Demanding Better Conversations About Data Centers

Guest Opinion

There’s a story about Napoleon Bonaparte I have always liked. Something along the lines of “I know he’s a good general, but is he lucky.” Lucky. So often in my career I have been in the exact right place at the right time, being at places where I didn’t plan. Lucky.

Last week I was honored with a Rural Power award by Groundswell and its Rural Renaissance Roadshow. Kenrick J. Escalanti, Quechan, nominated me for this honor to “recognize individuals whose leadership, ideas, storytelling, and service are helping shape a stronger and more equitable future for rural communities.” Instead of a mail-order plaque, the group gifted me a unique embroidered jean jacket to wear proclaiming “Rural Power.” Way cool.

To read more articles by Mark Trahant, go to: Marktrahant.substack.com

Here’s the lucky part. I have been thinking a lot about the debate going on in tribal and rural communities about data centers. It’s absolutely fine for tribes to pause or just say no. But could there also be a deeper conversation, what do we need when it comes to data storage, AI, and a digital future? Where is the richer conversation?

Turns out that was the theme of the conference: “At the Data Center Crossroads.”

The awards’ panel was first evening of the conference; a start of the conversation. And one of the first questions from the audience asked where I stood on data centers. I jumped right into the deep end.

Two things. First, we need a better conversation about data centers and where they should be located. And, second, no elected official should ever sign a Non Disclosure Agreement. I think that runs counter to the public good. Transparency is an important value and the lack of it is exactly why we are having a terrible conversation about what’s needed and why.

Data Centers at scale

“What is a data center and what do people know?” asks Sherry Stout, program manager for the National Laboratory of the Rockies. She works with state and tribal governments.

“So first and foremost, 38% of people statistically in this room, you live within five miles of a data center and you just might not know it,” she says.

“If you ask what national polls say 35% of people would say that they have heard —quote — a lot about data centers in this past year. And why is that? … there’s 632 local governments have taken up the issue of data centers this year alone.

It’s these very conversations that are so twisted. Data centers are pitched as inevitable on private and public land and many of the people involved won’t answer questions because they’ve signed those NDAs.

Sherry Stout:

“People are encountering news stories. They’re encountering political processes. They’re encountering social media that’s all about data centers. We’re seeing states that have paused large scale data centers and we’re seeing moratorium that are placed to say we need to pause and figure out what are these things? How are they affecting us and how do we need to go forward? There’s also, let’s just talk about the reality. There are a few very visible, very poorly done examples of data centers and those are going to drive conversations like it or not. NDAs are becoming a greater and greater issue. I spent a lot of last week with some of the hyperscalers talking about the issue of NDAs and it used to be in business that NDAs would actually speed things along because you would have some of that non-compete. But now the second a community finds out that their council has an NDA with a hyperscaler, that has changed the conversation and transparency is really changing. How we think about data transparency and what’s going on is really changing. Then there’s also just some of the reality of there’s a huge worldwide debate right now on the future of artificial intelligence or super intelligence if you work in the federal world. Data centers often can be the face, the physical manifestation of that conversation.”

Billions, not millions

Pearl Eva Walker is a member of the Memphis City Council where a huge generative A-I data center, Colossus, was built by Space X — Elon Musk —for Grok and is now leases computer capacity to Anthropic. Walker said the bill for that lease is $1.5 billion per month. (Soon to be Colossus 2 and Colossus 3.)

More than 7,500 construction workers are building the facilities. That number of workers has caused significant impact to the communities in Memphis, including those across the line in Mississippi that don’t get the same benefits.

“… God didn’t create data centers and they are not all good,” Walker said. “How do they become better? Hopefully all good. That’s up to us.”

When all this started there were not many community rules in place. So the community had to develop legislation as the data centers were under construction while learning about the impacts as (or after) they happened. That leaves few paths forward for to protect the public.

“What do municipalities need to know? If you’re thinking that a data center could come to your city or town, you need to check on the legislation that you have first concerning data centers,” she said.

That means a comprehensive legislative plan that outlines what companies have to do and how to hold them accountable.

Council Member Walker:

“We’ve been accused of signing NDAs. I have not signed an NDA. I have not been asked to sign an NDA. Why? Because they didn’t need us for anything. Why not? Because we didn’t have any guardrails and moratoriums or anything that kept them from coming in. And then on the other side, there were entities such as the chamber that helped them come into the city and maneuver certain spaces and circumstances. But you want to start with the zoning because they can’t do anything without a parcel. So keep that in mind. The Paul Laurie location, it’s been zoned for commercial industrial since the 1950s. And we are in the process of doing some rezoning for the entire city already. And it will include zoning specific to data centers. That is very important because that’s going to guide your municipality, your leadership, the business community, how they maneuver this space.”

A couple of lessons from Memphis: Be clear about the rules. And have in place a funding mechanism for community benefits, money that can be directed to improve the quality of life for people in the region. Tennessee law, for example, doesn’t allow a city to take money directly from a company for such activities.

Remember that the infrastructure problems will be greater than most people think. Imagine the impact of a “temporary” work force of 7,500 people.

“So when you use the word infrastructure as it relates to these data centers, you’re thinking about infrastructure build out,” she says. “They say 7,500 employees, people who are just in town for the project. Most of them at one time, not necessarily all of them at one time. So with that, we have their vehicles. We have the charter buses. So what they have set up around the area where there’s a mall, a shopping center, a grocery store, a movie theater, they are leasing parking lots around residential neighborhoods.”

