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I spent last Thursday evening at the community round table listening to and engaging in many thoughtful discussions about Data Center development concerns and possible areas of regulation. I appreciated that so many community members took the time to research and share their information, but I was frustrated that the bulk of those conversations were about how to regulate a thing that, according to a straw poll taken that night, very few people wanted to happen in our town at all. There was very little open discussion about WHY we’re preparing the way for a data center at all. These developments are only inevitable because we let them be.
The US currently has enough data center capacity to handle our day-to-day internet traffic. Data Center expansion is driven almost entirely upon AI expansion, and that is a much larger and more important conversation that we need to be having on a societal level. Why is Marshalltown so ready to lay down and prepare the way for developments that are so unproven and so environmentally dangerous? Is the faint promise of a few jobs and some tax revenue worth the risk? Are we really willing to be this complicit in something that has so many proven downsides and even more unknowns?