At a candidate forum in June, Republican Michael Carbonara responded to a question about data centers, a topic that has become a top issue this election cycle for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District.
The newly redrawn congressional district contains the proposed site of a 200-acre mega data center in Loxahatchee called Project Tango. The project sprung months of protest and activism from local residents who argue that water and energy use, as well as the noise generated by the project, would harm residents. The proposed project sits right next to a large housing community and an elementary school.
Carbonara, who is vying for the Republican nomination for the district, is very familiar with data centers. He told the audience that he has built data centers before and that the issue needs to be approached with caution.
"It is not a black-and-white issue. Every deal is negotiated, the zoning, the water, the electricity," said Carbonara at the forum, as reported by the conservative website The Floridian. "We don't want it in our neighborhood, near our houses. We want it someplace where we can't see it."
What Carbonara didn’t tell the audience is that he is already embroiled in a controversy over a cluster of data centers built directly next door to a PreK-5 Montessori school in rural Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His name is listed in permits used to build the operation and he is personally named in a lawsuit trying to shut it down.
" If we have a candidate who's doing what I call political double speak of, 'Oh, yeah, this shouldn't happen, but I've already done it' and trying to defend it on the other side, people should be very, very leery and aware of what this candidate is," Ben Brown, an opponent of Project Tango told WLRN.
READ MORE: Palm Beach zoning commission votes against AI data center 'Project Tango'
Brown is also the vice president of the homeowners association of the Arden community that borders the proposed Project Tango site in Loxahatchee, as well as the elementary school. He spoke in his personal capacity.
"I would say that it's beyond concerning," added Brown.
When contacted by WLRN, Carbonara did not answer questions about the Michigan data centers and his apparent contradiction in stances, and did not deny his involvement. In a statement, Carbonara defended his position.
"I am not against data centers, because I am not against innovation. I have built this technology and what I insist on is that innovation be sustainable meaning that the data center must pay its own way and not raise utility costs for the surrounding communities. And the surrounding communities should want them in their community," said the statement. "The residents organizing around Project Tango are doing exactly what I have called for: making sure a project earns its place before it breaks ground."
The controversial Michigan project and lawsuit
Lake Superior Academy, a charter school with a focus on environment education and outdoor living, paid for an expert to take decibel readings to quantify the data center’s impact on the school. Decibel readings as high as 64.4 decibels were recorded in the school’s outdoor classroom, about the same as background chatter in a business office according to a Yale University estimation. In the school driveway, however, the highest measurement was 72.7 decibels, according to a report included in court records. That’s about what it sounds like standing next to a washing machine.
The data center, which is being used to mine Bitcoin according to local media reports, is made up of six shipping container-sized boxes that operate with a series of computers inside of them. The fans used to keep the containers cool are what create the noise.
The area surrounding Lake Superior Academy, just south of the U.S.-Canada border is very rural. For miles around, the area is surrounded by hardwood forest.
“Prior to the Bitcoin mine moving in, it was just a beautiful spot for learning,” the school’s director, Susie Schlehuber, told a local news outlet last June. “Our whole school philosophy, everything we were founded on, has been disrupted because of the noise.”
The constant noise “obstructs the educational process, disrupts outdoor classrooms, and distracts, annoys and harasses students, educators, staff, and visitors,” reads the complaint originally filed in Michigan state court in June 2025.
North Michigan is ideal for data centers because it is cold for much of the year, which cuts down on cooling costs, coupled with relatively cheap energy. Yet the public never paid it much mind until they heard of a data center being built right next to Lake Superior Academy, said Kalvin Carter, the director of UP North Advocacy, an activist group based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
“ It's been a real flashpoint up here,” Carter told WLRN. “We started organizing against data centers and crypto mining from that point, and there's been township meetings and everything about it.”
The process of finding out who actually owns the data center has been complicated and is still incomplete. As reported by local media and outlined in legal materials, investigators have had to sort through layer upon layer of shell companies spread across the country before figuring out that Carbonara was the man behind Odessa Partners, the company that owns the land where the data centers were built.
Carbonara is listed on the local permit documents filed to build the data centers using the same Boca Raton address as other companies connected to him.
" We still have a ways to go, I think, to be able to figure out through discovery exactly what his relationship is. But certainly the fact that [Carbonara's] name is on the permit indicates that he had some level of decision-making power and authority in this project," Liz Jacob, the lead staff attorney at the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice, one of the law firms representing the school in the dispute, told WLRN.
The active lawsuit was filed against Odessa Partners, and has since been extended to include allegations against Alpha Watt LLC, the company that Odessa Partners said runs the actual data center operation. Clear ownership of the companies has still not been established, according to court records. Carbonara is one of the very few real people connected to the operation that attorneys have been able to identify.
The fact that the public face of the operation is running for Congress in Florida has not been a secret, at least for Michiganders. WCMU Public Radio in Central Michigan reported on Carbonara’s run back in December.
“Everyone knows the guy that's responsible for that damn Bitcoin mine is running for office in Florida,” said Carter.
