GREENVILLE - Elon Musk and local developer Dan announced Tuesday that the former Inn at Altamont site on Paris Mountain will be reimagined as a 2.8-million-square-foot artificial intelligence data center called The Archive at Altamont, ending years of uncertainty over whether the property would become a hotel, a theme park, a Dollar General, or something residents could hear humming from Taylors.
The facility, branded in renderings as The Archive at Altamont in a serif font normally reserved for boutique hotels and historic trusts, would replace the previously proposed inn with a terraced complex of server halls, cooling towers, emergency generators, and what renderings describe as a “community-sensitive substation experience.” According to Dan, every visible exterior surface will be painted a custom shade called Greenville Continuity Green.
“We heard the community loud and clear,” Dan said, standing beside Musk at a private briefing overlooking the site. “They did not want an inn. So this is not an inn. There will be no guests, no valet parking, and absolutely no rooftop bar. Just quiet, tasteful infrastructure for training models large enough to understand what makes this mountain so special.”
Musk said the mountain’s elevation, tree cover, and proximity to people with strong feelings about zoning made it an ideal location for what he called “locally aligned frontier compute.” He added that the green paint was selected after an internal study found residents were less likely to object to industrial facilities if they were the same color as the thing being removed.
At some point we have to decide whether benefiting humanity is more important than preserving a handful of woke trees, Musk said. I love trees. But trees have had millions of years to optimize human civilization and, frankly, the output has been mixed.
Preliminary materials show the data center occupying the same general hillside once associated with the Inn at Altamont proposal, after years in which the property was quietly sketched as a boutique inn, a small theme park, and, briefly, a “neighborhood retail option” whose parking layout strongly suggested Dollar General. The new plan includes a significantly larger mechanical yard and a service road wide enough for two tractor-trailers to pass without either driver having to make eye contact.
Meredith Sloan, a paid spokeswoman for the project, said the team had studied the earlier controversy around the Inn at Altamont and concluded the primary concern had been traffic. Because data centers have fewer guests, weddings, dinner reservations, and couples looking for a mountain-view anniversary weekend, Sloan said the new plan “solves the traffic issue by removing nearly every reason a normal person would drive there.”
Opposition formed almost immediately around Todd, a local resident who became the informal face of the protest after arriving at the announcement with a folding chair, three poster boards, and a laminated trail map he said he “keeps in the truck for situations exactly like this.”
“I am not anti-technology,” Todd said. “I own a phone, a laptop, and a thermostat that has been arguing with me since 2021. But I do not think Paris Mountain needs a building whose cooling system has its own weather pattern.”
Todd said activists who fought the original inn project were still recovering from the phrase “boutique mountain hospitality” and were unprepared to wake up to “AI campus with responsible visual buffering.” He has already organized a coalition called People for Paris Mountain Remaining Mostly Mountain.
County officials described the proposal as “early,” “conceptual,” and “not something anyone should yell at staff about before the formal yelling period begins.” A spokesperson said the county would evaluate traffic, power, stormwater, tree canopy, and whether painting a data center green legally counts as mitigation.
Dan, however, said he was confident the project would win residents over once they understood the benefits, including jobs, tax revenue, and the chance for Greenville to be known globally as the place where artificial intelligence first learned to complain about Woodruff Road.
“At the end of the day, everybody wants responsible growth,” Dan said, smiling as protestors gathered behind him. “When people say keep the green in Greenville, I assume they mean the green in dollar bills. Based on the preliminary numbers, this project should preserve quite a lot of that.”