Amazon held a community event on Oct. 20 at Montgomery County Middle School that gave area residents an opportunity to learn about potential careers with the company’s data center project, located outside of New Florence.

The three-hour event was called Opportunity Day. It had numerous Amazon representatives, local vendors and schools such as St. Charles Community College and State Technical College in attendance.

“We had a really good turnout,” said Emily Smith, Economic Development Manager at Amazon Web Services. “The goal and opportunity was to get the local workforce, local small businesses and potential vendors connected directly with project opportunities. We were able to take our entire ecosystem of the project and bring them all under one roof. So we have our eternal construction and opps teams, we have our workforce development team on site, we have our general contractors Brinkman and Clayco and their subcontractors are all here. We also have the unions and local community colleges here to talk about career placement.”

Amazon is building a data center to be located on a 1,000-acre parcel in the northeast quadrant of the Interstate 70 and Highway 19 interchange. In June, the company announced that it will invest $10 billion in the data project that will create hundreds of full-time jobs, thousands of new construction jobs and millions of dollars in tax revenue.

Smith said having Opportunity Day gave her company another chance to engage with the Montgomery County community.

“It’s been very positive so far,” she said. “It’s just the beginning. We’re just getting started.”

Two Montgomery City residents – father and son Jim and Jacob Hogue – are employed with one of the companies that was in attendance at the Opportunity Day event, Concrete Strategies in St. Louis.

“We did the Mizzou football stadium,” said Jim Hogue, who has been working at Concrete Strategies for 17 years. “I’m at the amusement park at the Lake of the Ozarks now. We’re going to be working on the data center. We have 11 builders out there.”

Jacob Hogue, who graduated from Montgomery County High School in 2025, works at Concrete Strategies twice a week while taking classes at Mizzou.
Amazon held its second event in four months at MCMS. On June 23, it held an open house that gave citizens an opportunity to be informed about the data center.

Smith said the company started planning on having Opportunity Day at the school during the summer.

“We always knew this was something that we wanted to do, but in terms of timing of construction, this was the perfect timing for us,” she said.

Smith said Amazon is always in a need for workers such as electricians and plumbers to work in the data center project.

“We often hear that there’s going to be an influx of construction work, then it will go away once the buildings are complete,” she said. “That is not the case with our operations on how we build, maintain and operate our data centers. We need skilled trades on site all of the time.”