In the midst of a rush on a national scale by AI companies to build data centers to support their feverish growth, and by many places to attract them, some cities say Whoa, not so fast.
This is the case in St. Louis and Saint-Charles, Missouri, two cities just 30 minutes apart in the heart of the country.
On August 22, St. Charles imposed, during a unanimous vote by the municipal council, a one -year moratorium on the construction of the data center of new data after the news announced a project of secret center of data from the city, which aroused demonstrations of local residents.
In St. Louis, the head of the planning agency of this city offered this week a similar moratorium “while the city develops a complete understanding of the problem and develops a use of the land, environmental and other quality regulations”, according to a memo quoted by the public radio of St. Louis. This is a break that the mayor supports.
There are good reasons for these cities to be concerned. The data centers, filled with thousands of computers to manage essentially everything you do online, have a voracious need for electricity and water, and not a small amount of land or construction space. The arrival of the generative AI has considerably increased the request of such installations by companies such as Openai, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
Between 2021 and 2024, the number of data centers in the United States almost doubled in the midst of AI rapid progress. Meanwhile, the AI action plan for the Trump administration offered full support for the construction of data centers and the resource pipes to support them.
Two of the largest concerns about data centers include the abundant amount of water needed to cool the servers and the constraint they cause on the electric grid.
I have heard objections to data centers of the AI of the residents of Pennsylvania and Louisiana this summer, when I was looking for the environmental and energy impacts of these installations. A retired school director who had organized a community resistance said to me: “I am worried about the kind of world I leave for my grandchildren. It is no safer, it is not better, and we sell to these large companies. You know, it’s not in their backyard, it’s in my court.”
Data center posser in St. Charles
When the residents of St. Charles learned the plans of the data center for their city, hundreds of people presented themselves during a meeting of the town hall to let their opposition be heard. The center, known as the Cumulus Project, is located on approximately 440 acres.
“The effects of all that this installation would bring, in the long term, in the short term, you call it, our house will feel it, be it the subsidized cost to build additional infrastructure, for having brought water, electricity,” said St. Charles, Andrew Gardner at the time.
The opposition and action of residents worked.
In an August email, shared by St. Louis Public Radio, the developers of Project Cumulus told the city of St. Charles that they withdrew their request for a parole permit. They said they would join the community’s comments and prepare a revised proposal.
A few days later, the city promulgated its one -year moratorium on the construction of new data centers.
According to St. Louis Public Radio, the company behind Project Cumulus seems to be Google, but that has not yet been confirmed. On the other side of the state, Google builds a $ 1 billion data center in Kansas City, Missouri.
Google did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comments.
A break on data centers, not a ban
It is a server room in a data center belonging to Facebook operations in Meta in Lulea, Sweden.
In Saint-Louis, Mayor Cara Spencer supports new construction permits for data centers while the City develops new regulations rather than fully prohibiting the construction of the data center.
“Although I have concerns about the effects of environmental data centers, public services prices, dynamism and urban life,” said Spencer in a press release at CNET, “I also recognize their importance for the main Saint-Louis industries, including biotechnology, geospatial fields, agtech and health cards, and my office is in close collaboration.
Currently, Missouri has nearly 50 active data centers with the majority located in Kansas City and St. Louis.
