I have been following the unfolding story about the AI data center plans for the past year and was struck by the very articulate and well-written letters about it from Shaena M. Crossland, Deborah Stiles, and Joseph Wilson Dumire. All three noted the lack of transparency from the developers and tech companies making promises and basically counting on the general pubic to be naïve and passiveonly focusing on the promise of jobs and tax revenue, and how the Thomas data center would very negatively impact our way of life here. As Mr. Dumire pointed out, this is not how our government is supposed to functionand it’s a symptom of a much larger, more pervasive problem taking hold in our country.
I recently came across a short story that had originally appeared in The New York Times, that was about another small rural community facing the same issue. In tiny Broadview Mont., population 140 souls about 30 miles from Billings. It’s a rural farming and ranching community where residents enjoy fresh air, quiet, and the beauty of their environment. They are currently in the midst of exactly what we’re going through here, only they are facing a mega data center on 5,000 acres, the size of 3,800 football fields. The approach of the tech companies and developers behind this is just what we’ve been experiencing in our community; representatives are coming into our meetings with scripted, pat responses to our questions, reassuring folks with “you just need to trust us” when asked about the proposed water and electricity use. The overall aim is to approach communities of interest in a quick and quiet way and move on to their next data center. Some town councils have been asked to sign nondisclosure agreements with developers to keep them silent about the project. Is this really how our country works these days? We all need to look to how other communities have organized to, at the very least, hinder these data centers.
In Montana, tech companies and their developers have currently already built 3 large centers and several smaller ones are proposed therelured by a governor with a plan to make the vast open rural state a data center hub with promises of tax breaks. So let’s have a quick primer on Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centers:
Q: What exactly is a data center?
A: Since we’ve had computers (started out with large mainframes in companies/institutions), there have been data centers… small remote ones. Data centers being built now are huge in size and scope to accommodate the tremendous processing power of the new AI models. A data center is a warehouse-size building that holds ‘a sea’ of computer servers that run 24/7 collecting, processing, and storing data. Data centers need a lot of water, in some cases more water than a small city needs -because the servers create intense heat and require continuous cooling. Water in rural Montana is a precious resource and folks already have low water flow in most areas. Additionally, data centers require massive amounts of electricity too. The proposed mega data center in Broadview manipulated the North Western Energy Co., Montana’s largest power provider, to sign a letter of intent to provide up to 7,000 megawatts to the data centermore power than is generated by the Grand Coulee Damthe largest power plant in the country….making this data center the largest in the world. When further questioned about this and the impact on power for the local residents, a spokesperson for the developer assured those in attendance that the data center would bring its own power (but refused any guarantees or details) and explained that power would be generated from solar and natural gas…..and that the data centers would not need “that terribly much water anyway”. Folks in MT are concerned about their wells running dry and their electric bills becoming unaffordable. This has certainly been the case with many data centers across the country/world already in operation.
Q: What kind of jobs will the data centers bring to the community?
A: Most of the (temporary) construction will be done by crews who have built other data centers in the general area. As far as permanent jobs, these will consist of (depends on the size of the data center and again, nothing is guaranteed or in writing) about 30-50 unskilled positions such as janitors, maintenance workers and security guards.
Q: What can be done to stop or at least slow these data centers -and at least put in some guardrails?
A: The residents in Broadview, MT have one very determined woman, Kassi Solberg, who is at the helm of this issue in that community. She is pushing for zoning regulations/protections and moratoriums on data centers so their full impact can be studied. She is lobbying state legislators and looking at what other US communities have done as a benchmark for approaching what she calls “the monster coming”. People across the country have been successfully recalling politicians who refuse to endorse moratoriums and storming town halls demanding concrete legal protections. Moratoriums on data centers were put on the ballot in Ohio but were tabled for now. The citizen-led zoning requires the approval of at least 60% of the landowners whose properties border the data center land and in MT, some ranchers have already leased their land to the developers. Basically, the developers are telling local residents that they can always just move. Most have been on their land for multiple generations.
Q: What if all this AI frenzy turns out to be a bubble that bursts?
A: In that case, and it could happen, there will be a lot of abandoned half built/built data centers left to beautify our landscapes. Just like AI itself, no guardrails have been placed on its use and everyday we’re seeing the impact of that. The rush to get these huge data centers up and running -at all costswill eventually bring misery to too many of us.
Dr. M. Selena Yearwood
Davis, WV