Two data center stories are unfolding in the Jackson metro at once. One is loud, local, and on a clock. The other is quieter, slipperier, and may matter more.

The loud one belongs to Saxum Investment Company, a New Jersey developer asking the city to rezone roughly 230 acres in northwest Jackson from residential and commercial use to heavy industrial, according to Mississippi Today. The site sits south of Forest Avenue, between Interstate 220 and Medgar Evers Boulevard — land that is mostly trees and brush, save for a small two-acre farm in the middle of it. Protesters packed a Planning Board meeting over it in late May. The board is scheduled to take the application back up on June 24.

That fight has the public hearings, the residents and the deadline. It is the one most people in Jackson are watching. But the more consequential precedent was set not at City Hall, and not by a vote at all.

In April, a company called Prado AI — run by Jackson developer Gabriel Prado — asked the Mississippi Public Service Commission for a declaratory opinion in Docket 2026-AD-10, according to The Enterprise Journal. The question: whether Prado could build a 350-megawatt natural gas power plant to run a proposed AI data center and semiconductor campus without being regulated as a public utility. Prado's filing argued the plant would run off-grid, serving only on-site demand, with no electricity sold to the public.

On a Friday in late May, the commission declined to answer. Commissioners said in their order that Prado AI had not given them enough to work with, calling the request “premature and primarily hypothetical,” WLBT reported.

Prado treated the non-answer as a win. “We're celebrating,” he told WLBT. “It's actually in our favor.” His reasoning: if the commission won't narrow the statute, the plain language of the state's utility exemption stands, and his power plant doesn't need the commission's blessing. He told reporters he would now seek a permit — and that the campus he has in mind is no longer 350 megawatts but one gigawatt.

The state's incumbent utilities saw the stakes differently. In its motion to intervene, Mississippi Power warned that letting Prado proceed could open the door to “potentially widespread industrial and commercial deregulation,” according to WLBT. Entergy Mississippi argued that because Prado's tenants would effectively be the public, the operation looks like a public utility no matter how it is described, as the trade outlet Jackson Jambalaya reported from the docket filings.

Prado's pitch leans on the one argument that lands hardest in a city exhausted by utility bills. “By self-generating energy on site, we ensure that 100% of the cost of powering AI semiconductor and AI cloud computing operations is borne by the company and is not passed on to Mississippi rate payers over time,” he said in remarks reported by AOL. He has put the project's cost above the roughly $25 billion Amazon Web Services is investing in data centers across Madison County, Ridgeland, Clinton and Warren County, WLBT reported — though he has not produced an exact figure, or, lately, an exact location.

That last part is its own problem. In filings and at an earlier press conference, Prado said the campus would be in Ridgeland. By June 1, speaking to reporters, he would only confirm it was somewhere “in the Jackson metro area,” even as social media speculation tried to tie him to the Forest Avenue site — the one that actually belongs to Saxum, according to WLBT. A roughly $25-billion-plus industrial campus whose developer won't say where it goes is a hard thing for any city to plan around.

Back at City Hall, the council has struggled to get ahead of any of it. Council President Brian Grizzell proposed a six-month moratorium on data center construction and permitting — a “cooling period,” he called it — to give the city time to write rules on water, sewer, electricity and environmental impact, Mississippi Today reported. The measure was tabled after City Attorney Drew Martin warned it functioned as a zoning ordinance and would need public notice and a hearing first. The day after the council balked, Saxum filed its rezoning request.

The money on the table is real. Saxum's attorney, Robert Ireland of Watkins & Eager, told officials that a data center the size of the one proposed in Clinton would generate about $60 million for the city and more than $80 million for the school district over ten years, according to Mississippi Today. Mississippi had two announced data center projects at the start of 2025; it now has seven in the works.

The June 24 Planning Board hearing will produce a vote, a headline and another round of protest. The Prado question already got its answer, and the answer was a shrug. In a state where the regulator just chose not to regulate, the precedent that sticks may be the one nobody got to vote on.