Proposed data center divides rural Indiana community

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Thursday the 25th of September.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown. First up, Big tech in small towns.

Right now, there are over 8,500 data centers worldwide, more than half of them are in the US, and President Donald Trump wants to build more.

Data centers are the back office of just about everything we do online, from asking AI how to cook Risotto to ordering decor from Amazon.

MAST: But the centers can cause problems if developers don’t plan well, and small towns across the nation are wrestling with the payoffs and drawbacks.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

KILEY BLALOCK: Imagine a data center back there.

MARY MUNCY: Kiley Blalock is standing on the road at the edge of her property in Henry County, Indiana. She’s pointing to a tree across a cornfield that marks a natural gas pipeline.

KILEY BLALOCK: The pipeline comes up to there in the back of our field, and that is where the data center they're wanting to connect and put their first building.

The site sits at the intersection of Interstate 70 and State Road 109. Two major roads. From where Blalock stands, all you see is farmland. She doesn’t want to lose the view to the proposed data center complex.

The developer says they’re going to build berms around the site to minimize the visual effect. Promising to make it look more natural. Something like they did in New Albany, Ohio. Blalock wasn’t convinced, so she drove there to see what it’s like.

BLALOCK: It didn't cover up the buildings. They're very tall, very, very large… And the berms with the trees on top, they don't cover them up. They don’t go with the landscape at all. So I don't think it's really a good fit for us over here. It's, it's going to change everything.

Blalock isn't just concerned with the view, she's also worried that changing the aesthetics could bring property values down, and that a data center would eat up the community’s power and water supply, making everything more expensive.

BLALOCK: We already have people in Knightstown, in our community, that are struggling to make it and this isn't going to help us at all with daily bills to be paid, monthly, anything.

So, Blalock and other community members have been going to community meetings and voicing their concerns.

And they’re not alone. According to one study, communities across the US have blocked or delayed $64 billion dollars in data center projects in the last year alone.

In the past, those data centers have been mostly concentrated in areas like Northern Virginia and California. But over the past few years, companies have been looking to expand. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of data centers in the US more than quadrupled in the last 24 years. And in July, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to try to expedite building even more.

GREG MARTZ: I live in the county, that we're trying to do this project.

Greg Martz is the owner of GM Development Companies, and his company now owns the land neighboring Blalock’s farm. He’s hoping to attract a data center to the property.

Indiana just passed a new law lowering property taxes, a good thing for individuals, but Martz worries Henry County schools and infrastructure could suffer if it can’t bring more revenue in. So he hopes to attract a big investor.

MARTZ: I think the reason that everyone assumes it's going to be a data center is just because there's so many of them trying to be built right now across the country, and I think it's a good assumption that they're going to be very interested in the site.

So, as a local developer, he’s trying to get the land rezoned to make that possible. He says normally, the process begins when a big company approaches a rural community with a site in mind, and then pressures them to get it rezoned to fit their needs. Martz is going about it the opposite way.

MARTZ: What we're trying to do is develop the land, not the building. Focus strictly on the land, so that we can make the zoning a community-prioritized zoning, rather than a company-prioritized zoning

That means anyone who buys the land in the future would only be able to use energy from the natural gas pipeline… and since it would have to generate a steady power source, it would likely add power to the grid, not take it. The proposed zoning won’t allow a new owner to dig a well—making it less likely to pollute the local water supply or deplete it. Finally, the zoning stipulates that the business must build berms around the property—both for aesthetic reasons and to dampen any noise.

Martz believes those restrictions will keep potential investors to a very limited group. Primarily data centers. It will also be written into the law that if no one decides to build there within 18 months, the land will revert back to its previous agricultural zoning and owner.

Community member and farmer Blalock still doesn’t think it’s a good idea. But some of her neighbors are on board even if it took some convincing.

GAYLA BEAR-TAYLOR: I immediately jumped on the bandwagon of being anti-data center.

Gayla Bear-Taylor lives about a mile from where the data center could be. She says when she first heard about it, she jumped online to see what kinds of things a data center might do for the community.

BEAR-TAYLOR: It turned up all this information you know, and about the water supply and the energy.

The initial search results were all negative. But she dug deeper. Then she took the same trip to New Albany, Ohio. She thought the city looked good. She also talked with a Northern Virginia realtor about housing prices near its data centers. He said property values have remained strong.

So Bear-Taylor has changed her mind. She says the information she saw originally is about ten years old.

BEAR-TAYLOR: AI is not going anywhere. It's only going to get bigger. You know, the data centers are going to have to go somewhere, and so we might as well work with them to create something that works well with our community.

And so the debate continues. It will likely be months before anything is decided in Henry County, and then it will be even longer for developer Martz to find an interested party.

Martz is playing the long game. He says it’s not just an opportunity for the county to get a big tax contributor, it’s also a chance to be part of making sure America stays a world leader in AI.

MARTZ: In some ways it’s scary for someone like me who just lives in a rural community, and I love the way things are right now, but at the same time, the other part of me thinks we have to win this race. It's a race we can't afford to lose. And that's part of what's exciting to me about that. You know, little Henry County, Indiana can actually make a difference in that race.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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