Gary Pinkston told a federal bankruptcy court in May that he has no interest in the Flint Hills Digital Campus. He had spent weeks promoting the 1,000-acre, potentially gigawatt-scale data center on Emporia, Kansas radio, according to Kansas Reflector's coverage by Max McCoy. Four days before the testimony, Pinkston called himself the "master developer" on KVOE's morning show. Under oath, asked by attorney Keith M. Lusby about Flint Hills Digital Campus LLC, Pinkston said: "I have no interest at all in that project." Asked about a community letter identifying him as the developer, he added: "No, I did not write that."
Pinkston is 84, based in Tiburon, California, and filed personal Chapter 11 in a Georgia bankruptcy court on May 14, less than three weeks before Emporia found out about the project. The filing covers more than a dozen LLCs he owns or manages, on top of unpaid IRS taxes dating to 2012 and unfiled 2023 returns. Under oath, Pinkston said his daughters, Crystal Pinkston and Tiffany Myers, own Kanza Park Place LLC, the entity behind the Emporia project. Bankruptcy filings show the same two women hold 98 percent of a separate entity, TC Clovis LLC, tied to the Hawaii dispute that triggered his Chapter 11. Lyon County residents who packed the planning commission hearing did not know any of this. Sixty people spoke. Five to one, they were against it. The commission recommended approval anyway, 6 to 1, and the city commission votes July 22 on rezoning and a digital infrastructure overlay district that would let the project proceed.
None of that ambiguity is new to data center siting fights. Denton, Texas residents are organizing against two AI data centers finishing construction this fall for a similar reason: the people showing up to zoning meetings are rarely the people who end up deciding how the plant actually runs once it is built. Emporia's version adds a wrinkle. The man residents have been questioning for two months is now on record, under oath, saying those questions were never really his to answer.
Flint Hills Digital Campus is planned for up to 1 gigawatt of IT load, backed by 600 megawatts of natural gas generation, phased over a buildout that could run a decade. Emporia has already written a water policy in anticipation: any user pulling more than 500,000 gallons a day triggers engineering studies, financial review, and an evaluation of system capacity before the tap gets turned. That threshold matters because the cooling method for the campus has not been picked. Air-cooled systems use no water. Closed-loop systems recycle what they have. Evaporative cooling, cheaper to build and far thirstier, is still on the table. Industry rule of thumb puts a 100-megawatt evaporative-cooled facility at roughly 530,000 gallons a day, a figure that clears Emporia's review trigger on its own, long before the campus gets anywhere near full scale.
North Carolina lawmakers have already decided that tradeoff is not one to leave to the developer. Senate Bill 730 would ban evaporative cooling outright at hyperscale sites, forcing closed-loop or dry systems no matter what an operator prefers. Emporia took the opposite path: write a gallons-per-day trigger and let the review process sort out the cooling method once someone commits to a design. That approach assumes someone is committed. Right now the person Emporia has been treating as that someone just told a bankruptcy court, on the record, that he is not.
Cooling engineers do not spec a chiller plant, a cooling tower, or a dry-cooler field for a client who will not admit under oath that he is the client. Somewhere between the KVOE interview and the creditors' meeting, Emporia lost the one signature that was supposed to make the water math, the gas turbines, and the rack density add up. A 100,000-square-foot data center outside Dallas filed its permits with no cooling plan in the paperwork at all, and got approved anyway. Emporia is closer to repeating that mistake on July 22 than its city commission seems to realize.