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Data centers are popping up all over the rural South and the Midwest, where researchers say three-quarters of new data center construction is planned. Harvest Public Media's Abigail Bottar reports that along with the boom, there's a corresponding rush of legislation from local and state governments trying to regulate the industry.
ABIGAIL BOTTAR, BYLINE: More than 100 people packed into tight chambers for a county board meeting in central Illinois this spring when a data center issue was on the agenda.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: All right. Thank you. I'm going to call this meeting of the Champaign County Board to order.
BOTTAR: Dozens of people, including Elizabeth Kirby, came to voice concerns about the massive amounts of water and energy data centers use.
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ELIZABETH KIRBY: We have an energy crisis right now. We've been talking about energy. We're all, let's fight fossil fuels. Let's get rid of fossil fuels. And yet, we're building AI data centers so that they can summarize my email chains.
BOTTAR: The county board hit pause and unanimously passed a one-year moratorium. In Festus, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, residents voted out half of the city council after it approved a $6 billion data center deal. Rick Belleville is one of the newly elected council members.
RICK BELLEVILLE: When somebody comes to town and says, hey, we're going to give you millions of dollars, and we're going to build a data center, then you need to slow down and get a full understanding of how the whole thing is going to affect their community.
BOTTAR: It's not just local governments. Lawmakers in more than 20 states, from Ohio to Kansas, introduced bills this year to add guardrails to data center development.
DAVE OWEN: I don't think really anybody foresaw how much of a popular backlash there would be against data centers.
BOTTAR: That's Dave Owen, a law professor at the University of California San Francisco, who studies the energy impacts of data centers.
OWEN: So even, you know, a year and a half ago, a lot of state and local governments were very eagerly trying to court data centers.
BOTTAR: Currently, 38 states offer dedicated incentives meant to attract data centers, but several states are reconsidering. In Illinois, Governor JB Pritzker praised the passage of tax incentives for data centers in 2019. But at his State of the State speech this year, he changed his stance.
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JB PRITZKER: In the face of rising demand and surging prices, I'm proposing a two-year pause on authorization of new data center tax credits.
BOTTAR: He's implementing that pause starting July 1. Several other states are considering a full repeal of their data center incentives. In Michigan, State Representative Dylan Wegela, a Democrat, cosponsored legislation with a Republican to repeal incentives that went into effect last year.
DYLAN WEGELA: As people especially have started to see the bipartisan local pushback, a lot of legislators have changed their mind on this.
BOTTAR: But Michigan's governor still supports data centers. That's one reason Wegela doesn't think his bills will pass, but he hopes communities will take up the effort and pass their own restrictions. That's a heavy weight for individual communities to bear, says Jonathan Coppess. He's a professor of agricultural policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
JONATHAN COPPESS: I do think it's a really difficult thing, even for states. Water flows, electricity flows across state lines.
BOTTAR: He says the federal government should step in. Federal legislation to pause data center development has been introduced, but the bill, sponsored by minority party members, is unlikely to pass in a Republican-controlled Congress. That means, for now, these decisions about data centers will continue to be based on a patchwork of local and state laws.
For NPR News, I'm Abigail Bottar in Champaign County, Illinois. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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