Lowell Covenant Business Park Data Center, Lowell, Michigan

Microsoft's proposed data center at the Covenant Business Park in Lowell Township, Kent County, Michigan, is on hold while a township committee writes the rules any data center there would have to follow. The site is a 237-acre industrial parcel at 4687 Alden Nash Ave. SE, where the developer Franklin Partners began drawing interest from data center tenants in 2025. A Microsoft spokesperson has described a current plan of five data center buildings, subject to change, in what Spectrum News has called a potential $1 billion project.

The land is owned by the Barnabas Foundation and has been zoned for industry since the early 1990s but has no municipal water or sewer, which the city of Lowell would have to extend. The site won about $17.5 million in state site readiness grants, and the city and township approved a land transfer agreement for it in 2024.

Residents learned of the data center only in November 2025, when the applicant asked the township to rezone the park, and the reaction was overwhelmingly negative. A December 8, 2025 hearing had to be rescheduled because the venue was too small for the crowd, and on December 18 the township said the applicant had requested an "indefinite suspension of the application and its approval process."

In January 2026 Microsoft said publicly it was the company behind the plan and that it had asked the seller to pause the rezoning process so it could spend time with the community before proceeding. Residents have raised power demand and bills, water and the aquifer, generator noise and emissions, wetlands and farmland, and whether the local fire department could handle a data center fire. A group called Residents United for a Healthy Lowell formed to oppose the project, and an online petition against it has drawn thousands of signatures.

In May 2026 the Lowell Township Board set up an advisory committee, instead of a moratorium, to recommend a data center ordinance. "It's going to take quite a long time to get to the point where there actually is an ordinance that we can make public," Planning Commission Chair Dave Simmonds said in August 2026. Committee member Julie Echtinaw, who lives across the street from the site, said: "We cannot just exclude Microsoft. That's exclusionary law in the state of Michigan."

Microsoft is pursuing other sites nearby: it owns about 316 acres in Gaines Township, Kent County, where a rezoning request has also been put on hold, and nearly 272 acres in Dorr Township, Allegan County, where it plans to develop 128 acres for a data center.

The Lowell Township Planning Commission holds a public hearing on any rezoning and makes a recommendation, and the Lowell Township Board has the final say on both rezoning and any data center ordinance. The Lowell City Council must separately approve new water and sewer agreements before the site can be served. No date has been set for the ordinance's first public reading.