It was standing room only Monday night as dozens of DeKalb residents turned out despite the snowy weather to share their thoughts on a proposed 560-acre Endeavour Energy data center.

The public hearing was in front of the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, which advises the City Council on development projects. Residents expressed their views and interests both for and against plans for what the city called “Project Vector” and last week announced would be Endeavour operating as its subsidiary, Edged.

The data center received the commission’s positive backing, but City Council approval still is needed.

DeKalb developer Jerry Krusinski of ChicagoWest Business Center spoke at the hearing. Krusinski is petitioning for city support to rezone and annex 560 acres of land on the city’s south side for Endeavour Energy to build a major, four-building, 3 million-square-foot data center. ChicagoWest owns most of the land in question.

“We’re very excited to make this introduction here,” Krusinski said, introducing representatives from Edged. ”We’re not hiding behind a project codename. They want you to know that they want to be part of the community as well."

While it’s true the public knows the company behind the project’s codename – a common strategy in major development and often mandated by nondisclosure agreements signed by public officials – it’s not yet known what company will be using the data center, however.

If approved by the DeKalb City Council, Endeavour Energy – which also has a data center in Aurora – plans to rent out its data center servers to other large-scale users. The city hasn’t announced who that user might be.

The data center campus would be built just south of Meta’s DeKalb Data Center, with fewer buildings but more land. Edged would have four data center campus buildings and two electrical substations, on about 560 acres of land on both east and west sides of Illinois State Route 23, north of Keslinger Road and west of Crego Road, records show.

Since 2020, ChicagoWest has brought significant industrial growth to DeKalb, securing developments from Ferrara Candy Co. to Kraft Heinz, Meta’s DeKalb data center and Amazon.

Krusinski said he’s been working with Endeavour for about six months now. The company’s CEO has been in town on multiple occasions, he said.

“The reality of it is these data centers are very high-value facilities and the layout is very similar to Meta,” Krusinski said. “We want this done responsibly, sustainably and really to let it fit in with the harmony of the area.”

Krusinski touted local tax revenue as a positive for the project. He said the data center build – expected to take up to 8 years – would bring in “good-paying union construction jobs for many years,” support local businesses and suppliers and, when online, bring 100 full-time high-paying jobs to operate.

DeKalb Mayor Cohen Barnes and City Manager Bill Nicklas also were present at the hearing.

Some residents expressed concerns about another major data center’s environmental impact. Data centers typically use massive amounts of water and energy to keep its 24/7 servers operating.

Endeavour Energy has said it plans to use natural gas-powered generators to cool its servers instead of water. Meta’s data center in DeKalb, comparatively, is limited by the city to 200,000 gallons of water per day, documents show.

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Krusinski also addressed energy consumption.

Endeavour Energy markets itself online as a maker of sustainable data centers, providing “carbon-neutral, zero water” data centers for major cloud companies.

“This facility here will not impact the city of DeKalb’s utility power costs,” Krusinski said. “What does do that is more of a national impact and what’s happening with the industry with transmission and power generations.”

This is a developing story which will be updated.

Shaw Local’s Kelsey Rettke contributed.