It usually begins with a notice almost designed not to be read: a rezoning application, a few hundred acres of farmland moving from agricultural to “light industrial,” a hearing at the township hall on a Tuesday. The project has a codename — Project Falcon, Project Copper, something that makes a county with a grain elevator sound like a theatre of war. A man from the development authority explains that he cannot reveal the company, because he has signed a non-disclosure agreement, though he can say it is a “technology end user,” that the investment will run into the billions, and that the board should vote yes tonight. By the time anyone in the folding chairs learns the company’s name, the land is under option, the tax abatement is drafted and the utility has been planning the substation for a year. The meeting is not where the decision happens. It is where the decision is announced.
None of this was supposed to have an address. For two decades the computing industry sold itself in the least industrial language ever applied to an industry: the cloud. Nothing in the history of branding has been named with more care to be unseeable — a cloud has no smokestack, no truck route, no water intake, and you cannot object to the weather. That was the genius of it, and the genius was jurisdictional: weather has no zoning board. The metaphor worked best on the people with the most leverage, the billion-odd users who experience computing as a menu on a phone, weightless and placeless. The footprint did not vanish; it was reassigned. The public that never has to think about the cloud and the public that suddenly lives next to it are two very different constituencies, and nearly the whole politics of the data centre lives in the gap between them.
Start with the honest part, because the cornfield substation is not a mirage. The International Energy Agency’s Energy and AI report, published in April 2025, estimates that data centres consumed about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024 — roughly 1.5 per cent of the global total — and projects that figure to more than double, to around 945 terawatt-hours, by 2030. In the United States, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report released by the Department of Energy in December 2024 found that data centre demand tripled over the past decade and is on track to double or triple again by 2028. All of this lands on grids that spent the better part of twenty years going nowhere; flat demand was the assumption an entire planning culture was built on. Utilities that have not built serious generation in a career are now being asked for loads the size of small cities, on a couple of years’ notice, under codenames.
How to site a cloud
The process that delivers a data centre to a farm county is not a string of accidents. It is a discipline, and its governing principle is that the number of people who get a say should be as small as possible for as long as possible. First the codename and the NDA, which convert a public decision into a private negotiation. Then the land options, signed quietly with individual farmers so there is no single sale to report. Then the incentive package, negotiated with a development authority or county board — often the only body that will ever vote on the substance. Inside Climate News has reported on an Amazon data centre deal in Richmond County, Georgia, negotiated under non-disclosure, with tax abatements whose terms residents learned only after approval. The Wisconsin Examiner has documented a tax incremental district — a device that earmarks decades of future property-tax revenue — assembled to finance data centre infrastructure. The Guardian described a packed board meeting in Saline Township, Michigan, where residents confronted a project they were only just being told existed.
To be fair, speed is the industry’s genuine constraint, and the secrecy is not pure paranoia: a project called Data Center Watch counts roughly 20 American data centre projects blocked or delayed by local opposition, a tally the industry reads as a permitting crisis and a resident might read as the sound of people asking to be asked. The construction jobs are real; the servers are real; if the economy is going to run on AI, someone will have to generate the electricity, and nobody — including the IEA, whose scenarios are wide — knows precisely how much. The argument is not that these buildings shouldn’t exist. It is that the method for choosing where they exist is engineered to settle the question before the public can take part in it. Secrecy is not a quirk of the siting process. Secrecy is the siting process.
On water, candour means admitting how little can responsibly be said. The much-shared claim that a short conversation with a chatbot drinks a bottle of water traces to a single contested 2023 preprint and deserves a quiet retirement. The defensible numbers live in municipal permits and utility filings — which is itself the story, because those are exactly the documents an NDA exists to keep sealed, or to release after the vote. Cooling a warehouse of computers through a Midwestern July uses water at a scale a farm county measures carefully, and “we can’t tell you” is not an answer that improves when a lawyer delivers it.
Who pays for the weather
The money has the same geography. When a utility agrees to serve a new industrial load it must procure generation and build transmission, and both costs flow into the rate base — the pool every customer pays into: the cornfield, the diner, the next county over. The anchor tenant, meanwhile, has frequently negotiated its local tax contribution down for twenty years, and in regulatory dockets across the country the fight has already begun over whether everyone else’s bills will subsidize the build-out — and over what happens if the forecast demand never arrives but the new power plants are already paid for. Spread the costs across millions of bills, concentrate the abatements in one county, hold the hearing after the signing. It is the cloud’s distribution model, applied to money.
Electricity demand is rising for the first time in a generation, and it will be met somewhere; the only real choice is whether “somewhere” is a place that got to read the deal first. There is a version of this industry that could survive a public meeting held before the non-disclosure agreement — one that treated twenty years of a town’s tax revenue as something the town was owed a vote on, rather than a signature it finds out about afterward. The cloud got its name so that no one would ever picture a building. The cornfield is where the building goes. The least the industry could do is hold the meeting before the concrete.