News from rural America.

Yonder Radio's first-ever special report is called Power Dynamics: The Rural Data Center Boom. We're digging into how different kinds of power – from literal computing power to political and economic power – shape data center development in rural America. Two-thirds of new data centers are going to be built in rural places, according to the Pew Research Center. That puts rural communities at the forefront of a nationwide scramble to build the physical infrastructure powering AI. Still, as the U.S. economy embraces AI, rural America has yet to feel the technology’s economic windfall. Instead, many communities are grappling with competing visions for the future of their land, water, and energy resources, as data centers crop up to supply growing AI demand. Over the past year, the Daily Yonder has reported on the rural data center rush in nearly every region. What has emerged is a story not only of what gets built, and where, but also of who gets to decide. Tune in for all that, and more, on Yonder Radio.

TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Jared Ewe, the host of Yonder Radio.

We bring listeners rural conversations with national reach.

This week, we've got a special report from Daily Yonder Energy reporter Julia Tilton.

It's called Power Dynamics, the rural data center boom.

And we're digging into how different kinds of power from computing power to political to economic power shape data center development in rural America.

We start with the geography of the data center boom and then move on to data centers power, land and water needs.

We continue with rural economist Michael J. Hicks, who analyzes the expectations versus reality of data centers promised economic development.

Then grassroots organizer, Saul Levin, breaks down the growing opposition to data centers and attorneys from the Southern Environmental Law Center talk about how developers can work alongside rather than against communities best interests.

This special report covers the power needs, The Power Playbook, and The People Power, all coming up on Yonder Radio.

Thank you.

Yonder Radio Rural Conversations with National Reach.

Hello, I am your host, Jared Ewe.

And this week, we're doing something different.

We are doing a special report focused on rural data centers with Daily Yonder Energy reporter, Julia Tilton.

We're digging into the power dynamics of the data center boom in rural America.

Power is a key word here because data centers involve a lot of different kinds of power, from literal electrical power to social power, economic, political power, the power of citizens.

First, we're talking about power needs, what data centers need to operate, including land, energy, water, infrastructure, and policy.

We'll then dive into the power playbook that data center developers and big tech companies are using to build out AI infrastructure in rural places.

We'll wrap it all up by looking at people power, the communities around the country who are organizing to oppose and negotiate with the industry.

And just to lay it all out up front, just how data centers impact rural America depends on who gets a seat at the table during their development.

So we're focusing on where data centers are being built and who gets a say in the decision.

And people who felt left out, well, they've turned it into the story that is all over the news.

This Google data center is one of two currently operating in Ellis County and more like it are coming to Texas.

Nearly a dozen are already in the works.

A plan to build the largest AI data center in the world in Southern Ohio is being welcomed by many with open arms there.

The future site of an Amazon data center is abuzz with activity.

Work is already underway on the future Amazon campus that will house thousands upon thousands of servers.

Demand on data centers is growing across the country.

With that excitement, there's also been plenty of pushback.

And as concerns mount, more political candidates running in November are calling for a federal ban.

Joining us now is Daily Yonder energy reporter Julia Tilton.

We've had Julia on to discuss data centers around the country, and she's been leading the Daily Yonder's coverage of rural data center development.

Here she is right now, Julia Tilton.

Hello.

Hey, Jared.

We've had data centers before, Julia.

I mean, I've been liking Facebook posts for 20 years, so something's been helping me do that.

How are these new data centers we're hearing about different from what we've had in the past?

I mean, to your point, data centers have been around for decades.

They are humming along as the backbone of the modern internet.

Think about streaming services, online marketplaces, and all those vacation photo albums you have stored in the cloud.

What's new are these massive hyperscale facilities that are being built now to power artificial intelligence.

These campuses often host dozens of Walmart-sized buildings that use as much power and water in a day as a small city does in the same time frame.

These hyperscale data centers can also bring economic development to the communities that host them, at times representing total investments worth hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in some cases.

And so, in short, the facilities are huge, both in their physical size and in their promised impact, sometimes representing a 10- or 100-fold increase compared to their 2000s and 2010-era counterparts.

Why have data centers become such a big focus of your reporting?

Over the past year, this new crop of hyperscale data centers have become part of this fast-growing industry that has not had much regulatory oversight or accountability.

And like with any big new industry, it's the ground rules that are laid early on that will determine the outcomes for host communities, including rural communities.

Yeah.

And Julia, when I've talked about the stories you've covered, there's this theme, this main theme that communities bring up over and over again.

What is that?

That would be transparency.

