Data Centers are a red-hot political football in a surprising number of communities. Some of the country’s richest corporations, conglomerates, and other shadowing investment entities are busy attempting to force them on well established moderately populated towns and rural areas and have significant help from compromised elected officials who are essentially being handsomely bought off either overtly or indirectly. Public utilities are also incentivized to use their monopolistic standing and power to force placement of supporting recourses. The resulting imposition includes huge land holdings swallowed up by monstrously large buildings, destruction of community spaces, drastic water usage for cooling, major drags of electricity consumption which drives up prices by planned scarcity, and pervasive sound and possibly electromagnetic frequency pollution for residents close and even moderate distances away. A telling sign of the malicious collusion taking place to force data centers on communities is the sudden disappearance of all ‘environmental’ concern, now forgotten and conspicuously silent.
Legislatures are calling for studies. ‘Studies’ is code for: we already made the agreement secretly and now we’re just going through the motions of appearance to create the impression that we did our due diligence obtaining community ‘support’. On the back end it means, ‘we did everything we could but it didn’t work out, sorry’. [insert tear]
The whole effort reminds me of the kind of political conquest promoted by Obama, wherein he advocated for forcing public and high-density housing in the back yards of often rural jurisdictions of his enemies, conservative Republicans. Is the push for data centers the exact same? I don’t know and it doesn’t entirely matter if it isn’t. Does it really matter if a Democrat is coming to destroy your neighborhood and home value vs. a group of mega-billionaire investors who have paid off local officials from both parties? No.
I get that AI is here to stay – something I’ve addressed in past and in the future – but I firmly believe it’s reasonable to counter inflict some fiscal pain on those that would destroy my neighborhood or county. Data centers need to be close to resources of electric and water. They do not need to be next door to Johnny who is using AI to create self-styled porn in his bedroom next door. Sure, I’m all for AI rendering more accurate diagnoses, predicting electric grid distribution, solving unsolvable problems, but there is nowhere that says it has to come at the expense of 5000 trees down the road and 20% of the market value of my home. Even if I assume that there is no ulterior motive to deliberately inflict harm on conservative districts – and that will take a long time to confirm or disprove – at a minimum, placement of data centers are likely easily extracted conveniences to investors to minimize capital costs – residents be very damned.
I’d like to suggest just a few ground rules for data centers, no matter where they are to be placed:
- No data centers should be placed on anything but established industrial zoned lands. Recent and hastily re-zoned land not allowed. Old rehabilitated industrial land should receive mandated preference.
- A 2 or 5, or 10 mile buffer of land, zoned the same must apply. This means data centers should only be located in very large industrial parks.
- Data centers must operate off of their own power generation. No exceptions. Figure it out and pay for it. Plenty of tech options already exist.
- Data centers may not tap their cooling capacity from ground water or local tributaries.
Do these and a lot more people would tolerate them. Don’t be sold out by any of your local elected officials. Reject any state or federal government measure that would qualify data centers for state sponsored eminent domain seizure.
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