Nobody Here Wants the Data Center: An Oral History

We’ve gathered stories from all across the country detailing what happens when Big Tech’s latest monstrosities come to town.

While some are worse than others, the stories people tell about how data centers invade and disrupt their communities follow the same contours. The tech company and their swarm of contractors are in town before you know it, and they’re already scheming with local leaders. In no uncertain terms, your elected officials have chosen tech billionaires over their own neighbors.

Soon, an army of men with bulldozers are tearing out trees near your home and ripping up fields. Dump trucks careen around town, and the night sky is so polluted with light, you can’t see the stars. A year or so later, the data center is up and running. By then, the high-paying construction jobs have all but disappeared.

After months of digging, you finally have an idea of how much water the data center actually consumes. If you’re lucky, your area isn’t in a drought. You hope things won’t get dire. Meanwhile, the monolith is droning and hissing, wearing you and your neighbors down with constant noise. You hope the water you do have will be drinkable this time next year as you try to adjust to the unnatural heat the data center generates.

The militaristic drive to build the best chatbot and somehow “beat China” knows no bounds, including those of logic. This nightmarish iteration of the extraction economy was made possible by undemocratic processes and a national administration that sold us and our resources out to tech oligarchs. But people in these towns and cities are smarter and tougher than the plutocrats accounted for—and they’re putting up one hell of a fight. Told by people whose communities have been impacted, this is the story of unhinged data center expansion in America.

Jared Spann (Utah): It’s been the equivalent of a sucker punch. People have had no say in any of this.

Devan Jenkins (Mississippi): Nobody here wanted this. They didn’t let us know. We had to find out on our own.

Tracie (Texas): If you look at the board of directors at the very beginning, Bill Gates’s fingerprints are all over it. He had his own picked people on the board in a town like Abilene, Texas that isn’t really on the map. That set the stage for the sleight of hand.

Dan Caruso (Indiana): They called it “Razor 5” at first. I thought it would be a Motorola-type manufacturing plant. Then they went on and called it “Ramboll.” By the time they broke ground, we figured out it was Amazon and Anthropic all along. It was a lot of everyone wanting to be so secretive about the whole thing, and that’s gone on through the entire process. They call it “Project Rainier” now, but I have other names for it.

Our elected officials who were meeting with Amazon all signed NDAs for how much water it would use to cool their servers. They have open-loop systems here. My question to them was and still is: How are we supposed to know if they’re getting close to the limitations of our freshwater aquifer if we don’t know how much water they’re using? They just say, “Oh, we’ll know. Don’t worry.” Yeah, right. That’s what I’m worried about. I’m always asking them, what’s so “Colonel Sanders’s 11 secret herbs and spices” about how much water they use to cool their servers? We have a right to know.

Amazon has tried to win us over by doing “nice things” for us. Over the holidays, we have a town potluck banquet where everyone brings a dish, but this year Amazon brought all the food. On Facebook, people were saying, “Isn’t this wonderful? Amazon is bringing food to the banquet for everybody!” I guess all they had to do was feed people for them to forget everything they’re doing to us. That one really got me.

Racel Wurfel (Indiana): Meta has been allowed to go through so many tax loopholes that, even on the most basic economic level, this makes no sense for the state of Indiana. I’ve done so much research trying to figure out how much Meta paid for the land. We have no transparency.

When the project got rolling, our community was told it was a “technology campus.” We thought it would be a Meta office with software jobs. We had no idea what the intention was.

If you go to the Jeffersonville Data Center Facebook page, they try to make it look like a place you can go and enjoy with cutesy community rooms with paintings on the walls. But if you drive over there, it’s like a military compound from a sci-fi movie. Everything is covered. You can’t see what’s actually going on.

Christine LeJeune (Wisconsin): Our town heard about the data center during a presentation from Cloverleaf. The mayor was careful to point out that discussion about it was in the very early stages—that this was the first step in a thousand. He said he was hearing about it along with us, but open records revealed that he was already in communication with them. Cloverleaf handed off the project to the operator, Vantage Data Centers, a multinational corporation with data centers on five different continents. Vantage maintains ownership, but they’ll rent out the data center to Oracle and OpenAI.

The project was approved at a town hall. That was also when the transmission line company outlined how people’s properties will be impacted by the huge transmission lines needed to power the data center. Part of their playbook is to give the public piecemeal information. When we were focused on the data center itself, suddenly there’s the other issue of how it will be powered by gigantic transmission lines that will affect people across five different counties, running through protected areas and conservation easements.

It caught us all off guard. Since then, the mayor has kept repeating this phrase, almost like a mantra:........

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