That is probably the biggest theme that has emerged in my reporting.

And it's a common challenge that I hear from both rural community members and from legal experts, policy experts, is that it's really difficult to get a hold of precise information about data centers, how much water they'll use, how much power they'll use for any specific data center facility.

In some instances, data center developers will claim that these kinds of metrics are trade secrets.

And so while we've seen some policymakers move to try to end this practice, a lot of information about these facilities is still unknown to the public.

Okay, I know you're about to set sail with a lot of information.

Yes.

So the hyperscale data centers that we're talking about, they represent more than just the computing they enable or the resources that they consume.

I think it's important to note that they are also a physical reminder of our changing economy in the face of AI.

And to some, that's a welcome development.

To others, not so much.

So here's a very short but painfully and powerfully loaded question.

How do people feel about data centers?

On average, not super thrilled.

In May 2026, Gallup did a national public opinion poll and found that 7 in 10 Americans oppose constructing AI data centers in their area, with nearly half being strongly opposed.

And then a month later, in June, a Reuters-Ipsos poll found that that sentiment cuts across party lines, with 57% of Americans, including two-thirds who identify as Democrats and half who identify as Republicans, also opposing data centers in their community.

And so this sentiment, opposition to data centers, has prompted some politicians to begin taking action on data center regulation, especially as we gear up for the midterm elections in November.

I just want to pause and feel the warmth of our rare togetherness.

But we need to get into the geography of this data center boom.

What do we know about where data centers are?

What are the data points as to where they're going to be built?

So in June, I worked with the Daily Anders data editor, Sarah Mallott, to analyze this geography of data center development.

We looked at a few different things, including where data centers currently are, where they're being planned and how that development tracks onto existing electricity grid infrastructure, since electricity is such a big piece of this data center puzzle.

So where are data centers being built now?

We found that the majority of data centers that are currently in operation are located in metropolitan counties.

And this tracks with other analyses that have been done, including one by the Pew Research Center, which found that 87% of existing data centers are in urban areas.

Are you seeing a change, though?

I have a feeling that there's a change.

Yes, there is a change.

Based on prior reporting.

Yeah.

Yes, there is a change, and that is a big reason why we are talking about rural data centers today.

When it comes to new data centers, so facilities that are currently being planned as part of this data center development boom, the story is quite different.

Key Research Center found that 67%, so two-thirds, of planned data centers are in rural areas, with three-quarters of all of the planned construction happening in the South and the Midwest.

What does this kind of construction mean for rural communities?

That is a question that depends on who you ask.

The industry has one point of view.

Large data centers that are characteristic of the current boom can bring multi-million dollar windfalls to the local governments that host them, in the form of tax revenue.

I spoke with Brad Teets.

He is the Director of Government Affairs for the Midwest with the Data Center Coalition.

That's the industry's National Trade Association.

And he said that if done responsibly, this development can bring significant benefits to communities.

I'm looking at some projects where the property taxes being paid is three to four times more than the total operating budget for that community at this time.

From our perspective, this is a significant opportunity to help fund schools and libraries and public safety and all these different things that communities often are seeking.

I think it's incumbent upon us to work with the communities and making sure that it's done responsibly and it makes sense for that community.

Still, smaller populations in rural communities mean smaller tax bases and fewer government officials.

That can leave rural communities with fewer resources to negotiate it deals with developers or deal with the fallout of lost tax revenue should the facilities close down the line.

So you say facilities could close.

What do you mean by that, that there is this unpredictability?

Yeah, well, since this is a new industry, it's still very much in flux.

And so right now there's a lot that we don't know about which facilities are going to get built.

And once those facilities are built, which facilities are going to have clients that are going to use the racks of servers inside.

And so it's hard to say whether the amount of demand is going to match up with the supply that we will see later.

To paraphrase purported genius throughout history, we don't know what we don't know.

I'm kind of getting Kevin Costner Field of Dreams vibes here with data centers.

If you build it, the controversy will come.

Why are data centers coming to rural America in the first place?

So I think the answer to this question, this why rural America can be broken down into a few parts because it is complicated.

Data centers are the convergence of a lot of different kinds of issues.

And data centers fundamentally need certain ingredients.

They need land, they need water, they need energy, and they need infrastructure.

And then they also have what we can call nice-to-haves.

So think about existing grid infrastructure and then a friendly policy environment.

Usually that is some form of tax break or tax incentive.

We'll get back to the nice-to-haves, as that's a neat phrase, but let's talk about land and water.

Why is rural America attractive on those two points?

