The Greater Birmingham Humane Society spent years planning a $67 million animal welfare campus: a facility built around adoption services, outdoor rehabilitation, and foster care for the animals in its care. Then a $2 billion AI data center was approved on a neighboring lot, within 160 feet of the property line, in four months.

For comparison, the humane society's own building permits took 18 months to review.

The GBHS has filed suit in Jefferson County Circuit Court, alleging that the city of Birmingham and entities of Nebius Group worked together to fast-track the data center by bypassing the zoning review process that applies to everyone else. The organization had already warned the city that the data center's noise could harm the animals in its care and disrupt veterinary operations on the new campus.

Allison Black Cornelius, the GBHS's president and CEO, put it plainly: "This case is not about whether data centers should exist. It is about whether a project of this size and character should move forward in this location without the legal questions surrounding its approval first being resolved."

That is exactly the question the Birmingham City Council and the mayor's office need to answer: did they follow the law?

We are calling on the Birmingham City Council and the mayor's office to conduct a transparent public review of the Nebius data center's permitting process, halt construction until the zoning questions in the lawsuit are resolved, and commit to applying the same standards to every project regardless of its budget.

Sign this petition to demand that Birmingham's leaders follow the rules they wrote and protect the animals and community institutions depending on them.