FloridaWest CEO Chris Plate has done interviews with WEAR-TV and the Pensacola News Journal but has yet to return the calls or texts from Inweekly. In the void of information, we refuse to stay on the sidelines on a story that could have a tremendous impact on our community’s quality of life—data centers.

Two likely sites for a data center have surfaced—The Bluffs and the Town of Century.

• In his interview with the PNJ, Plate confirmed that a defense industry company approached his organization and is exploring the construction of a “smaller” AI data center in the “north” part of the county, away from a populated area.  Both the Bluffs and Town of Century fit that description.

THE BLUFFS

More than a decade after FloridaWest Economic Development unveiled an ambitious industrial campus designed to transform Northwest Florida’s economy, not a single shovel has broken ground at The Bluffs.

When then-FloridaWest CEO Scott Luth stood before Escambia County boosters in November 2015, his pitch was electric. The Bluffs — a sprawling 6,300-acre industrial complex in Cantonment — would create 15,000 jobs, direct and indirect, over its first 25 years. It would recruit manufacturers to a site already threaded with pipelines, rail lines, barge terminals, and a 900-megawatt power plant. It would, Luth promised, “literally put Escambia County, Pensacola and Northwest Florida on the map as a center for manufacturing.”

• As of May 27, 2026, the land remains undeveloped.

A Site Rich in Infrastructure, Light on Progress

The Bluffs was conceived along a corridor north of Nine Mile Road, roughly between the University of West Florida campus and Beck Lake Road near the Emerald Coast Utilities Authority’s Central Water Reclamation Facility. FloridaWest and its partners — ECUA, Ascend Performance Materials, Gulf Power Company, and UWF — assembled a master plan around what engineers identified as a genuinely unusual confluence of existing assets: three high-pressure natural gas pipelines, a wastewater treatment plant producing 22 million gallons per day of reclaimed water, Class I industrial waterway access through two barge terminals, rail service, Interstate 10 access, and elevation between 60 and 120 feet above sea level, largely insulating the site from storm surge.

Gary Sammons, then Gulf Power’s District General Manager for the Western District and a FloridaWest board member, called the site unique not just for the region but potentially for all of Florida.

• “What’s attractive about this particular area is first it’s large, and it has the possibility of 60 different companies or more coming to Escambia County,” Sammons said at the time. “It has rail service, it has gas transmission, and it has electric transmission. When I say it’s got them, I mean it’s right there.”

The project’s origins stretch back further than 2015. A committee formed under the Greater Pensacola Chamber in 2011 — dubbed “Project FOIL,” for Forward Operating Industrial Location — spent years assembling the site concept. Fred Donovan, Jr. of Baskerville-Donovan chaired the initial Commerce Sites and Buildings Committee. His group identified the adjacent landholdings of ECUA, Ascend, Gulf Power, and UWF as a potential industrial cluster and commissioned an engineering study through the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity.

What Remains

The natural assets of the corridor are unchanged. ECUA’s reclamation facility still operates. Ascend Performance Materials — successor to Monsanto’s chemical operations — still anchors the industrial spine of the area. Gulf Power, now absorbed into NextEra Energy’s Florida Power & Light, still operates the Crist Plant. UWF’s nature trails still run from its Nine Mile Road campus northward through the corridor.

• What The Bluffs has not produced is jobs or tenants.

Town of Century

The Town of Century has struggled financially for years. The property taxes from the data center could make its cash flow problems disappear. State Rep. Michelle Salzman posted on Facebook when asked if she supported data centers in Escambia County:

• “I do support one in Century (my district) and remote areas that can access the ECUA recycled water (used to be used by the FPL coal-burning plant, but now we dump it—lots of excess water there.)

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