The short and sweet answer is that land in rural America tends to be cheaper and more readily available than land in cities and suburbs.

And water is a little bit more complicated, so I will talk about that in a minute.

We have talked about how the size of these hyperscale data centers compares to their predecessors.

The kinds of campuses that are being proposed and built now often range from hundreds of acres to tens of thousands of acres.

What do you have as far as examples?

Yeah, I was thinking about this, and there are two examples that I want to point to.

I was in Tucker County, West Virginia earlier this summer reporting on a proposed data center that could span 10,000 acres, which is more than four times the size of Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia, which is right next door.

And then in the West, Kevin O'Leary, who you might know as Mr.

Wonderful, has proposed his own data center campus in Box Elder County, Utah.

That campus was originally slated for 40,000 acres.

And I was trying to find something to compare this to.

For context, the land area of Washington, D.C. is around 44,000 acres.

So just 4,000 acres more than this data center campus.

Wow.

Yeah, after significant public backlash to this proposal, O'Leary agreed in June to scale back that project to 20,000 acres.

Why are you seeing the water becoming so complicated?

Yeah, I'm going to give you the 30,000-foot view on this.

Essentially, data centers need water in order to keep the machinery inside them from overheating.

And you can think about it like how when you run your laptop for a while, you might hear that internal fan kick on to keep it cool if you have a bunch of tabs open or are running a high processing program.

And a data center has the same need, except it's at a much greater scale.

There are a lot of complexities with calculating a data center's overall water footprint, since much of a facility's water consumption is actually baked into how that data center is powered.

Things like what kind of energy it's using and how that energy is being generated.

And then there are different cooling technologies that have different water demands.

Water demands.

Go ahead and bring your foul language to Western states and we get a little bit prickly.

Talk about that in rural America.

When we think about water availability in rural America, there are a few broad trends we can speak of.

The West, as you mentioned, is experiencing high levels of water stress compared to other regions.

And then the Midwest and the South, by comparison, are facing less severe levels of water stress.

This is according to the World Resources Institute, which tracks baseline water stress across the country.

And so this could be one reason why we are seeing increased data center development in these regions in the Midwest and in the South.

But in June, The Guardian found that nearly two-thirds of planned data centers in the U.S. are actually set to be built in places that have experienced drought conditions throughout the past year.

The Guardian also found that a similar proportion of data centers that are already operating are in drought-affected areas.

Land and water are just two of the ingredients here.

Data centers also need energy.

They need infrastructure.

What do we know about data centers' energy usage?

We know that data centers are going to need a lot of energy.

This past July, Bloomberg NEF, that's Bloomberg's research service, released a report projecting that data centers will account for up to 20% of U.S. electricity consumption in 2035, so just under a decade from now.

And that's an increase from just under 6% of total U.S. electricity consumption today.

So to put this another way, the amount of power that data centers will need by 2035 is equal to 194 gigawatts, or about the same as 194 nuclear reactors.

By another comparison, a small city might need between 50 and 75 megawatts of power, which is just a small fraction of just one gigawatt.

Whenever I hear the word gigawatt, I think about time travel, although I think that was a gigawatt from Back to the Future.

1.21 gigawatts.

What the hell is a gigawatt?

But still, this is an insane amount of energy.

No hyperbole necessary.

How do we better understand this?

To try and break this all down, I spoke with Jackson Morris.

He is the director of state power sector policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

And here's what he told me about how data centers' energy needs affect the power grid.

Electricity demand, or what's known as load growth, has been relatively flat for decades.

As a result of that, utilities and grid planners and others have gotten used to it being relatively flat.

And then what we saw start to happen fairly quickly, two, maybe three years ago, is that these increasingly massive data centers have basically been coming onto the grid proposals to come onto the grid.

What's resulting is that load growth for electricity demand has skyrocketed in a way that we've really never seen.

It's pretty unprecedented.

Hearing this, I was curious how all of this new electricity demand that Morris talked about is impacting clean energy resources.

In my own reporting, I've been seeing more and more instances of data centers signing agreements with sources like nuclear and solar power.

I asked Morris how those kinds of agreements can affect clean energy or decarbonization goals on the rest of the grid.

If a data center developer comes in and signs a contract for 20 years with an existing nuclear plant or an existing giant solar farm and battery storage project that was already supplying that carbon-free energy to all the rest of us, they could say it with a press release, oh, my data center is powered with clean energy.

Meanwhile, what happens is if you cannibalize that existing clean resource for a giant data center, not only is it not carbon neutral, you've actually dug us a carbon hole.

