On August 7, 2026, a Dallas company called Applied Digital Corporation wrote a $25,000 check to the campaign of Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama.

Applied Digital owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, in Tuscaloosa County. It has pulled some permits for an industrial project there. It will not confirm whether it is building a data center on the land. The Tuscaloosa Thread, which has been covering the site for months, describes the company plainly as one of the developers wanting to build a data center near Brookwood.

The people who live around those 1,300 acres cannot find out what is going in next to them, because Brookwood's own officials have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

Tuberville, meanwhile, has spent the summer telling Alabamians that their objections to data centers are not real.

What he said in July

On July 13, Tuberville stood in front of the Alabama Sheriffs Association in Opelika and dismissed the concerns of nine or more Alabama communities that have organized against data center projects — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Mobile. He said the worry about noise and the environment was "bull crap," and blamed the opposition on Chinese propaganda. We wrote that story at the time: Alabama Towns Are Saying No to Data Centers. Tommy Tuberville Says That's 'Bull Crap' — and Blames China.

That post ended on an open question — who is on the other side of the deal Tuberville keeps selling.

Twenty-five days later, part of the answer arrived as a campaign contribution.

The company, the land, and the gag order

Here is what is publicly known about Applied Digital in Alabama, and what is not.

• It owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, according to county property records.
• It has received some permits for an industrial project on that land.
• It will not confirm whether a data center is planned. An Applied Digital spokesperson did not immediately respond to AL.com's request for comment.
• Brookwood Mayor Joe Barger has signed a non-disclosure agreement tied to data center proposals, according to city officials. So the town's elected leadership is legally barred from telling residents what it knows.
• The company is developing a data center campus in Louisiana called Delta Forge 1 and has facilities in North Dakota, so it is not a small operator testing the waters.

Fifty Brookwood residents have signed up to speak at a public meeting about the project. They will be speaking to a mayor who cannot answer them.

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project"

Tuberville's campaign confirmed to AL.com that the senator met with Applied Digital recently. His communications director, Mallory Jaspers, drew a careful line around it:

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project, it was an overview of how they communicate their projects to communities they want to invest in."

Read that again. The meeting was not about the specific project the company owns land for in Alabama. It was about how the company talks to communities it wants to build in.

Jaspers also said neither Tuberville nor anyone on his team has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Applied Digital. That is worth something. It is also not the problem. The problem is that the mayor of the affected town has signed one, and the man who wants to run the state took the company's money twenty-five days after telling those residents their concerns were nonsense.

Terry Grammer, a Brookwood-area resident who is currently raising money for legal fees to try to stop the project, told AL.com what it looks like from where he lives:

"This going on is almost like a pay to play deal. This is corruption at its finest."

The industry group asking the state to go easy

Applied Digital is a listed member of the Data Center Coalition, the industry's national lobbying group. Earlier in August, that coalition asked Alabama's Public Service Commission to make sure any new rules governing data centers and electricity rates allow "sufficient flexibility."

That is the fight that decides whether Alabama families or the data centers pay for the new power plants and transmission lines these facilities require. The industry is at that table. Tuberville's answer to the people who aren't is that they've been fooled by China.

This is not an Alabama-only pattern. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany campaigned against data center subsidies while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for the state's data center coalition. In Ohio, Jon Husted promised to protect people's electric bills while collecting $69,750 from the tech and utility companies driving those bills up. Same industry, same script, three states.

What $25,000 buys in this race

The contribution is not an outlier in size. Tuberville reported several comparable checks in August: $50,000 from Rapid Deployment Inc. of Mobile, $35,000 each from Trimed Billing Solutions of Hoover and K12 Management of Reston, Virginia, and $25,000 each from Schola Management of Birmingham, Newlight Healthcare of Austin, Advantage Capital Management of New Orleans, and Long & Long of Mobile.

He does not need the money. Tuberville ended July with $9.2 million on hand. His opponent, former U.S. Senator Doug Jones, had $1.7 million — and actually out-raised him that month, $622,000 to $289,597.

So this is not a candidate who took a check because he was desperate. It is a candidate who took a check from a company with 1,300 acres and a gag order in a town whose residents he had just called dupes of a foreign government.

Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new Alabama data centers while the state updates its water and energy rules. Tuberville's position is that data centers are a "gold mine" and that opposition is imported disinformation. Only one of those two positions has a $25,000 contribution attached to it from a company that stands to build one.

What the filings show

Applied Digital Corporation, which owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood and will not say what it is building there, gave Tommy Tuberville's campaign for governor $25,000 on August 7 — twenty-five days after Tuberville publicly called Alabamians' data center concerns "bull crap" and blamed them on China. The town's mayor has signed a non-disclosure agreement, so the fifty residents signed up to speak at next week's public meeting cannot get a straight answer from their own government. Tuberville, who is sitting on more than $9 million, took the money anyway.

Source

Ruth Serven Smith and Hannah Denham, Data center company tied to Alabama project donates $25,000 to Tuberville campaign, AL.com, August 28, 2026. Photo: Will McLelland / AL.com. Additional reporting from Don Hartley, Tuberville Gets $25,000 From Data Center Developer With Land in Brookwood, Tuscaloosa Thread, August 28, 2026. Fundraising figures from Andrea Tinker, Jones outraises Tuberville in July; Tuberville retains financial edge in governor's race, Alabama Reflector, August 6, 2026.