Alabama residents weigh fighting or fleeing new data center

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Every morning, at 6:30, at the edge of a giant clearing the size of a couple of supermarket parking lots, the trees start coming down.

The towering evergreens fall one by one. It smells like a Christmas tree lot in the neighboring backyards. In the middle of the clearing, there’s an industrial-sized chipper, turning those trees into mulch.

“Three weeks ago, this started. I mean, with abandon,” said one of the neighbors, watching them come down from his backyard.

He said he talked to the workers clearing the trees. “You will be amazed how fast this is going to move,” he said they told him. “Well, they’ve proven themselves correct.”

We aren’t using his name because he’s afraid of retaliation from his new neighbor: the developer of a $14.5 billion hyperscale data center that’s got hundreds of acres of forest left to clear.

Voters in dozens of parts of the country had to decide last week whether to ban or limit data center development. And largely, data centers lost.

But everywhere else in the country, people have to rely on local elected officials to make data center decisions for them. In many places, they’re not happy with the decisions those officials are making.

“Why are they pushing it so hard now? The only reason that I've heard given is some sort of race against other countries,” said resident Heidi Colpo. “I don't believe that the race is that important.”

Colpo and her neighbors have been showing up to council meetings and appealing to elected officials, but so far, it hasn’t slowed the project down.

“Our whole government is set up so that the little guys can't do anything. We're powerless,” said resident Tina Mann.

The mayor signed a non-disclosure agreement; he got ousted. The new mayor asked the developer, QTS, to pause construction and meet. QTS kept working and postponed the meeting.

“I’m two years into doing this work, and it boggles my mind that you would be an elected official and not get something just ironclad, absolutely unbreakable,” said Charles Miller, a policy director with the Alabama Rivers Alliance, which is an environmental group that fights data center projects.

The city councilmembers didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. The developer declined an interview. Its website advertises that it’ll generate more than $1 billion in tax revenue over 20 years, and promises $10,000 for college to every local high school graduate in the next four years. It says it’ll pay for its energy, mitigate noise, and limit impact. Miller said the developer did not give any benchmarks or goals.

“We’ve seen hyperscale data developers break that trust all over the country, and it just blows my mind that someone would take their word for anything,” Miller said.

So now, the man whose backyard abuts the construction said he’s got a decision to make. He’s lived there with his wife for 43 years, and the developer has offered to buy his house.

His wife is blind and frail.

“My wife exists today for one reason,” he said. “She's got an app. She sits on the front porch, and it identifies birds by the sounds anywhere within a certain geographic position.”

But with the clear-cutting, she can’t hear the birds anymore. He’s worried the data center will drown them out too, once it’s operating.

“If this happens, that woman's gone. She won't exist,” he said. “I know her that well. I've been married to her for 60 years. So what are we supposed to do with this?”