Because until we can backfill that generation with new zero emissions resources, we're going to be relying on the rest of the fossil fuel fleet to backfill that previous supply.

And so we have to do that just to get back to even.

I do want to note here that this isn't the case across the board.

There are some data center developers and big tech companies that are bringing their own new clean energy to power data centers that don't displace other clean energy already on the grid.

And that's something that's been discussed is can these companies provide their own energy?

Is that happening?

I think that there is a good example in Google's strategy.

So over the past couple of years, they have been really key parts of advancing advanced geothermal, which is a clean energy source that provides round-the-clock power.

But it's still quite expensive for utilities to build or purchase this kind of energy resource on their own.

And so Google has been a longtime investor in Fervo, which is an advanced geothermal startup.

And after a pilot project came online in 2023, Google signed an agreement with Fervo and Envy Energy, a Nevada utility, to purchase 115 megawatts of power to supply its data centers.

And then this past March, Fervo signed a three gigawatt framework agreement with Google to ramp up that production between now and 2033.

And you guessed it, that production is to supply additional power to Google's data centers.

And the last piece of the puzzle here of the nice-to-haves, thank you for that phrase, tax breaks.

What did you find out about that?

Like any other industry, data centers like to have tax breaks.

And that's because it makes development much cheaper at scale.

This is something I asked Morris about to get a better sense of how states have treated the data center industry so far in their tax incentive policies.

Going back two or three years, I would say that a lot of governors and state legislatures were drinking the data center Kool-Aid.

And they were really excited about it.

And there was a serious fear of missing out.

And so we saw a proliferation of tax credits to attract the industry to your state.

As a result of that, today, as it stands, 38 states have some form of a data center tax break on the books.

Currently, though, Morris told me that many states are reconsidering their tax incentives.

In 2026, lawmakers in at least 28 of the 38 states with those incentives have introduced legislation that would significantly amend those policies.

That's according to a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures.

And then in July, New York Governor Kathy Hochul became the first governor in the country to launch a one-year moratorium on building new data centers in the state.

Is that still the country's first temporary ban on the facilities?

I mean, it feels like every week a new governor is coming forward with a proposal to regulate data centers.

As of mid-August, New York is still the only state with a temporary ban in place on the facilities.

I should note, though, that New York is not a hotspot for data center development.

And so in many ways, this feels more like policy posturing than anything else.

But maybe another state to bring up here is Pennsylvania.

On August 18th, Governor Josh Shapiro issued an executive order that mandates that all new data center projects have to first be approved by local officials and that they need to pay for their own power, hire local workers and stick to high water conservation standards.

And I expect that as we get closer to the midterm elections, we might see more politicians starting to talk about data center regulation.

Great insight.

That's what we get with Julia Tilton.

We are examining data centers, the why, the how, the where.

And next, we get into the power playbook.

And for those of you who are history geeks, we're digging around for robber baron metaphors because we might be seeing some of that same activity.

That is On The Way on Yonder Radio. music Thank you. guitar solo guitar solo Yonder Radio, rural conversations with national reach, and nothing has reached longer and deeper and more tentacle-like into all our lives like the conversation we're having today.

We are talking about the power playbook, the trends that have emerged and how data centers approach rural communities and how that's being received by those communities.

I'm here with Daily Yonder Energy reporter Julia Tilton.

To understand that playbook, we're going back in time to the mid-1800s when railroads were first built in the United States.

Julia, help me with this metaphor.

What are you doing with railroads?

So to better understand the power playbook, I spoke with Assad Ramzanali, who is the former chief of staff and a deputy director for strategy at the White House Office of Science and Tech Policy.

He worked under President Biden.

And Ram Zanali now heads up a research center called the Policy Accelerator at Vanderbilt University.

And Ram Zanali made an interesting analogy between the data center development we are seeing now and the railroad development that we saw in the 1800s and 1900s.

Here's some of my conversation with Ram Zanali.

You testified before Congress last June, so a year ago in 2025, And you made this comparison between the dawn of the railroad in the 19th century and AI data centers right now.

I'm wondering whether that comparison is still apt a year later and why you felt the need to draw that comparison, what some of the parallels are between those two industries.

I think the comparisons have gotten much deeper where the over-financialization of AI, where AI is now leading a lot of the shifts in the stock market, but also in the debt markets, they're taking out loans bigger than we can imagine.

All of that also happened with the railroads.

They actually caused some of the initial boom bust cycles that we've seen in this country where you have a financial bubble that causes a whole market to crash.

