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: “It’s a done deal. It’s a done deal.” I’m so sick of hearing that. They’re trying to infiltrate your psyche with this belief that there’s nothing you can do. And a lot of people accept that. People here are not used to having to stand up for themselves to corporations like this. It’s very new, complicated, and challenging for people.
LaTricea Adams (Tennessee): The only folks who knew were part of the deal: the mayor of Memphis; the president of Memphis Light, Gas, and Water; and the Chamber of Commerce. It really shows how this goes beyond a permitting issue and gets into a democracy issue.
Our local utility didn’t have the capacity to provide the power the Colossus 1 data center needs, so xAI brought in “temporary” gas turbines on semi trucks and parked them. The turbines weren’t fixed to the ground. They were on trailers.
In the same zip code as the Colossus 1 data center, there are over 17 other high-polluting facilities. Both of my parents are from that area. To make the environmental racism fully blatant, the Valero refinery is right next to MLK Park. So with the addition of the xAI data center, there’s a nexus of pollution—from transportation, the oil refinery, all the other heavy industry, and now the data center.
The community rightfully raised hell about the polluting, unpermitted turbines when they were in Memphis. The city decommissioned the turbines, but then xAI went right across the state line into Mississippi and set them up again.
Devan Jenkins (Mississippi): Musk came along and bought all the land around here that he could—and it’s a lot of land. He’s rushing it. I don’t know what contractors they have, or who exactly is doing what, but they have these huge dump trucks here on Windsor Road. It’s a residential street where my grandparents have lived for decades. The truck drivers violate this residential area that isn’t supposed to have industrial trucks driving through. I got the city to put up “No Trucks Through” signs, but they still drive down the road all day. They take up the whole road and drive crazy. They won’t be done building out the power plant until early 2027.
I’m having my wedding in my grandparents’ backyard in June. My husband and I will move into a little cottage on the property. I don’t want the peace of my wedding to get disturbed, or have the safety of my guests get compromised.
Dan Caruso (Indiana): There were problems with the Amazon people zooming past a school bus with its “Stop” arm out. They’d swing out into the other lane and fly past the school bus while the kids were about to get on or off. The bus driver took it on her own initiative to tell people not to send their kids to the bus stop at that intersection. She started driving to everyone’s door to pick up their kids instead.
Amanda Mueller (Wisconsin): When they first started 24/7 construction, it was land of the midnight sun. My streetlight went out, and I didn’t even notice because it was so bright. The light pollution from construction has since improved, but data centers are maximum security installations. The perimeter is lit up at all times. They want to keep it secure and surveil it constantly.
Christine LeJeune (Wisconsin): There has been a big dust issue because of the scale of the first construction phase, during which they tore up the majority of the 673 acres. It’s windy here because it’s near Lake Michigan. There’s a vortex of swirling air surrounding the lake. The dust, concrete stabilizer, lime—all that gets trapped in the air. Then the wind gets very strong very often, blowing it all in different directions.
People who drive past are shocked by the huge swales of dust. The way they build these things, they push up the soil into volcano-looking mounds throughout the site. It collects on people’s homes and cars, not to mention inside our lungs. There’s a lot of dump trucks driving around and carting the top soil away. They’re just carting away this wonderful, fertile soil that’s been cultivated by farmers for generations.
Amanda Mueller (Wisconsin): Our subdivision empties out into the middle of construction. We call it the battlefield. Wherever you turn, it’s bulldozers, cement trucks, men. There are 5,000 workers coming in, and the total population of our town is 1,432.
Tracie (Texas): The housing shortage is intense. Many people who own their homes are moving and setting their houses up as rental properties. My widowed daughter-in-law is completely out of a house. She couldn’t afford the rent hike. And it’s her own family who’s saying, “We want to make hay while we can.” All the apartments are full, and we have R.V. parks springing up all over the place.
Jane (Oregon): I’ve worked on multiple data centers here in Oregon. There’s something like nine or 10 Meta buildings, and then about four for Apple, just in this area where I live. They’re all over Oregon. It brings in a lot of people while they build them, but they don’t employ many people long term. One is a million square feet.
I’m a sheet metal worker. I run duct work for the big units to keep everything cool. Most of the data centers in Oregon are built by union workers. We’re the only ones who can man them. It’s trades-workers like sheet rockers, electricians, painters, and metal framers that frame the walls. It takes somewhere near a year to get one of them up and running, depending on the size.
They get their own Apple or Meta people running diagnostics and doing the high-tech jobs when it’s all online. One outfit I worked for keeps four or five people on at one of the Meta buildings, doing stuff like changing out filters, because there’s thousands and thousands of them in the walls. Outside air gets sucked in, cleaned, and then run down a long tunnel to keep the servers cool.
