Small Towns Are Rising Up Against AI Data Centers

Unless you're living in a shack off the grid, you've probably noticed that artificial intelligence is being shoehorned into every corner of existence, from kitchens to doctors officers to alarm clocks.

And as AI creeps further into our lives, so do the hulking data centers that power it — but not everyone's stoked about their new neighbors.

The facilities working behind the scene to fuel the AI revolution are bulky, noisy, and hog resources like electricity at a staggering scale. Data centers have been blamed for placing a huge burden on local electrical grids and water tables that were only designed for small-town homes, not state-of-the-art industrial facilities.

That being the case, it's no surprise that local opposition to data centers is growing rapidly in rural areas of states like Indiana, Virginia, Missouri, and Illinois, where AI developers are flocking to lock down cheap land and generous tax breaks. And as local organizers successfully repel the monstrous sites, their battleplans are being chronicled and shared with other activists engaged in the fight.

"Hyper scale data centers bring few benefits to communities," claims Peaceful Peculiar, a grassroots campaign that successfully repelled a Diode Ventures data center in Peculiar, Missouri. "Dozens of communities around the nation severely struggle from the presence of data centers. It's only about maximizing their profits, so they choose properties as close as possible to a large power supply."

The group's Facebook page, "Don't Dump Data on Peculiar," once welcomed input from activists and organizers in other communities, according to a profile by the Washington Post. Now after successfully fighting off the Diode facility last October, the organizers of Peculiar have become a resource to fellow activists as far away as Indiana, Idaho, Georgia, and Texas.

"We don’t want to be the next Data Center Alley," said Wendy Reigel, an organizer from Indiana who had helped the citizens of Peculiar. "Data Center Alley" is the nickname given to a stretch of land in northern Virginia, which is home to over 50 of the facilities, with plenty more on the way.

Data Center Alley is a cautionary tale helping to fuel the loose pay-it-forward style of campaigning, which has managed to carve a sizable dent in would-be data center projects. A Heatmap investigation into data centers in Indiana, for example, found that out of 30 ongoing proposals, two were repelled in the last month alone, on top of five more rejections in the past year. (That's all despite a corporate-friendly governor and generous tax incentives offered by state lawmakers.)

Thanks to the disconnected nature of small towns, and the many resources available to tech corporate interests, local residents themselves — not larger groups — are proving to be the most effective line of defense against the looming threat of data center development.

"We’re building out tools to help local folks feel like they have the knowledge and the resources to be able to engage at these local levels," an organizer with Citizens Action Coalition, an Indiana-based environmental group told Heatmap.

"When we have several dozen data center proposals in the state of Indiana and more coming, a small organization like ours can’t be there for each individual fight," the organizer added.

More on datacenters: Microsoft's Huge Plans for Mass AI Data Centers Now Rapidly Falling Apart

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