My Hometown Is Protesting a Data Center. I Think They're Misled.
I grew up in Ashland. I want to walk through what's real, what's overblown, and the bigger picture
Last month, the national fight over data centers landed in my hometown. Until now, this has been an issue playing out “elsewhere”, in areas I have no ties to. No longer.
TeraWulf announced they had acquired the Muskie Data Campus located in the 1,000-acre EastPark Industrial Park, located just off of I64 between Ashland (where I grew up) and Grayson, Kentucky. This is a site that was specifically developed to support high-performance computing, and Terawulf plans to build a 1GW data center there.
Immediately, I began seeing social media posts and reshares from old friends, reflexively protesting the planned data center. These are people I care about, who I know have their hearts in the right place and care deeply about Kentucky. But it feels like the reaction is reflexive because it’s the popular stance to hate data centers. They’re an easy villain at this moment in time. Many of the arguments I’m seeing are based on misinformation or misplaced fear, and it feels incredibly similar to the movement that halted the development of nuclear energy - a massive self-own for the environmental movement and our country as a whole. I’m not saying this is the same, but it does rhyme.
These projects deserve scrutiny, but they are not the villain you think they are.
A Layered Cake of Hate
Having watched closely as public opinion on data centers forms in real-time, I’d like to bake my observations in to a 3 layered hate-cake.
Layer 1 - Philosophical
Let’s start with the base of our cake. The ingredients of the base are largely philosophical - everyday people are not seeing how artificial intelligence is going to benefit them. They’re hearing tech CEOs warn how it will take all the jobs, their social media feeds are inundated with AI slop, and it’s not been made clear how this technology will improve their health, wealth, or happiness. Who wouldn’t hate that? Unless you’re very diligent about where/how you consume information, you’re likely being fed mostly negative narratives - the social media algorithms amplify the content that seeds fear and anger.
From my point of view, most of these philosophies about AI are either misled or downright wrong. Of course, as a society, we have a very strange and uncertain road to navigate - but when has that not been the case? The only constant in the short time our species has inhabited this planet is change, and that will only accelerate. I’m not suggesting that there is an inevitable path laid before us - I’m a big believer in the power of agency and actively building the future we want to see - nor am I suggesting that everything is going to go right just because we want it to. But if you can’t acknowledge the massive benefits this technology is currently delivering and the potential benefits it can deliver in the future, that feels a bit intellectually dishonest.
Some examples:
This guy used ChatGPT + AlphaFold to develop a custom mRNA cancer vaccine for his dog. Her aggressive mast cell tumors shrank by 75% within weeks of the treatment.
AI is helping Radiologists assess scans & make more accurate diagnosis.
All the above examples are supported with data or research, but that doesn’t take into account the explosion in entrepreneurship that has been spurred as a result of LLMs. There’s never been a better time to have agency and a desire to be a problem-solver.
Yes, I believe some jobs will go away, but I don’t believe we’ll encounter mass unemployment as AI will lead to more and different work to be done. I believe we’ll seek out and celebrate human-made things even more than we do now. And I believe abundant intelligence will diffuse into our everyday lives, making us healthier (advances in biotech & personalized medicine), wealthier (robotics + abundant energy will create an economic boom), and happier (largely a personal choice, but if you get the first two things, your odds are better).
Layer 2 - Economic
The ingredients of the next layer of our hate cake is primarily comprised of economic fears related to the construction of a data center in your neck of the woods. The most valid of these fears is whether or not these power-hungry facilities will cause your utility bills to increase. There’s been lots of attention on this, both from the White House and legislation at the state level. Many new data centers will simply be required to bring their own power production - a trend which will hopefully drive investment into developing nuclear energy technology like SMRs (small modular reactors), and solar-plus-storage capacity, resulting in a healthier, more decentralized grid. As far as this TeraWulf data center stands, it would be served by Kentucky Power under a large-load industrial tariff that does carry long-term contract commitments that help ensure a big customer pays its share over time rather than walking away and leaving the bill to everyone else. I would also expect Kentucky to pass a bill in 2027 that provides guardrails to keep data centers from shifting their costs onto everyone else. HB 593 and 544 were aimed at this issue, but didn’t make it across the finish line this year due to “nuances around how nonprofit and for-profit utilities operate and fund themselves.” Lawmakers have signaled it’s coming back in 2027, so there is continued focus on this issue, while also being careful not to over-regulate.
Other economic complaints typically revolve around the jobs that the facility creates not being long term, since these facilities just don’t require many people to operate. I often see this used as an attack, saying that the economic impact from a jobs perspective is overstated - and sure, there are other projects out there that could theoretically bring in more jobs. But this has to be evaluated on a project by project basis. For this particular project, the site has sat empty for 28 years! Some long term jobs, plus a surge of construction jobs, plus an increase in tax revenue to put towards school and local taxes seems like a great opportunity for the community to me.
Layer 3 - Environmental
The flavor of the top layer of our hate cake is environmental, comprised of ingredients like water usage, noise pollution, and ground water pollution. I’ll start with the most egregious misinformation that people love to harp on, and that is water usage. Data centers produce a lot of heat because they run specialized chips that get really hot, so keeping them cool is a big effort. For many facilities, water is used for evaporative cooling, and thus the water leaves as vapor and eventually falls again as rain. These are the facilities that are on the heavier water-use side of things, but to view that water as being “consumed” seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how water cycles through our environment. Yes, that water may leave the local watershed, but that matters a lot more in a parched state like Arizona or California than it does for a water-rich state like Kentucky - especially when the site is positioned near the Ohio River. The primary concern is when water has to be discharged and contains additive chemicals from the cooling process, called “blowdown”. The EPA requires that water to be treated before being released back into the environment.
