Chris McKee, president of CRG, said he hopes construction will begin on the company’s data center in Festus this November.
In late 2025, CRG announced its plan to develop a hyperscale data center on 361 acres north of Hwy. 67 and west of Hwy. CC. CRG, which is the St. Louis-based data center development arm for Clayco, has estimated the cost of developing the facility at $6 billion.
In the Festus project, CRG would develop the property, and then a data center company would operate it, although no operator has yet been identified.
Opponents to the project emerged soon after CRG’s plans were made public.
“We’ve been saying, for as long as I can remember, that it is our goal to get this started before the end of 2026,” McKee said Monday.
CRG was expected to conduct a webinar on Wednesday to inform the public of the specifics of the project, after the Leader’s deadline for publication. The company moved its webinar from Thursday to avoid a conflict with a visit to town of the Budweiser Clydesdales, city officials announced.
According to information on FestusForward.com, the webinar was intended to present information and answer questions from the community about the project.
McKee said the webinar came about in response to a request from the city.
“So, the city asked us to try to engage with the public more regularly going forward, and so this is our attempt to try to do that, and so there’ll be a presentation,” he said.
In answer to questions from the public, McKee said the webinar did not count as a meeting required by a city ordinance regarding data center developments. That meeting will be in-person in Festus at a time, date and place to be determined, he said.
“Just to be super clear, (the webinar) does not fulfill the meeting requirement that we have to do as part of the permitting process,” McKee said. “There’s been a lot of confusion around it, and it absolutely does not.”
If the webinar is considered successful, CRG plans to conduct more webinars concerning the data center development project over the next several months, he said.
“Yeah, I think we’re going to do the first one Wednesday to make sure that, first of all, that it’s useful, and that it has what folks feel like is something that we can work with as a tool going forward,” McKee said. “Then, my intention is we’ll schedule them out for the next few months thereafter, so folks can go ahead and put them on their calendar and be available.”
At the July 13 Festus City Council meeting, three councilmen proposed a year moratorium on the proposed data center development project in town.
McKee reiterated that because the councilmen’s proposed ordinance has not been formally introduced, “we’re not going to speculate on specifics – but our commitment to getting this project right for Festus is unchanged,” which he had stated in a previous written statement.
He said the July 22 webinar format will involve him giving a presentation on what CRG has described as its “refined conceptual design” for the proposed Festus data center development, which company officials presented to the Festus City Council and other officials during a closed session June 29.
City officials said the meeting was closed due to discussion regarding possible amendments to the data center agreement between CRG and the city approved by the majority of the City Council in March. Data center opponents have criticized the closed session presentation, saying it continues a pattern of a lack of transparency in the data center process involving the city and CRG.
McKee said he could not respond to the allegations concerning a lack of transparency as there is “an active lawsuit around a bunch of issues as it relates to transparency.”
“I will say that CRG followed the process that is outlined by the city in their ordinances,” he added.