The modern corporate bond actually gets going because of funding the railroads in the late 1800s.

So the parallels are actually really deep.

This is also the birth of the robber baron era, where the inequality and the vibes of it just doesn't feel fair.

We're seeing a rise in opposition against data centers.

And I wonder to what extent you think that actually can translate into policy, into regulation at all different levels of government.

The fundamental place I start is a community should have local control over the types of businesses that are allowed to operate there.

That is an important part of how our system of governance works.

And we have to maintain that.

Now, I'm also extremely pessimistic about the fact that the power dynamics here are unfair.

And that's what we have to start to rebalance of trillion dollar companies going up against a community in rural America who may not actually have the time, the bandwidth or even know that it's coming.

So it's heartening that people are starting to pay attention.

But I think we have to figure out a dynamic where that power isn't so imbalanced.

OK, so we've ridden the railroad of data center comparison.

And we see the country's wealthiest corporations are building out physical infrastructure across the United States and transforming communities whenever they touch them, whenever they even stop by a town council meeting.

They're shaping the economy in a way that affects all of us.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, Jared.

And it's something that I have observed in my reporting as well, that as much as there are concerns around power, water, infrastructure, there also are concerns about, as Ramzan Ali said, the vibes of this current development boom.

Well, we are talking about vibes here, people.

So, you know, you're in the right place.

We're next.

We're honing in on the expectations versus reality of data center development.

Let's start with economics.

Job creation is one promise that data centers tend to make when they come to town.

What did you find out on that front?

So last November, an economist at Ball State University named Michael Hicks analyzed the local job creation effects of data centers in Texas.

Texas, as you may know, is an epicenter of data center development with at least 248 facilities proposed, the majority of which are planned in rural areas, according to an analysis by the Texas Tribune.

So Hicks chose Texas for his analysis because it makes for a good case study that can then be extrapolated to the rest of the country.

What we did was looked at not just the overall effect, but the sectoral adjustments like within information or construction jobs.

And what we found was that there was no statistically detectable effect of employment change in a county that hosted a data center in the months leading up to it.

So the construction phase or afterwards, after it had started.

So during the biggest year in Texas, we had construction jobs, about 26,000, 27,000 additional construction jobs in commercial construction, which would have been the data center sector, almost an equal loss in residential construction.

So no net growth, just a movement from home building to data center building.

So while Hicks says the data center jobs are just a transfer of jobs, not new ones, Hicks isn't the only voice commenting on data centers as it relates to employment, right?

Yeah.

So I also asked Brad Teets about this.

He is with the Data Center Coalition.

That's the industry's trade group.

And I wanted to give him a chance to respond to this critique of the data industry.

We're often criticized for limited full-time jobs and then a lot of temporary jobs.

And I think these really aren't temporary jobs.

Oftentimes someone will be on a site, Think of electricians or HVAC or pipe fitters for five to six to seven years.

And I'm not aware of many other occupations where that's considered a temporary job.

To get another take on this, I spoke with Garrick Harwick.

He is the assistant business manager for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

That is a union across North America.

Harwick is based in Janesville, Wisconsin. and he told me that there are additional benefits to data center development for skilled trades workers that last even beyond the construction phase.

After they're built, after five, six years, when it's completed and it's up and running, we hope to have our local contractors get service contracts with these places so that we're in there all the time.

You're going to have lots of electricians in there for any retrofitting, upfitting of these facilities as technology changes.

You're going to have plumbers in there for cooling systems.

You're going to have HVAC.

You're going to have all these other trades that hopefully can get a piece of this service work and work there indefinitely.

For electrical contractors and a lot of other trades, those service work projects are a really good moneymaker for them and keep people local.

So it looks like, at least in this instance, that big business and unions are on the same proverbial page here.

Yeah.

And it's interesting that you say that because something else Harwick mentioned is that there are a number of big tech companies, including both Google and Meta, that have actually made investments into these training and apprenticeship programs that Harwick mentioned into the trades to shore up the skilled labor that is going to be needed to build data centers.

So far, though, the analysis on the data center industry's net impact on jobs is a mixed bag.

And so while there may be some potential for job growth, we don't yet have enough data to actually identify any major trends in rural communities.

It's hard not to feel a bit giddy when you hear about job growth in theory, but as you learned, Julia, it is a bit more complicated than that.

You also dug into some other concerns surrounding data centers, including their health impacts.

What did you find?