More advanced data centers use direct-to-chip or immersion cooling, which uses a special fluid designed specifically for cooling computer chips. It’s more efficient for keeping the chips cool, and uses dramatically less water (fun fact, Kentucky-based Valvoline actually produces this kind of cooling fluid - I interviewed them about it on Middle Tech last year). TeraWulf has not yet published the design specs for the Kentucky site, however, their other facilities use this approach, so it’s a reasonable bet they’ll build the same way here.
Noise pollution - what’s been described as “the sound of a jet engine that never takes off” (I think that’s dramatic) - is a valid concern if there are residents nearby that it impacts. I too would be pissed if there was a constant sound of any kind where I lived. But this is why 1000 acre industrial parks like EastPark are ideal locations for these facilities - they’re really far away from the city centers where a majority of residents live. Regardless, I’d imagine this is a problem that gets solved over time if these companies want to have a shot at being accepted by communities.
Most recently, I’ve seen politicians like AOC hold up jars of brown well water from Georgia, where residents near a Meta site say construction wrecked their water. She's actually right that the mechanism appears to be construction, caused by processes like "dewatering," where groundwater gets pumped out during site prep. While this is not necessarily unique to data centers, it is a problem worth taking seriously. But it’s a fixable engineering-and-oversight issue, not evidence that every data center everywhere poisons the groundwater forever, which is how the clip tends to get flattened online.
Of course our environment has to be protected, but it’s gotten to a point where it’s incredibly difficult to build anything in our country. We can find a path forward to build responsibly without sacrificing our ability to grow and innovate, but only if we reject ideological groupthink and evaluate projects based on their merit and tradeoffs.
The Icing on Top
Our hate cake would not be complete without some icing, and that is the local context that is unique to each community that is fighting a data center. Every city/town has it’s own flavor of local politics and economic development history that plays into their attitudes towards new projects.
In Boyd County/Ashland’s case, there is some history worth understanding if you want to understand the texture of resident’s attitudes towards a project like the Muskie Data Campus. It starts with Ashland Oil, which was the company that originally put Ashland on the map. Founded in the 1920s around the Catlettsburg refinery, it grew into one of the only Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Kentucky and was the civic and economic anchor of the whole region for decades. But over time, the corporate heart drifted away. The company gradually exited the oil business entirely and began winding down crude production back in the 1980s. By 2005 it had sold off its refining and marketing arm to Marathon altogether, pivoting to specialty chemicals. The headquarters followed the money out the door: from Ashland/Russell, to Covington in the late 1990s, and finally out of Kentucky entirely to Delaware by 2020. The refinery itself never closed - Marathon still runs it today - but the company that had defined Ashland, the headquarters jobs, the name on the building, the civic gravity, all of it left. The region never quite replaced what walked out with it.
Then came AK Steel - Armco, as most locals still call it - a massive blue-collar employer that, at its mid-century peak, employed several thousand people. They shut down in 2019 taking the last couple hundred jobs with them. In 2020, Our Lady of Bellefonte Hospital, a local hospital owned by Bon Secours-Mercy Health, closed entirely after nearly 67 years in the community, costing close to 1,000 healthcare jobs in a single stroke.
But the project that most people will point to in light of the TeraWulf project is the Braidy Aluminum disappointment from 2017, in which a proposed aluminum mill (in the same EastPark where TeraWulf will locate the data center) was supposed to be built for $1.3 billion dollars. They promised the community the moon - training programs with guaranteed jobs upon completion, attraction of tangential businesses, investment in the city. They failed to raise the funding they needing and it never came to fruition.
Our people have been burned by big businesses coming in and promising to be an economic development home run, so of course it makes sense for many to be skeptical of the latest to do so.
I won’t deny that it sucks, but I also don’t know a better way to fix it other than to keep taking swings. It’s hard for a community to recover moral once it sees itself as a victim.
The Bigger Picture
We’re in a weird moment in America. I don’t feel great about many things happening in our country and it feels like we’re all just holding on for a ride that is jerking us around a bit too much. This data center issue is happening at a time when it feels like the national debt looms like a ticking time bomb over the younger generation’s heads, combined with that same generation struggling to afford a house, saddled with student loan debt they can’t get out from under, and viewing the system as rigged altogether. The generation that should be adopting and driving this technology forward in the direction they want it to go seems to be rejecting it in mass.
I’m aware that society has marched through many times of high tension, but it seems like we really have to thread the needle here. If the country tries to put a moratorium on all data center construction, I think things would get worse, not better. New data center builds are quite literally keeping our economy out of a recession currently, and I’m not sure people are considering the downstream effects of trying to put a stop to this path. If we can even get a modest half a percent gain on our economic growth thanks to AI, that goes a long way towards avoiding a financial disaster that would result from our country entering into a debt spiral.
To my friends in Ashland - if you’re going to stand against this project, I hope you’ll at least do it based on facts, rather than succumbing to narratives that have been fed to you via social media algorithms. Personally, I hope this project successfully utilizes more industrial land in EastPark, brings tax revenue and jobs to Boyd County, and further advances America’s lead in this new technological revolution.
Well done! Thanks for the thoughtful research and helpful clarification. Algorithms are fueling false “groupthink” on many fronts…this should be an area of concern to all of us. Critical thinking and inquiry must be a priority.