Who are the middlemen behind data center deals?

WARRENTON, Mo. — You’ve likely heard of Google, Amazon and CRG — all name-brand companies bringing data centers to the greater St. Louis region.

But you might not have heard of MarksNelson, a consultancy behind at least four proposed data centers in Missouri. The Kansas City-based firm helps with recruiting, selecting sites, negotiating incentives, evaluating labor markets and more, according to its website.

It’s part of an industry of middlemen brokering data center deals between multibillion-dollar companies and small communities — often after having been hired by the communities themselves.

These companies can play a vital role in helping match big business with communities seeking jobs and tax revenue. But residents across Missouri and elsewhere have accused their local governments of not being forthcoming in those negotiations.

Four local projects involve MarksNelson, which recently rebranded as Springline Advisory. The Greater Montgomery County Economic Development Council paid MarksNelson more than $350,000 for “organization management and consulting” from 2021 to 2024, according to public records, as the county courted an $8.5 billion Amazon Web Services data center and a $15 billion Google data factory.

Warren County also entered an economic development deal with the consultancy that dates back to at least 2021, according to a contract acquired by Missouri Business Alert. There, the AI company Crusoe plans to build a data center projected to cost over $8 billion.

The city of Festus, too, paid MarksNelson $20,000, plus $400 per hour, to facilitate discussions with developer CRG on a data center project valued at $6 billion.

However, some residents don’t approve of the way these deals went down. Local data center opponents in Montgomery County and Festus have alleged their local governments tried to keep the projects out of the public eye.

Festus opposition group Wake Up JeffCo named CRG and the city of Festus in a lawsuit accusing them of hosting unlawful secret meetings, including one with MarksNelson advisors.

In Montgomery County, residents filed a similar lawsuit accusing their local government of a lack of transparency. MarksNelson was not mentioned specifically in that suit.

All four of those developments involve Steve Etcher, an economic development consultant at MarksNelson.

Etcher’s name and number frequently pop up on websites promoting industrial development, and his quotes advocating for data center construction are in news articles covering communities across Missouri, including in Montgomery County, Festus and Warrenton.

He has worked in Warren County and Montgomery County since at least 1992, when he was hired to be the executive director of Boonslick Regional Planning Commission, an association of local governments in Missouri.

“We've had a longstanding contract relationship with those entities to do their economic development,” Etcher said. “So, as part of our economic development work, we're working on the data center development.”

The Amazon, Google and Crusoe data centers make up the backbone of a large development area Etcher dubbed the Heart of America Mega-Site, which aims to turn land off I-70 around the two counties into a 5,000-acre tech hub. Etcher said the region contains valuable resources for development, including one of the largest substations in Missouri.

“It’s got access to the workforce, access to all the transportation assets, it's got great power,” Etcher said. “It really checks so many boxes.”

Etcher said this project has been in the works for years. He met with Missouri officials nearly a decade ago and received state funds to flesh out the idea. In 2024, data center companies started to show interest.

State economic development officials love the project.

“What you're doing in Warren, Montgomery County, I wish I could replicate you all across the state,” Missouri Department of Economic Development director Michelle Hataway told Etcher at the July 2025 Missouri Nuclear Summit, which a Missouri Business Alert reporter attended.

Under wraps

In Missouri, economic development appears to be a tangled web. Missouri Partnership, a public-private economic development organization, markets Missouri to big businesses outside the state. It then helps locate industrial sites for those companies and collaborates with state and local officials, plus consultants such as MarksNelson.

The partnership is funded primarily by the state, but the private Hawthorn Foundation chips in as well. The two are closely related, with Hawthorn members serving on the Missouri Partnership’s board.

Once data center companies are in Missouri, Etcher said, the Missouri Department of Economic Development takes over to focus on further expansion.

But the layers of middlemen can keep the process out of sight. According to Kasia Tarczynska, a research analyst at economic development watchdog group Good Jobs First, many consultants and data center companies are incentivized to keep discussions under wraps for as long as possible. This is done by creating nondescript project names, forcing parties to sign nondisclosure agreements, and sometimes even skirting city and state rules regarding open records and open meetings.

Tarczynska said local residents are paying the price.

“With a nondisclosure agreement, it’s just so hard for the public, for people on the ground to really understand what's going on,” Tarczynska said.

Late last year in Tucson, Arizona, for example, residents pushed back on a $3.6 billion data center development called Project Blue. The Arizona Daily Star reported that Pima County signed a five-year nondisclosure agreement with Amazon in 2023 to keep key project details private. Most city residents only learned about Project Blue in spring of 2025, when some details became available.

The Montgomery County lawsuit also alleges county officials signed NDAs to keep the public unaware of the commission’s data center discussions.

Chris Lloyd, a site selector with Richmond, Virginia-based McGuireWoods Consulting LLC, said 95% of his work is representing data center companies. His firm in 2025 helped with data center projects that poured almost $200 billion into communities across the country.

Lloyd said there are valid reasons why data center companies and local governments would prefer to keep discussions under wraps. When publicly traded firms announce plans to build a large project like a data center, they must submit regulatory filings that can drive stock prices. Disclosure can also increase project costs.

“It's a fine line that you got to walk, because, you know, in any real estate transaction, if word gets out, then prices go up,” Lloyd said.

Etcher echoed that sentiment and pushed back on the narrative that his data center projects have been unfairly secretive.

“There's been a tremendous amount of transparency, you know,” Etcher said. “Projects like this, you have to deal with confidentially until you get to a certain point. At that point, we're very forthcoming.”

The public, like in Montgomery County and Tucson, is increasingly fighting data center projects.

Lloyd is the vice chair of the Site Selectors Guild, which bills itself as the world’s leading association of site location consultants. According to its 2026 State of Site Selection Pulse Check report, 69% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that NIMBYism, short for “Not In My Backyard-ism,” is an increasing barrier to economic development projects. This was especially true of data center projects, which the report referred to as “lightning rods” because of concerns over water and electricity use.

“(Communities) wanting no development or limited development are certainly getting more vocal, more active,” Lloyd said.

Across the country, at least 20 data center projects were canceled in the first three months of 2026, according to an analysis from climate news outlet Heatmap.

Over the past two years in Missouri, data center proposals in Peculiar and St. Charles were canceled, while Festus voted out half of its city council over the CRG project. St. Charles officials also voted to ban data centers permanently.

Playing on both sides

Tarczynska also raised concerns about consultants who work for both a local government and a data center, which could create conflicts of interest.

“It's controversial and it's problematic,” Tarczynska said. “You might have one company working on both sides and really extracting quite a lot of money for having this relationship.”

Missouri residents have criticized MarksNelson and Etcher’s role in Missouri data center development on social media. On a community Facebook group, one user questioned if Etcher was “double dipping,” or working for the data center developer and the local government at the same time.

Etcher said his team is not being paid by data center companies on any project. They are funded by local economic development groups and the city of Festus.

Lloyd said his company does provide services for both developers and governments, but never at the same time.

As data center development accelerates in Missouri, it’s likely residents will continue to sort through the plethora of roles middlemen play between huge companies and local governments, while critics question if enough information is given out to communities and if lines are being drawn appropriately.

However, Etcher said most big developments like data factories spring from a network of people working together.

“The best economic development is a team sport, and we're just part of the team,” Etcher said.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.