I wanted to learn more about how data centers might be affecting public health more broadly because one of the first stories that I reported on this topic about a community in southern Virginia that organized to halt a data center that was going to be powered by a 3,500 megawatt natural gas plant had to do with concerns about air quality.

And so I asked Elizabeth Bichard, a public health manager at Moms Clean Air Force, which is a national organization working to protect kids from the threats of climate change and air pollution.

She told me that data centers powered by fossil fuels, like natural gas, or by on-site diesel generators used for backup or during times of peak grid stress, emit air pollutants harmful to human health.

There's really a dangerous mix of pollutants that come out of diesel generators, things like nitrogen oxides or particle pollution, which you might refer to as soot, volatile organic compounds, things like benzene and formaldehyde.

All of these pollutants are dangerous for humans to breathe, but we're especially concerned about the impact of these pollutants on children and babies.

We know that the bodies of babies and children are still developing, and when they're exposed to pollutants at critical developmental stages, it can really have impacts that last a long time and be especially concerning.

Thinking about these pollutants that Bachard mentioned, in August 2026, news broke that Amazon is behind a 7.65 gigawatt natural gas power plant in rural West Texas that's planned for data centers, and it will be the largest single source of air pollution in the United States.

And that alone is significant and worthy of follow-ups on Yonder Radio, which there will be.

Well, it's a pretty easy pivot from that conversation about health to environmental impact and what that could mean on communities.

And in Wisconsin, it's about water and their huge supply of it and their attractive tax policies.

And now Daily Yonder reporter Alana Newman takes us to Wisconsin.

One of the world's largest private developers eyes Beloit for what could be one of the country's largest data center campuses.

Reporter Nathaniel Langley.

We are here tonight to make our voices heard to our elected leaders.

So a data center does not tear another community apart.

And I'm not saying we can't build the future, but we have to be smart about it.

What good is the future?

Currently, there are 12 proposed data centers in Wisconsin.

And this weekend, a local group is raising awareness instead of backing down.

Blaine Halverson first heard about plans to build a data center in his hometown of Menominee, Wisconsin from a Facebook post.

A few weeks later, he attended a city council meeting where leaders were debating whether or not to rezone land to allow for the development.

Halverson said the vast majority of the residents spoke against the proposal during a public comment period, but the council approved the rezoning plan.

That's when I really got upset because I thought local government should work better than that, better than secrecy and better than favoring the voices of a few people with power or landowners instead of centering the voices of the people in the community.

Wisconsin has become a major hotspot for data centers.

It has an abundance of water and has passed tax incentives encouraging data center development.

But grassroots opposition has sprung up across the state, thanks in part to leaders like Halverson and Prescott Balch, a former banking executive who is spending his retirement helping communities organize.

Balch first got involved after he helped defeat a Microsoft data center proposal in his village of Caledonia, Wisconsin.

After a career of working with advancing technologies, he says he's not against data centers themselves, but is concerned by the trend of building them in small communities with limited tax bases and municipal resources.

I say to everyone, I have no objection to data centers.

I'm not a Luddite.

I'm the furthest thing from it.

I think we need them.

We need them in the right place.

For Balch, the right place comes down to economic common sense, fairness, and respect for local communities and their residents.

I know a lot about technology.

I know a lot about financial analysis.

And I started seeing things that were just horrifying.

And I can't sit idly by and do nothing and just laugh and say, oh, too bad.

Halverson has been channeling the love that Wisconsinites have for their home as the chief organizing principal.

This approach, Halverson says, has helped organizers build coalitions across party lines, something he sees as a unique opportunity in today's political landscape.

When we put everything else aside, we can stop big corporations, we can be empowered.

In Halverson's home of Menominee, public outcry eventually led the mayor to cease negotiations with the data center developer.

But because the developers still own the land, Halverson warns that the fight may not be over.

Menominee residents are currently pushing to pass a local ordinance that would regulate data center development in the future.

For Halverson, it's about standing up for his community.

It just to me seems so obvious that the people who make the decisions for the future of my state should be the people who live here, who work here, who pay taxes here, not people who don't care about us, who just fly over and want our water and want our electricity and want whatever they could extract from us.

For Yonder Radio, I'm Alana Newman.

Thank you, Alana Newman.

And next we get into another kind of power, that of the citizenry, people power.

That's what we talk about next on Yonder Radio. music plays Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach.

We are continuing the big, chunky, nutritious conversation with Daily Yonder energy reporter, Julia Tilton, about data centers.

Now, we've talked a lot about electric power.

Now, we're talking about people power, how rural communities are responding to data center development.

