Then-Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley talks to the media on June 24, 2015 at Tennessee Valley Authority's Widows Creek Fossil Plant about Google's announcement that it would open a $600 million data center there."Where's Waldo?" is the U.S. version of a popular series of children's books that got its start in 1987 in England.
"Where's Google?" is a question that David Hughes, the mayor of Bridgeport, Alabama hears all the time.
"Everybody asks about it," Hughes says.
Google has yet to start construction on a $600 million data processing center in Jackson County, Alabama, near the site of the now-shuttered Tennessee Valley Authority's Widows Creek Fossil Plant.
It's been two-and-a-half years since the surprise announcement that a superstar of Silicon Valley was investing in rural Alabama.
The symbolism of building a clean and "green" new data facility at the old coal plant is one of the things that appealed to officials at Google, which has been "carbon-neutral" since 2007.
Google cleared the land in a flurry of construction after its big announcement in June 2015 and created a dirt "pad." Then activity stopped.
A central cooling plant keeps data center cool in Douglas County, Ga.So when will concrete be poured? When will the walls go up? Is the data still going to be built?
Google's not saying exactly when.
"We don't have anything new to share right now, unfortunately," says Charlotte Smith, the Washington D.C.-based Google spokeswoman who handles all the questions about the Alabama data center. "I can't share anything more than what we've shared, already."
'Very, very, very, very secretive'
"Secretive" is a word that invariably comes up when officials in Jackson County talk about Google -but they're confident the giant corporation will come.
"It's kind of like 'Fight Club.' The first rule of Google is, 'We don't talk about Google.' They're a very secretive group," says Jackson County Schools Curriculum Supervisor A.J. Buckner. "They are very, very, very, very secretive."
"So as far as when they're going to start construction, I'm going to say when the cement trucks start arriving is when we're going to know," he says.
Buckner is convinced the data center is on track - partly because the school system in September announced it got a $200,000 grant from the Google Inc. Charitable Giving Fund of the Tides Foundation to fund its Alabama Math, Science and Technology Initiative for grades 4-8.
"They fully funded a STEM initiative for us," Buckner says. "I only requested $20,000 and they gave me $200,000."
Google's data center is slated for an unincorporated area of the Jackson County, close to the city of Bridgeport, which has a population of about 2,400. The construction site is located inside Bridgeport's zip code in an area patrolled by the city's police and its gas and sewer service will come from Bridgeport Utilities.
"We're working on them with utilities for the site," says Bridgeport Utilities General Manager Jim Hughes. "They're very secretive. We talk to them about utilities, and not much else."
Secrecy has been Google's way from the beginning, according to Hughes.
Company officials didn't identify themselves beyond their first names when they first met with Bridgeport Utilities several months before the big June 2015 announcement.
"Nobody had [business] cards and it was first names only," he says. "Their confidentially agreement was like 30 pages long."
A Google data center is shown."We couldn't figure out who they were," Hughes says.
He thought they had to be from another Silicon Valley giant, Apple Inc.
"Well, they gotta be Apple," Hughes remembers thinking. "Because they've all got Apple computers and Apple phones."
Predicts other data centers will follow
Jackson County, Alabama, is in a similar situation as Clarksville, Tennessee, which also is still waiting for construction to start a $600 million Google data center that was announced about two years ago.
"They're very close-lipped on information," says Mike Evans, the executive director of the Montgomery County Industrial Development Board who explained utility easements had to be straightened out there and an electrical substation needed to be built. "I"m confident that they're committed to building a data center here. I just don't know what the timeline's going to be."
Bridgeport's mayor says some Jackson County residents question if Google actually will build its Bridgeport data center, based on the county's experience with the Bellefonte Nuclear Power Plant, which was never completed even after TVA spent more than $5 billion building the twin-reactor complex.
"That [doubt's] always going to happen since Bellefonte done what it done," Hughes says, adding, "I'm confident that [Google's] coming."
Buckner, a Jackson County native, is thrilled that Google chose his home turf.
He says Jackson County and Highway 72 are overdue for business development, since the county is midway between Chattanooga, a longtime industrial center, and Huntsville, Alabama, which is strong in technology thanks to its role in NASA space flight.
"You just take the city of Bridgeport, alone. Bridgeport has a major railroad, a major highway, it's close to interstate," he says. "It's just a destination that's greatly underutilized."
Buckner predicts that once Google opens its data center in Jackson County, other companies' data centers will follow, since that's been the pattern in other places where Google opened data centers.
"The Google announcement is on the level of the creation of TVA," he says."We're going to be a destination, instead of a drive-through."