00:00In a small Pennsylvania valley town smaller than Manhattan,
00:04residents are staring down six proposed data center campuses at once,
00:09and they are fighting back from a $100 million lawsuit in Texas
00:14to a quiet revolt sweeping a third of Indiana's counties.
00:19The backlash against the AI data center boom has moved from scattered protests
00:24into an organized national movement, and behind it all,
00:28the money keeps getting bigger.
00:31We begin in Archibald, Pennsylvania,
00:35a former coal town wedged between mountains along the Lackawanna River,
00:39and now the unlikely front line of America's data center revolt.
00:44This community, slightly smaller than Manhattan,
00:48is facing more data center campus proposals than any other municipality in the state.
00:54Six separate projects that residents say could one day pack
00:58in dozens of server halls the size of Walmart superstores.
01:03In response, neighbors who had never met formed a group called Stop Archibald Data Centers,
01:09showing up in fading yellow t-shirts to hearing after hearing.
01:13What is most striking is who is standing together.
01:17Retirees and young families, Democrats and Republicans,
01:21all united by a single fear.
01:24That big tech could permanently reshape the valley they call home.
01:29That grassroots opposition is increasingly colliding with the courts.
01:34And in Hill County, Texas,
01:36a developer is fighting back with a vengeance.
01:39After county commissioners passed one of the state's first data center moratoriums this spring,
01:45A company called RCM Hill filed a $100 million federal lawsuit,
01:52arguing the county had exceeded its lawful powers.
01:55RCM says it spent 16 months and nearly a million dollars pursuing Project Aquila,
02:02a proposed 1,235-megawatt data center,
02:06and had contracts to buy more than 800 acres of land.
02:09Facing that legal onslaught, commissioners blinked,
02:14voting unanimously to rescind the moratorium and replace it with a review checklist.
02:19But here is the twist.
02:22Even with the pause repealed,
02:24RCM's lawsuit is still very much alive.
02:27A warning shot to every county in America attempted to hit the brakes.
02:33And yet, for every county that backs down under legal pressure,
02:37many more are digging in.
02:39Nowhere more dramatically than Indiana,
02:42a new tally finds that nearly a third of all Indiana counties have now moved to restrict data.
02:49Center development,
02:50a staggering shift for a state that just months ago was rolling out the welcome mat.
02:56According to Indiana University's Environmental Resilience Institute,
03:0111 counties have passed formal data center ordinances.
03:05At least 17 have enacted temporary moratoriums.
03:09And two have banned new data centers outright.
03:12It is a quiet, county-by-county rebellion,
03:15driven by worries over soaring electric bills,
03:19water use,
03:20and relentless noise.
03:22What was once a scattered handful of local fights has hardened into something that looks a lot like
03:27a statewide reckoning?
03:30The reason so many communities are anxious comes down to one overwhelming force.
03:37Electricity.
03:38The numbers are almost hard to believe.
03:40More than 4,500 data centers now operating in the United States already consume around
03:48176 terawatt-hours a year.
03:50Over 4% of all the electricity the entire country uses.
03:55Total data center demand has rocketed from 23 gigawatts in 2023 to roughly
04:0142 gigawatts today.
04:04And forecasts see it more than tripling by the end of the decade.
04:08P.J.M., the nation's largest grid operator serving 65 million people,
04:14warns it could fall 6 gigawatts short of its reliability target as soon as 2027.
04:21Federal regulators are now so alarmed they have ordered the six biggest grid operators to defend or
04:27rewrite the rules for connecting these massive new loads.
04:32The strain on the grid is only half the story.
04:36Water tells the other half.
04:38And few projects capture the tension like Project Jupiter.
04:42Rising in the Chihuahuan Desert near the New Mexico-Texas border,
04:47this enormous complex is being built to house servers for Oracle and OpenAI.
04:52In one of the driest regions in the entire country,
04:56the concern is simple math.
04:58A single large data center can drink up to a billion gallons of water a year.
05:03And as much as 2.7 million gallons on a single scorching summer day.
05:09Just to keep its processors from overheating.
05:12With about two-thirds of the more than 800 data centers now planned nationwide slated for
05:18drought-prone land,
05:2036 states are scrambling to write brand new rules
05:23governing exactly how much water these
05:26thirsty facilities are allowed to take.
05:30State legislators are taking notice.
05:33And this month,
05:35several of them slammed shut the very tax breaks that lured data centers in the first place.
05:40As of July 1st,
05:43Arizona enacted a three-year moratorium on its data center sales tax exemption.
05:49Freezing that incentive all the way until 2029.
05:52In Illinois,
05:54Governor J.B.
05:55Pritzker directed the state to pause its data center tax incentives on that same day.
06:00And Ohio's Governor Mike DeWine took nearly identical action.
06:05It is part of a remarkable turn.
06:08More than 300 data center bills have been introduced across 30 states this year.
06:13With California,
06:15Ohio,
06:16and Utah already enacting laws that force developers to cover their own energy costs.
06:22The era of no questions asked subsidies for big tech may be quietly coming to an end.
06:29Yet despite that regulatory wave,
06:32construction is pressing forward at full speed.
06:35And Microsoft is leading the charge.
06:38The company just cut the ribbon on a $3.3 billion data center in Mount Pleasant,
06:45Wisconsin,
06:46the very first facility to go live at its sprawling campus there in one of its highest profile.
06:52Artificial intelligence projects to date,
06:55almost simultaneously,
06:57Microsoft broke ground on another major data center in La Porte,
07:02Indiana,
07:03even as counties across that very same state are moving to restrict them.
07:08It is a vivid snapshot of the moment we are living in.
07:12The industry is racing to build faster than communities can regulate,
07:17planting billions of dollars of concrete and silicon into the ground while the political and legal
07:22fights swirl all around it.
07:26And the money behind all of this construction is staggering,
07:30reaching numbers that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
07:34In one of the largest data center deals of the entire year,
07:39a group of investors has agreed to acquire aligned data centers for roughly $40 billion.
07:45The buyers read like a who's who of global capital and technology.
08:04It is a vivid sign that no matter how loud the local opposition grows,
08:10the world's biggest financial and technology players are betting tens of billions of dollars that
08:16demand for AI computing power will only keep exploding.
08:20The revolt may be spreading,
08:22but so is the capital that is determined to build straight through it.
08:34It helps us cover more of these stories.
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