Julia, we've had a lot of conversations about this.

We've presented on Yonder Radio throughout this year the work you've been doing.

What is the common thread that you're finding throughout rural America?

I would say that communities are responding to data center development in different ways.

Obviously, every data center is slightly different.

But in my experience reporting on rural communities that are facing data center developments or data center proposals, there are some common threads.

And maybe the most common is that there is often a Facebook group, some kind of social media organizing against that data center or data center proposal.

And so at the Daily Yonder, we actually analyzed the growing resistance to data centers using data from the Data Center Opposition Report, which is a collaborative research project.

And they use Facebook groups as a proxy for opposition.

And we found that as of June 2026, there are approximately 129 of these Facebook groups in rural counties that are opposed to data center development.

And that represents around 27 percent of all of the opposition groups, which are present in 43 states.

And Julia, you talk to people in Missouri, New Jersey, Texas, all about this growing opposition in rural and urban places.

Let's take a listen.

Next night, the backlash against AI data centers is growing with protests from coast to coast in dozens of states today.

The issue uniting many Americans across the political divide.

Here's ABC.

We'll hope the data center's got to go.

Data centers are not allowed.

The people united will never be divided.

The people united will never be divided.

All across the country, communities are responding to data center development in their backyards.

In Missouri, getting access to information about nearby data center proposals can be especially difficult in rural areas.

I spoke with Max Quinn, a reporter at Missouri Business Alert, to understand how locals are filling in the gaps.

We had two data centers that were proposed in this rural county that's kind of between St.

Louis and where we're based in Columbia called Montgomery County.

There is a large Amazon site being built there and there's a large Google site being built there.

A group of concerned citizens work together to start their own nonprofit.

It's called Preserve Montgomery County.

And what those people have done is show up to public meetings.

They have sort of learned to take on the roles of journalists themselves.

They do public records requests.

They get the word out, help organize, hold weekly meetings.

One key strategy of these opposition movements is to spread the word about data center plans.

That's according to Saul Levin, a climate and labor organizer who's been working with activists in New Jersey.

I spoke with Levin about his work with the Climate Revolution Action Network of New Jersey, called CRAN for short.

And while most data center developments in New Jersey are in metropolitan areas, Levin said that the group strategies are applicable to rural communities too.

CRAN has been really effective at stopping data center projects and winning moratoriums because they've communicated with people all over the place and followed the lead of folks on the ground and what they need.

And I think that the lesson carries over to rural places.

We need to at once recognize that people should have self-determination once you give people just a little bit of a template and a guideline, most people, regardless of party and rural, urban places, are saying similar things.

In our third state, Texas, opposition led by both rural and urban residents has captured the attention of state policymakers.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who has been a staunch advocate for AI and innovation, recently released his own plan to regulate data centers.

Here's what he said about it at a campaign stop in July in East Texas.

Any AI dentist center even thinking about coming here, they got to bring their own money, bring their own power, reuse their own water and do it in a way that reduces the cost of electricity for residents across our state.

We must prohibit them from building AI dentist centers in rural Texas neighborhoods, and we must eliminate the tax break they are getting.

Still, this kind of crackdown is far from assured, according to Taylor Goldenstein, who reports on the politics of data centers for the Texas Tribune.

This is what she told me.

I think there are early signs that the politicians are listening and reacting.

It will just be a matter of what kind of legislation, how strict of regulation do we actually end up seeing next year.

Since this show has been largely about construction and the opposition, we should say it's not just those two paths being paved.

There's something else.

There's the negotiation.

Julia, are there organizations that are assisting communities or community members in negotiations with data centers?

Yes, there are.

And actually, one of them is the Southern Environmental Law Center.

I wanted to learn more about the work that they're doing helping communities dealing with data centers in the South.

And so I spoke with some of their attorneys.

I'm Amanda Garcia.

I'm a senior attorney in SELC's Tennessee office, and I'm also our data center project leader.

I am Ryan Anderson.

I'm a staff attorney in SELC's Alabama office.

A little over a year ago, we kept getting a lot of cold calls from right outside of Birmingham regarding a data center project called Project Marvel, which at the time was slated to be one of the largest data center projects in the country.

So quickly had to get up to speed on all of the data center issues, including water use, power use, and zoning, and now have kind of translated that knowledge to developments that are happening throughout the state.

You already brought up Project Marvel, but just to drop some stats here, it is a hyperscale data center complex in Bessemer, Alabama.

The project will have 1,200 megawatts of capacity, and it will span 1,600 acres in rural Jefferson County.

