Governor Mike Kehoe will host the Governor's Forum on Artificial Intelligence and Data Centers on June 18 at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Google has announced a $15 billion investment in a Missouri data center campus. Metrobloks announced a $1.4 billion project in Clay County. A state bank is facing a boycott call connected to a data center controversy. Missouri's Department of Natural Resources has been directed to review energy regulations specifically to address the grid impact of data center power demand.
All of this has happened in roughly five months. Missouri is the current template for a state that decided early to position itself for the AI infrastructure buildout, and the consequences, both the wins and the friction, are arriving on the same timeline.
In January 2026, Kehoe signed Executive Order 26-02, which aligned Missouri's research and workforce assets with Trump's national AI initiative and directed the DNR to begin reviewing energy regulations and infrastructure planning in response to data center power demand growth. That executive order was the signal. The Google announcement and the Metrobloks project are the outcome of that signal reaching corporate site selection teams.
This is the formula that pro-development states are running in 2026: executive order establishing policy intent, governor's forum creating a visible commitment to industry engagement, direct corporate recruitment, regulatory review that removes friction from permitting and power procurement. Missouri executed all four steps faster than most states have executed one. The $15 billion Google commitment and the $1.4 billion Clay County project are the result of doing all four steps in sequence, quickly.
For context on what that investment volume means at the facility level: a $15 billion data center campus at Google's typical build cost per megawatt implies a facility in the range of several hundred megawatts to multiple gigawatts, depending on the configuration. Missouri's grid will need to accommodate that demand. The DNR review is supposed to produce the roadmap for how that happens.
The cooling infrastructure question in Missouri is different from the cooling infrastructure question in the West. Missouri does not have the water stress of Utah, Arizona, or Nevada. The Missouri River basin and its tributaries provide the kind of water availability that makes evaporative cooling economically viable without triggering the water rights conflicts playing out in Box Elder County, Utah. Evaporative cooling at scale in Missouri is not the political liability it is in Phoenix or Las Vegas.
The constraint is grid capacity. Missouri's electrical grid is a mix of coal, natural gas, nuclear, and growing renewable generation. Adding several gigawatts of data center load on top of the existing industrial and residential demand profile requires transmission upgrades, substation builds, and potentially new generation capacity. The DNR review, if it produces actionable guidance rather than a report that sits on a shelf, will determine which of those infrastructure investments Missouri is willing to fast-track and which it will require developers to fund independently.
That distinction matters for operators. A state that tells Google or Metrobloks "we will upgrade the substation on the public dime" is making a different offer than a state that says "you can interconnect, but the upgrade cost is yours." Missouri's posture on that question will be visible in the commitments that follow the June 18 forum. What Kehoe says at Missouri S&T about infrastructure cost allocation will tell operators more than any press release.
A Missouri bank is facing a boycott call connected to data center controversy, according to American Banker reporting. KOMU has covered Missouri leaders pushing data center development despite electricity and environmental concerns. The community resistance pattern that is visible in the national project delay data is not absent in Missouri. It is just arriving later than the approvals, because that is always how the sequence works.
State leadership creates the conditions for investment, corporate announcements follow, community opposition emerges once the physical scale of what is being built becomes concrete to the people living near the site. The Metrobloks project in Clay County, 30 permanent jobs on a $1.4 billion investment, produces exactly the kind of ratio that local residents find hard to reconcile: enormous capital flowing into a facility that will draw significant power and produce minimal local employment. Data center economics do not follow industrial employment rules, and communities that expected manufacturing jobs sometimes end up with an automated facility behind a fence.
The bank boycott is an early signal of that friction. It is not determinative of the state's direction, but operators watching Missouri should recognize that a state that moves fast on development also compresses the timeline on which opposition organizes. Kehoe's June 18 forum is an opportunity to get ahead of that friction with specifics on grid investment, water use commitments, and community benefit structures. Whether those specifics materialize is the question the forum will answer.
Missouri's climate presents a genuine engineering choice for operators. Average wet-bulb temperatures in Missouri are low enough for free cooling through economization for a meaningful portion of the year. Combined with the available water supply, a hybrid cooling architecture, mixing direct-to-chip liquid cooling at the rack level with evaporative or adiabatic cooling at the facility level, can achieve water use effectiveness figures that are difficult to match in water-stressed states without paying a higher capital cost for dry cooling systems.
Google's facility in Missouri will almost certainly use liquid cooling at the rack level for AI workloads, given that the company's current infrastructure build is aligned with GPU-dense configurations. Whether the facility-level cooling uses evaporative towers, dry coolers, or a hybrid system will depend on the specific site, the power density, and the water access commitments Google makes to Missouri regulators. Those commitments will be visible in the DNR review process. They will also become the reference point for every operator that follows Google into Missouri.
Missouri is building its case as an AI infrastructure state in real time. The $15 billion Google commitment is the proof point. What comes out of the DNR review and the June 18 forum will determine whether that proof point holds.