LAWRENCE COUNTY, Ohio — A Texas company spent nearly $1 million on Lawrence County land last December, held a ribbon-cutting, and declared it the future of artificial intelligence. The community is still catching up.
The company is Strata Expanse, headquartered at 2001 Timberloch Place in The Woodlands, Texas. Its Chief Revenue Officer and Sr. Vice-President of Origination, Ellen Taylor, summed up the company’s pitch plainly in the official press release: the company is, in her words, “flipping the data center model on its head — delivering dispersed AI infrastructure in weeks, not years.”
The Lawrence County Economic Development Corporation sold the land for $919,500. Hamilton Township has no zoning laws. Because Strata Expanse did not seek tax abatements, no public comment period was required. The deal moved forward without a community vote, hearing, or formal notice.
The facility is the first of a planned 30-site national rollout the company calls “Land-to-Hand AI Infrastructure” — a model built around acquiring available land, generating on-site power, and delivering what Taylor’s team describes as a turnkey “AI Factory-in-a-Box” directly to data center tenants. The power mix includes green hydrogen from Dayton-based Millennium Reign Energy, deep geothermal cooling, solar generation, natural gas backup, and battery storage — all off-grid. The company claims it is the first data center in the country to run directly on green hydrogen.
Computing hardware is supplied by Supermicro (Nasdaq: SMCI), a publicly traded company whose prior accounting violations and related controversies are documented in SEC filings. AI workload orchestration runs through RAVEL’s Orchestrate AI platform, led by Co-founder and CEO Denise Muyco, who called the project “the next generation of AI infrastructure in America” in the December 19 press release.
The intended use cases, per company materials, include large language model training, retrieval-augmented generation systems, robotics simulation, and high-performance computing — the kinds of workloads that require serious, sustained power and connectivity investment.
A Change.org petition titled “Stop AI Data Centers in Lawrence County, Ohio” collected more than 5,000 signatures since the ribbon-cutting. Residents and council members raised concerns about health risks, the speed of the deal, and a lack of community input.
Whether Strata Expanse delivers on its promises remains to be seen. Lawrence County is watching.