And as you mentioned, a lack of project transparency, as well as large power and water needs, have made it a source of controversy for local residents.

What kind of legal recourse do communities have for a project like this?

And how does that inform your work at SCLC?

So zoning is by and large the most powerful tool that communities have to engage in data center development.

However, that doesn't apply to all communities, especially in rural communities.

There are areas, unincorporated areas, that don't have any zoning laws.

So now what we're seeing is kind of an uptick of developers locating in places that don't have zoning.

And that's, again, really important because the zoning laws are what trigger public notice requirements, public hearing requirements.

So when there's not zoning, there's kind of a lack of a public engagement framework.

I'm curious in the SELC's work across the Southeast, if you've noticed any trends in the ways that developers are approaching communities and particularly rural communities?

I've seen actually in a complaint filed by a data center developer that they basically said, we chose this community because it didn't have zoning in place.

So yes, we are definitely seeing that trend.

And really, data center siting is continuing a long legacy of developers targeting communities that have historically been dumping grounds for polluters, right?

So that includes Black communities, lower wealth communities, and rural communities.

A lot of times these deals are getting done behind closed doors with no input from the communities that are going to be most directly affected.

And that is a classic polluter playbook.

Yeah, I mean, from a legal perspective, what kind of options are there to enforce more transparency or to get data centers to be more straightforward about what they're doing?

The first thing I tell communities when they call is start asking questions immediately.

You just start showing up at your local utility board meetings, at your local county commission meetings, and ask the questions that need to be asked.

Where data center need?

Where is the power coming from?

Are they going to have power on site?

Are they going to have their own dedicated fossil fuel plant nearby?

These are questions that your local elected officials should answer.

You really just set the groundwork for exactly what happened in Best In Heart with Project Marble.

At the outset, community members started attending meetings, asking all the right questions and still not getting any kind of robust response.

So when we started getting involved to support community members, we filed open records app requests and we also started going to the meetings and observing what was happening.

Most states have something called an open meetings law where the public has a right to go and watch what is happening during a government meeting.

So throughout the year of rezoning efforts, we really just kept a careful eye on the city government and reminded them of their obligations under both the Open Meetings Act and the Open Records Act.

And what we saw was actually fairly transformative.

They set up a overflow room for people that wanted to watch the city council meetings.

They set up a way for the public to line up and give their public comments.

So just reminding city governments of their obligation to comply with those kinds of things, I think is really powerful.

Do you see pathways for data centers to bring prosperity to rural communities in particular?

And what are those pathways?

There is a potential for data centers and tech companies to be good neighbors, but they have to have the incentive to negotiate with local communities.

And local communities are giving them that incentive by showing up and resisting and pressing pause when needed and saying, we need to think about this.

We need to figure out whether and on what terms we want data centers to be our neighbors in order to do what they could do, which is help support the modernization of infrastructure and the grid and help us move to a clean energy economy.

All of those things are possible, but they need to be done alongside community.

Julia Tilton has been out talking to people and reporting the stories.

Is there something that you come away with, Julia, that would bring the developer and the community into a place where there could be progress?

I mean, certainly hearing from the team members at SELC and from others who are working with the data center industry or in the data center industry or even against the data center industry, there is the potential for the promise of economic development to be realized.

But that needs to happen alongside the community's best interests, as Amanda Garcia said at the SELC.

And right now, there is very little regulation around the data center industry, both at a state level and at a federal level, which makes this kind of responsible development difficult to achieve in communities because there is a lack of transparency all around that communities are experiencing.

Well, thank you, Julia Tilton.

This has been a special report of Yonder Radio Power Dynamics, the rural data center boom.

This is a massive topic.

It isn't going away anytime soon.

It is complicated, and we want to be your source to break it down.

We will be back to regular scheduled programming next week, but you can expect more data center coverage from Julia on Yonder Radio.

You can find all of the Daily Yonder's coverage on the topic by going to dailyyonder.com and clicking on data centers.

Thank you for listening to Yonder Radio, a production of the Center for Rural Strategies, publisher of the Daily Yonder.

I'm your host, Jared Ewe.

Thank you to Quincy Ponver, Leo Pozel, and Tim Merrimah for the great music.

This special report was researched and produced by Julia Tilton.

It was edited and produced by Susanna Brown and Anya Patron-Slepian with additional support from Alana Newman.

Our executive producer is Joel Cohen.

The executive in charge of production is Adam Georgie.

Yonder Radio, rural conversations with National Reach. guitar solo