The jobs lately have all been for all this AI stuff, which is not my jam. But when we bid for the job and that’s what it calls for, we’re not necessarily thinking about how bad data centers are for the environment. This is just what I do for a living. Data centers are not all we build. We do schools, hospitals, libraries, all kinds of things. The data centers are good money for people in my trade, but they’re obviously not good for the world. If that work was replaced by something else, I would be all for it, 100 percent.
Dan Caruso (Indiana): The agreement between Amazon and St. Joseph County was that, upon completion of the 16 to 18 data center shells, they would have 400 full-time workers and then 600 on-call contractors for basic maintenance. The 400 permanent workers are spread among the 16 shells, working five shifts. So five workers per shift, per building. Each of those buildings is 216,000 square feet. These guys are going to need a cell phone just to communicate with each other across these huge buildings.
Rachel Wurfel (Indiana): There was a lot of blasting required during construction, and that’s done untold foundation damage to people’s homes. Every lawyer in this area who people contacted are under NDAs. They’ve been on retainer to Meta. People don’t know where to turn for help.
Within a year of Meta starting construction, we had multiple homes that needed major foundation repairs. My next door neighbor had to have it done. Part of the house has to get jacked up so the concrete can get repoured. It takes at least a few weeks. Some of the data center contractors have come out and said that heavy blasting can cause shifts in land—and they were doing massive amounts of blasting.
I’ve also noticed problems with our water. We’ve always needed water softener, because we’re on a rural water tank. But now you get this pink cast left behind if the water sits. It’s this sludgy residue. You have to constantly scrub your bath and shower, or else it looks disgusting. We strictly use bottled water to cook with now. There’s also a smell in the air. On hot days especially, you can feel a different heaviness.
Jason Haley (Mississippi): My neighborhood was nice and peaceful until the turbines and xAI power plant came in. I’ve been here 20 years. I’ve never had any major complaints with noise. Just typical neighborhood sounds. A dog barking, stuff like that. You’d sit outside at night on your back deck and not have many problems.
Now it’s constant noise. I started hearing it when I was in my backyard or around my house—not super loud at first, but always present. My first thought was, “Hell, somebody’s got a leafblower going.” But it never stopped. Then I found out it’s the xAI powerplant causing the noise.
The noise kept getting louder. It became this terribly loud, high-pitched noise—and that’s along with the lower tone rumbling. I started reaching out to city officials. They’d say, “Yeah, we know it’s a problem. But it will be better next week.” That’s a phrase they kept repeating: “It will be better next week.” It’s never gotten any damn better.
It took a lot of speaking in public, going to meetings, and posting about it for city officials to even take it seriously. The mayor at one point said it was a priority, but there was never any pause with the noise. Today it’s not as bad as it was yesterday, but that could change any minute. From my understanding, the high-pitched sound has to do with the steam and releasing the pressure from the turbines, which they run wide open.
I hear it from inside my house. It’s torture, man. Some people say, “Well, just shut your door. Stay inside. Insulate your house better.” Blah, blah, blah. It was so damn loud in my house the other night that I could feel it. It felt like my house was vibrating. And I’ve had that happen several times—where I can feel it in addition to hearing it. There are a few days here and there when it seems bearable, and I start thinking maybe they’ve finally gotten something fixed. But within 24 hours or less, it’s back to, “Fuck my life.”
Elena Schlossberg (Virginia): “Data Center Alley” is in Loudoun County, about 30 minutes from my house. When that area of Loudoun County first became Data Center Alley, they were small data centers. But it’s metastasized.
When you go into the belly of the beast, you can see what unconstrained data center growth looks like—and how the digital world is crowding out our own. You come over this ramp and look in front of you. As far as the eye can see are sprawling buildings. Cranes everywhere. Substations, transmission lines. It’s a mechanical overgrowth. No matter what road you go down, there’s more and more.
Pratika Katiyar (Virginia): Actual communities could’ve been built there, but instead it’s one data center after another. It’s dystopian, especially compared to my memories of what it was like to grow up here, when there were so many parks and kids had so much space to play and ride their bikes. They can’t ride their bikes there anymore. Some of the data centers are surrounded by barbed wire fences. Some are right out in the open. So it’s these huge, alienating rectangles that clash with the area’s culture and history, as well as the land itself.
Jane (Oregon): Data centers are great for the CEOs and uppers like that, but it’s not good for us or our land. They eat a lot of water. It’s something like 1,300 gallons of water per minute for cooling. Oregon’s in a severe drought. Usually we get buried in snow. We got one inch one day this year. That’s it.
