That’s not what we’ve got.”

Community concern
Not everyone is satisfied by the idea that the data center is a small one, however.

A public post on the Facebook page “What’s Happening in Marshfield Missouri” announced what it characterized as a “mega data center” on May 5. The post predicts a rise in electric rates and a drop in water tables that would result in dry wells. It also compares the round-the-clock noise levels to that of a Los Angeles freeway. By 8 a.m. today, the post had generated brisk interaction, with 129 comments and 14 shares.

In the thread, posters express concerns about water, electricity and natural gas usage, among other concerns.

A meeting was held May 5 in a standing-room-only Jackson Wedding and Event Center, which holds 125, according to its website.

“Some people are fighting it,” Ipock said, characterizing the meeting as “a little out of hand.”

A Facebook livestream of the meeting showcased myriad environmental and safety concerns of county residents, most of whom were just learning about the data center.

The Webster County Commission will host a public meeting at 10 a.m. on May 11 at the Marshfield High School auditorium to discuss the data center with members of the public.