Project Red Wolf data center, Kansas City, Kansas

Residents beat half of this data center on a technicality the law gave them, and the other half turned on eight people changing their minds. Red Wolf DCD Properties proposed six buildings totalling 1.8 million square feet on land north and south of Parallel Parkway in western Kansas City, Kansas, in Wyandotte County, which would have been the largest development in the county's history. The campus would total some 600 megawatts across 1.8 million square feet, with two on-site substations, three buildings north of Parallel Parkway and three south, west of the Kansas Speedway.

Protest petitions were filed against both halves, which required a supermajority of the eleven member planning and zoning commission. On 31 July 2025 the north side rezoning failed to reach it on a 7 to 3 vote. The south side never faced the same test, because eight signatories took their names off that petition.

Neal Palmer and Haskell Farms LLC then sued, alleging the applications contained "numerous errors and insufficiencies" and "failed to adhere to the Unified Government's municipal code", and that the commission rushed its review "without sufficient study of short and long-term impacts". The suit also alleges that a commissioner was "unduly pressured" to recuse himself from planning commission hearings, and that Red Wolf orchestrated the effort to have those signatures withdrawn. On 29 October a district judge refused the Unified Government's motion to have the case thrown out.

Greg Kindle, president of the Wyandotte Economic Development Council, argued the return: the site is in the Piper school district, the second fastest growing in the state, and each of the six buildings would pay more than $2 million a year in property tax. "General Motors pays about $3.5 million annually in property taxes on four million square feet," he said. "We're looking at one data center generating $2.4 million a year on 330,000 square feet." He put the jobs at 40 to 60 confirmed and possibly 100, technical work at around $100,000 a year, and said the water demand would be set by the tenant: "These folks aren't planning to use a significant amount of water. They're going heavier on power and less on water."

Ty Gorman of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign answered that the campus would double the county's energy use, and that the objection was to who would own it: "The risk to our health and the risk to our bills of just inviting this kind of real estate flipper style of data center from Red Wolf is great." His preference was that the commission force a sale to an end user like Google that had committed to green energy and would invest in the grid around it. Zack Pistora, who directs the Sierra Club in Kansas, framed the wider question: "We're trying to figure out, if we're going to welcome data centers to Kansas, how we can make sure that we're not doing any harm to the communities, to the ecosystems and the environment." Kasia Tarczynska of Good Jobs First, who studies data center subsidies, said there had been a great deal of buildup and talk of a bubble.

Power is the next test. In January 2026 the Unified Government and the Board of Public Utilities said they were in the pre-development phase with three proposed data centers, code-named Red Wolf, Yardbird and Linda, in a system that now peaks at about 500 megawatts. BPU officials said existing ratepayers would be protected and developers would pay all on-site costs and substations.