Zoning in Rankin County, Mississippi: A $6 Billion Data Center Case Study

A $6 billion campus, and Mississippi's third-largest economic development project ever

In summer 2025, AVAIO Digital Partners -- a Connecticut-based developer and operator of data centers -- announced it would build a $6 billion AI-ready data center campus, branded AVAIO Digital Taurus, at the East Metropolitan Center Business and Industrial Park in Brandon, Rankin County. The Governor's office described it as the third-largest economic development project in Mississippi state history by capital investment. The campus footprint runs to 329 acres, with the first development phase sited on 175 acres of that tract. Site work formally began September 10, 2025, shortly after AVAIO executed an Agreement for Electric Service with Entergy, and Yates Construction -- a Mississippi-based contractor with a national large-scale infrastructure track record -- is serving as general contractor.

The first phase alone is planned at more than 600,000 square feet of data-center buildings with 116 megawatts of power capacity, targeted for completion and energization in the first half of 2027. Company and state officials cite at least 60 direct, high-tech jobs from the completed campus, plus hundreds of indirect construction and related jobs during the build-out. The Mississippi Development Authority approved the project for the state's Data Center Enterprises sales-and-use-tax exemption -- a program that, per industry trade coverage, requires a minimum $20 million investment creating at least 20 new jobs paying 125% of the average state wage, a threshold this project clears many times over -- and MDA had separately already funded site preparation at the East Metro Business/Industrial Park itself through its Site Development Grant Program, which is part of why the site was development-ready when AVAIO came looking. Rankin County and the City of Brandon are also providing local infrastructure upgrades and tax incentives.

Why this landed quietly here while Jackson's data-center fights made headlines

The same 2025-2026 period saw genuinely contentious, high-profile data-center zoning fights just across the county line in Jackson -- a rezoning application from Saxum Investment Company that grew to cover 230 acres, packed planning-board hearings, and ultimately a citywide moratorium on new data centers passed by the Jackson City Council in July 2026, while neighboring Clinton and Madison amended their own zoning ordinances specifically to add data-center definitions and conditional-use-permit requirements. This research pass found no evidence of a comparable public rezoning battle over the AVAIO project in Rankin County specifically.

The likely reason is structural, not coincidental: AVAIO's campus sits inside the East Metropolitan Center Business and Industrial Park, a site Rankin County and the Mississippi Development Authority had already developed and zoned for exactly this kind of large-scale industrial use, rather than a residential or agricultural parcel that would have required a contested rezoning the way Jackson's proposal did. That distinction matters for anyone evaluating land near this corridor: a parcel already inside an established, county-and-state-backed industrial park carries very different (and generally faster, less contested) zoning and permitting exposure than a comparable-looking parcel just outside the park's boundary that would need its own rezoning application to support a similar use.

What this means if you're evaluating land near the AVAIO corridor

If you're looking at land near Brandon and the East Metropolitan Center Business and Industrial Park, treat the AVAIO project as a real, current driver of demand for nearby workforce housing, contractor staging, and ancillary commercial and logistics use -- not a speculative rumor. But don't assume that momentum extends automatically to land outside the park's own zoned boundary: confirm with Rankin County's Office of Community Development exactly where the industrial-park zoning ends and the county's general Reservoir Community District or standard residential/agricultural zoning resumes, since a parcel just outside the park may face a materially different (and potentially contested) rezoning process to support any similar large-scale use. Also confirm current infrastructure capacity -- water, sewer, and especially electrical grid capacity given the scale of Entergy's commitment to the AVAIO campus -- directly with the relevant utility before assuming an adjacent parcel can piggyback on the same buildout.