Dan Caruso (Indiana): In 2024, our board of commissioners committed to a 24 million gallon per day withdrawal cap from our aquifer to protect it. That’s for everyday users, like people taking showers, as well as the water needs of farmers and other businesses. But now we have contractors for the data center pulling 35 million gallons of water per day–and that’s in addition to our 24 million. And let’s be generous–the town could go down to 23 million if we had to. You’d still have 58 million gallons of water per day getting pulled. That’s exceeding the capabilities of our aquifer by at least 10 million gallons of water every day. They say it will only be for a period of two years. But it can’t be for one day. They’ll drain the aquifer.
Austin Dalgo (Tennessee): Memphis sits atop one of the purest aquifers in the country. It’s the size of Lake Michigan, just underneath Memphis. We have the best-tasting water I’ve ever had in any city, and that’s because of the Sand Aquifer.
xAI initially told us they were going to use gray water. About a month ago, the company turned around and said, “Oh, by the way, we’re using freshwater at the data center.” They’re feeding off this amazing natural resource we have, using something insane like five million gallons of water a day.
There’s no reason why they can’t use gray water. Musk said that using gray water was always supposed to be phase two of the plan—but that he “doesn’t have the money right now to do it,” which is absurd coming from someone who just became the first trillionaire in history.
Jared Spann (Utah): Water has been a sensitive subject for a while here. This year we had one of the worst snowpack years in Utah history. Almost all of Utah’s water comes from snow runoff. And now Kevin O’Leary wants to use two billion gallons of our water per year for his psychotic data center.
Not having the moisture we need, the temperatures are getting insanely hot. We’re getting well into the hundreds during the summer, and it’s lasting for longer and longer. Everything dries out, so then we’re also dealing with wildfires. As if that weren’t enough, the Great Salt Lake is evaporating and receding every year, which puts toxic chemicals into the air. Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Front traps all those pollutants. Now they’re saying O’Leary’s data center will raise temperatures across the entire Wasatch Front. According to Governor Cox, somehow it will all be fine.
Paul Oblock (Utah): I never would’ve considered myself a climate activist in any way whatsoever. But there are some early estimates from ecologists that O’Leary’s data center could raise daytime temperatures in our region by five degrees, and then nighttime temperatures by almost thirty. So when they’re only 10 miles away from such an awesome ecological site as the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge—it doesn’t take an ecology professor to know that a thirty degree rise in temperature will not be good for any of the wildlife in that area or that marshland habitat. There’s going to be a lot of evaporation of that existing water at an accelerated pace.
If temperatures rise that much, it doesn’t seem sustainable for any amount of time. Imagine where we’ll be in 200 years if it goes on like that. My family and I love it here, but now I’m left wondering what my sons’ future will look like. If we don’t have water that’s easily accessible and we’re bleeding it all dry–I worry about the future for all of us, period.
Amanda Mueller (Wisconsin): I thought these were going to be my golden years. I thought it was going to be me and the raccoons. Now I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t think I can sell my house at this point, but I don’t think I can live with this monster data center either.
I’ve never protested. I’m a 67-year-old lady. The only time I’ve been a menace to someone was when I took sailing lessons. I wanted to mind my own business, but suddenly I’m taking on towns and cities, and even the whole state. I’ve come to realize we’re all in this together, and we can do this together. Even though people are so trodden on and so defeated, there’s still this little voice that won’t go away. And that’s America truly being America.
For anyone who’s looking to get involved, remember that facts speak truth. A lot of people in suits are going to tell you that you don’t matter. They’ll say you’re small and you should crawl back under your rock. So you need thick skin.
But if this keeps you up at night, you should do something. Even if that just means going to a town meeting and telling people it’s wrong. And when you speak to government people, don’t be afraid to tell them like it is. I told our state senator to her face that she’s wishy-washy, and she got really upset. But the people who lead us need to be tougher than that.
Jason Haley (Mississippi): After some back and forth, an xAI representative offered me enough where I could get a nice house somewhere else. It was clear what they wanted, which was for me to shut the fuck up and go away. But it doesn’t feel right. That’s not who I am. What about everyone who can’t just pack up and move? I’m trying to have some integrity here and do the right thing.
Elena Schlossberg (Wisconsin): I was one of those residents who was hesitant to become involved. I was very aware of the situation, but I never thought it would come to this. Having access to more information than I did a year ago—my advice is for people to realize that, if you don’t do it, no one else will.
LaTricea Adams (Tennessee): This is a pivotal moment where the majority of the country has something in common that’s ticking us all off, and that’s data centers. So how can we harness that energy and take back our democracy? It’s possible. The elected officials who are just creating pathways for the tech bros—we need to remind them they work for us, not corporations.
