The vote that mattered

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: A small Michigan town voted against building a data center—but got one anyway.

These facilities store AI data, and they’re cropping up around the country. At the same time, many communities are objecting to their construction. They’ve raised concerns about high energy and water consumption, as well as noise and light pollution.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: But many say the fight is really about diverging visions of the future—one where humans work with their hands and minds, and another where computers displace humanity.

WORLD’s Lauren Smyth visited a data center in rural Michigan, and has our story.

SOUND: [Data center humming]

LAUREN SMYTH: That hum is a hyperscale data center in Dowagiac, Michigan, recorded from a nearby resident’s front porch. The volume is about the level of a normal conversation, and it runs 24/7.

In eastern Michigan, another community fears that sound will become its new normal.

MARK GOLA: I’ve been hearing with these data centers that noise is a real problem …

Mark Gola is sitting outside a coffee shop in Saline, a city of about 9,000.

GOLA: I mean, we don’t want to fall behind, but I don’t know if the way it was done was the right way to do it.

In the background is traffic noise from construction trucks. Gola’s friend, Jim Peterson, says their table used to be quieter.

JIM PETERSON: It's almost like a wartime building effort. This is very unusual.

Many of those trucks are heading toward a 250-acre data center construction site for Oracle and OpenAI, just down the road. It’s called “The Barn,” and it will create nearly 500 permanent jobs and more than two thousand temporary jobs. The developers also promised millions of dollars to community projects.

That didn’t convince the Saline township board, which initially voted not to allow construction on The Barn. One of the concerns was high water usage, which could push up prices up for locals by tightening supply.

KATIE WRIGHT: When these data centers are coming into communities, they might be the highest single user, or the highest single diverter, of water.

Katie Wright is an economist who specializes in water distribution. Michigan has plenty of water, but Wright says that abundance has created vague laws about ownership.

WRIGHT: Data centers are kind of the first big thing that maybe is making the East think carefully about how they’ve defined their water rights.

Unlike most data centers, The Barn won’t use evaporative water cooling. Instead, it will rely on circulating air and won’t even connect to the municipal water supply. It should use no more water than a standard office building—though that could still be more than any other building in town. And limiting water usage isn’t a silver bullet.

WRIGHT: The general tradeoff is, you can either use more water … or you can use more energy.

A typical data center uses up about as much energy as a nuclear power plant produces. 

Joel Stewart works in nuclear plants and sees an opportunity for his industry to build new plants near data centers.

JOEL STEWART: That would be the positive outcome of an AI data center, is the nuclear power plants. They’re one of the longest-lasting job-creating factors for a community.

In the past decade, only one nuclear plant has been built in the U.S. And they take longer to build than data centers. At least in the short term, Stewart says if a data center popped up near him:

STEWART: I would be worried about rising energy costs. Absolutely.

The Barn has promised to take on those costs and not pass them onto local residents. Instead, the developers say they’ll fund their own energy use and contribute to strengthening the local power grid.

But even if the water and power questions could be worked out, Stewart believes data centers still wouldn’t be welcome in many communities.

STEWART: Michigan is a very aesthetically beautiful state, and AI has this dystopian, you know, cyber-future vision to it, to where it’s a direction that really scares a lot of us in the rural communities.

In purely economic terms, the data center could be a boon. By rejecting the project, economist Katie Wright says:

WRIGHT: They basically have said ‘no’ to an industry that could have provided them additional security or lowered uncertainty for a recession in the future.

Wright believes the easiest way to sort out who wants what is to clearly define who owns what—and then let them trade if they’re willing.

WRIGHT: If we want data centers to end up in locations where local populations actually want them, or local communities want them, then allowing people to buy or sell or hold their water actually helps those data centers end up in places where communities are comfortable with the tradeoff of that.

When construction finishes next year, The Barn will be one of the largest data centers in the United States. Other Michigan towns are taking note. So far, 26 communities have blocked data center construction, and at least two more have bans under consideration.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Lauren Smyth in Saline, Michigan.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.