A former jail in Chattanooga, Tennessee, could host a new data center.

As noted by local press, including Wdef, Local3, and News Channel 9, local developer Urban Story Ventures is planning to convert the former Hamilton County Jail into Jailhouse Studios.

The eight-story building would house film studios, a music production space, and a data center. The project could be completed within 18 months, according to minutes from a January 7 county commission meeting.

According to Urban Story Ventures, companies including Oracle have expressed interest in the project.

“The idea of Jailhouse Studios came as a solution to a need we’ve been trying to meet for years,” Kessler Cuffman, executive officer for the Songbirds Foundation and partner on the project, told press. “While this facility will be positioned for production work at the highest level, the original vision was born out of workforce development and job creation for students local to Chattanooga. This will be a vessel for production excellence and a source of real, lasting impact for our community.”

According to the Chattanoogan and Local 3 News, Urban Story is working with Golden Acquisitions and The STEM Practice, the latter an Oracle Cloud partner pitching its own AI inference network.

A representative from the STEM Practice told press that the site would only host ten racks and be focused on serving the production needs of the companies inside the building.

Nearly 900 residents have signed a Change.org petition against the potential project at the time of writing.

Opened in the mid-1970s and located at 601 Walnut Street, the downtown county jail closed in 2021 after some 45 years, relocating to the Silverdale Detention Center. The county-owned building totals 142,000 sq ft (13,190 sqm) on a 0.75-acre plot. After expansion in the 1990s, it could host up to 500 inmates. The county put out a request for information to redevelop the site last year.

Real estate investment firm Golden Acquisitions recently acquired an enterprise data center in Memphis, Tennessee, set to host the STEM Practise.

On LinkedIn, Golden said the Memphis site will serve as one of four Tennessee data center locations currently slated to open in May 2026.

Bernie Alen, the founder and CEO of The STEM Practice, formerly served as the executive director at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The company aims to develop an “AI Inference Grid” using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and modular data centers. On its website, the company claims to have 231 sites “in progress.”

On LinkedIn, the company said it aims to leverage Oracle Distributed Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to transform “underutilized data centers into AI-ready hubs that bring the power of AI closer to where it is needed most.”