Much of the community in the Upper Peninsula is very distrustful of the data center industry and everyone associated with it, he said. The perception is that wealthy people who have no connection to the local community are swooping into rural areas with few regulations in order to make money, no matter what the local community thinks about it.
" It's all just to get their foot in the door so they can get these darn things built so they can extract from your communities. That's, that's all this is about. This is an incredibly extractive industry," said Carter.
The lawsuit succeeded in shutting down the operation for a two-week period last year, although it is now running again. The involved companies claimed that they were losing $15,000 per day when the operation was shut down. The companies are now demanding in court that the school pay nearly $200,000 in lost revenue during the closure.
The school’s case against the data center company in Michigan court is ongoing, with the next hearing scheduled for July 29.
Carbonara’s other businesses
The Michigan data centers controversy is only one of the issues following Carbonara in the complex cryptocurrency world.
Ibanera LLC, a financial technology company started by Carbonara, is being sued in Miami federal court over allegations that it has “stolen” over $20 million worth of dollars and cryptocurrencies from Deltec, a Bahamas-based bank. Carbonara is also being sued in his personal capacity in that case. As Deltech has moved to get its money back, Carbonara launched RōM, a new stablecoin cryptocurrency, and the company alleges that the allegedly “stolen” money was used to prop up that cryptocurrency.
The lawsuit remains active, but Carbonara's campaign claims it has "been dismissed by the courts."
"It is a frivolous case, and these kinds of litigious attacks are unfortunately too common in business. I am running to put a stop to these sorts of frivolous lawsuits that cost taxpayers billions of dollars every year. I am proud of my work with Ibanera," Carbonara said in a statement to WLRN.
Ibanera did not respond to a request for comment.
In the race for Florida’s 22nd Congressional District, Carbonara has raised over $2.52 million, the most money out of any candidate running for the seat, according to data kept by the Federal Elections Commission.
The largest source of his money in his campaign account is from himself.
Campaign records show $1.1 million in expenditures sent to his company Ibanera LLC and to Ibanera’s crypto wallets.
The transactions are listed as “investment bank services,” and "permissible investment” in Bitcoins and the cryptocurrency Ether.
"The campaign did not pay Ibanera $1 million. The campaign purchased digital assets, and Ibanera was the trusted third party vendor that processed those purchases," Carbonara said in a statement. "Every transaction is publicly disclosed in our FEC reports and fully compliant with federal law."
No clear frontrunner in race
As recently redrawn, Florida’s 22nd District now runs from western Palm Beach and Broward counties, across the Everglades and to Naples. The district was previously heavily Democratic but it now slightly favors Republicans, assuming the 2024 election results will be replicated.
No major polls on voter sentiment have been published since the district was newly redrawn. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently announced that they will be spending resources on the race in order to keep it in Democratic control. Democrats believe the seat is winnable considering voter sentiment polling, paired with major Democratic victories across South Florida during recent off-elections.
“Republicans’ cynical attempt to subvert the will of Florida voters continues to backfire,” DCCC Chair Suzan DelBene told the Miami Herald last week. “Democrats are keeping South Florida blue.”
Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz lives in the district but she opted not to run for the seat. Instead, she controversially chose to run in the newly redrawn solidly Democratic 20th District.
Her decision to leave her home district for the historically Black district leaves no incumbent candidate in the race.
Trailing Carbonara in raising money for the seat is Republican Herbie Wartheim, whose $2.5 million all came from himself. Other Republicans in the race are Belinda Keiser, the vice-chancellor of Keiser University. Dan Franzese, who ran for the 22nd District in 2024 with the endorsement of President Trump, is also running for the seat. His campaign has raised nearly $1.5 million.
Among Democrats, the top fundraising candidate is educator and political newcomer Pia Dandiya, who has raised over $1.5 million, much of it from individual donors and PACs. Attorney Kaysia Earley is also vying for the Democratic nomination.
Lev Parnas, a Ukraine-born political operative who achieved fame for his involvement in the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, is running as an independent. He has raised about $30,000.
Brown, the opponent of the proposed Project Tango data center in the district, said Republican candidates Steve Avila and David Burke deserve "credit" for reaching out to him to discuss the project. Progressive Democrat Victoria Doyle is the candidate that "has attended the most events" and is the most involved in pushing back against Project Tango, he said, but after redistricting Doyle is now running in Florida's neighboring 23rd Congressional District.
If fully approved and built, Project Tango will impact the entire region, said Brown, and he hopes candidates from different districts remain involved: "It's basically a guarantee that you will have some kind of impact from this."
The fact that Carbonara said of data centers in Florida's 22nd Congressional District that "we don't want it in our neighborhood" while being connected to a project in Michigan that directly impacted a school is deeply troubling, said Detroit-based attorney Jacob. She said the community bares the cost of these projects in terms of water and energy use and noise.
" It's not the companies who are bearing those costs, it's the communities that they're in. And Mr. Carbonara might be doing this in Michigan now, but if I was a resident of Florida, I'd be deeply, deeply concerned about any politician who's building their model saying, 'Not in our backyard here in Florida, but somewhere else,'" she said. "All you're doing is externalizing harm and sacrificing another community, and that should worry any voter in Florida."