That includes traffic, accidents, and rows of motor coaches lined up to take people to specific sites.

In that area of the city there’s a school that attracts students from across the city and region — and now student schedules are impacted because the traffic makes their commutes so much worse.

Council Member Walker:

“In between Colossus two and the middle school is a graveyard. You can hear, ladies talk about the noise. You can hear the humming from the football field at the school. It’s just that close. And the traffic, a lot of this is residential. We have churches, businesses, things like that. And so people have had to adjust their lives. They have had to adjust their lives. The time they leave to go to work, the time that they leave to take the children to school. And this particular school is something that we call an optional school. And optional schools, they have special curriculums and there’s a process to get your child in. Well, optional schools bring in people from all over the city, which means this is not an area where children can just get up and walk to school.

“So we have the extra traffic because people are coming from all over the city because of the type of school that it is. And then you have churches over there. And so what is my point? It’s a whole lot of traffic y’all that’s not being reported on and we’re just, it’s I guess assumed that we should make adjustments for that. But these are the kind of questions that you want to ask ahead of time.”

None of this makes me want to have a data center built near where I live. But at the same time, Council Member Walker said not all companies are doing this the same way.

This is whythe rules are so important, and include any community priorities that should be enforced.

For example the power requirements of data centers are enormous. But what if a regional power plan could include upgrading and paying for a smarter energy plan for the region, a shopping list that might include cheaper power for all, plus the weatherization of homes in the area to make them more efficient? Again, think of the scale, if a computer-time lease pays $1.5 billion per month, what would it be worth make the project’s neighbors whole by paying for all homes to be more energy efficient? (Saving power and money.) The cost of doing business as part of the answer.

Community sound ordinance also need to be re-drafted. Instead of just focusing on loudness — decibels — there must be attention paid to the impact of low frequency rumbling. Perhaps more strict set-back regulations.

We also know that data center operators take advantage of the jurisdictional maze; tribal, city, county and states all have different regulatory frameworks and companies should not profit from that.

And the federal government pretty much builds data centers without asking any community for permission. Last year, for example, the Idaho National Laboratory announced it plan to “develop cutting-edge AI data center and energy generation projects. This selection is a next step in the Trump administration’s goals of utilizing Federal lands to lower energy costs and help power the global AI race.” Cutting-edge, in this context, is building mini-nuclear plants to power data centers. (I live about 40 miles from that one.)

Private data centers have their own way around state or tribal rules.

At Colossus 2, the gas burns in Mississippi and generates electricity for Tennessee. Those gas turbines were installed under a Mississippi law that allows portable equipment to operate for up to a year without air permits. (The basis of at least one lawsuit.) By July the plant had a capacity of about 1,775 megawatts, rivaling the state’s largest power plants—and enough to electrify more than 1.4 million homes.

Beyond playing one state against another, there is the issue of how to transmit electricity across an aging grid. That’s a problem that tribes can help solve (even without data centers). Most of the power lines that cross reservations will need major upgrades because more electricity is being used everywhere. So instead of just rewriting the lease, why not rebuild the lines as a tribally-owned transmission line?

That was the story in Southern California with the Morongo Band of Mission Indians.

From my 2021 piece in ICT:

“The tribe had the corridor and created Morongo Transmission, LLC., to invest some $400 million or up to 50 percent of the project. That’s all been approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

“The deal will be “hugely profitable” for the tribe but will not cost the utility’s ratepayers any more than it would have cost without the tribe’s involvement. Because of the way utilities are structured, the very right to invest in a project is valuable.

“Thus Morongo Transmission gets the same revenue that Edison would have received and will earn a profit based on a formula. And Edison saved money in the deal because it did not have to pay as much as $500 million for the right of way (since it does not own the lines, the tribe does).”

We think of data centers as only Artificial Intelligence — and that’s been a big part of the rush to build. But data (and energy) are growing faster than our ability to plan.

There’s also the we. We want our phones (creating and storying more data than what was in a data center just a few years ago). Our social media. Our online bill paying. And so now our world is full of ones and zeroes.

Take health care. A few weeks ago I went into a dental surgeon for some work on my teeth. I could see the imaging process in action and how that had changed. It was all AI; a wand in my mouth and then within seconds a 3D rotating image showing a path to fixing my teeth. Stunning really.

The scale of data generation is stunning too. HealthTech estimates that an average hospital produces roughly 50 petabytes of data every year, more than twice the size of the contents housed in the Library of Congress.

And the amount of data being generated (and then needed to be stored somewhere) is increasing at a rate of roughly 47% per year. And the total health care data reflects about a third of the world’s total data volume.

So how do tribes and communities get ahead of this? What is the direction pointing to a better conversation?

Sherry Stout said in Colorado recently a city council passed a resolution supporting data center construction in rural communities. Away from people. The logic: We want the value of data, what it means to our lives, but we don’t want the negative impacts.

“We want our ChatGPT, we want our cloud, we want our cloud storage, we want all of those things, but we would rather you put it somewhere else, somewhere where it’s away from what we consider away from people and away from people is going to inherently mean increasingly rural,” Stout says. “How we think about rural impacts is going to change as this conversation continues to see these type of ordinances saying, ‘Go out there.’”

But we who live out there might have something to say about that.