The St. Lawrence County Planning Board has approved a proposal to convert a former Sears store in the St. Lawrence Centre mall into a data center.

According to the Watertown Daily Times (GovTech), the Massena, St. Lawrence County, New York data center proposal comes from investment company Tareo Capital Management. The plan was initially submitted to the Massena Planning Board, which oversees the town in which the mall resides.

This was then sent to the St Lawrence County Planning Board and returned to Massena, approved, but with a query on whether it would cause any power issues for other businesses. The Massena Planning Board is meeting today (Aug 20) to decide on the proposal.

Crypto mall

The details about the site have not revealed by Tareo other than a reference to the facility being an “electronic data processing center.”

St. Lawrence County Planning Office Deputy Director Jason Pfotenhauer told the county’s Planning Board: “We’ve heard a lot about data centers in the past. I don’t know for sure if this is a Bitcoin mining data center or a data processing data center.”

According to Pfotenhauer, there would be no alterations to the exterior of the space and no partitions added to the interior.

“There’s no impact from an exterior standpoint. It does involve site plan approval, but there’s not much site plan to it,” he said.

Since the site plan was so “minimal,” the county’s Planning Office proposed sending it back to the Massena Planning Board.

Pfotenhauer told the Board that he didn’t know whether the site’s function would prove to be “problematic” due to the high power consumption of cryptocurrency operations.

But, according to the Watertown Daily Times, he suggested there might still be enough power for the new data center.