AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard

AI Data Centers Are Coming to Your Backyard

AI doesn’t live in “the cloud.” It lives in buildings: large, energy-hungry, water-dependent facilities that require land, cooling systems, backup power, utility agreements, zoning decisions, and public infrastructure. We’re re-releasing this conversation because the issue has become urgently local. Across the United States, communities are debating whether proposed data centers are good economic development, risky infrastructure bets, or something in between. Here in Ames, Iowa, the City Council is reviewing a proposed data center. The City of Ames says the proposal is still in the early review stage, with no final decision made, and that the full buildout could require up to 25 megawatts of electricity. Kimberly recently wrote an open letter to the Ames Mayor and City Council asking them to slow down, require independent review, and make sure ratepayers are protected before any binding commitments are made. Read it here: “Open Letter to the Ames Mayor & City Council: Re: Proposed Lightedge Data Center on Aviation Way. [https://kpb12177.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-ames-mayor-and-city?r=1sa8v5]” This episode originally focused on 3 of AI’s environmental impacts, energy consumption, water use, and e-waste. But the larger question is civic: who pays for the infrastructure behind AI, who benefits from it, and who gets a say before it shows up in their community? Kimberly and Jessica talk with Jon Ippolito [https://jonippolito.net] and Joline Blais [https://umaine.edu/directory/ums_directory/joline-blais/#:~:text=Joline%20Blais%20is%20Associate%20Professor,regenerative%20design%2C%20and%20digital%20culture.]about the physical infrastructure behind AI and the local consequences of the data-center boom. We discuss: * Why AI is not abstract, weightless, or magically floating in “the cloud” * What data centers are and why they require so much electricity, cooling, and land * The difference between individual AI use and concentrated industrial infrastructure * Why “innovation” can become a rhetorical wrapper for public risk and private profit * How data centers can affect utility planning, municipal water systems, noise, land use, and local tax policy * Why communities should ask hard questions before approving long-term leases, incentives, or infrastructure commitments * The Lewiston, Maine, data-center fight and what other communities can learn from it * Why “AI infrastructure” is not just a tech issue, but a local governance issue Data-center debates are spreading across the country.  The National Conference of State Legislatures reported on July 1, 2026, that lawmakers in 15 states are considering bans or pauses on new data-center development while they study community impacts, grid resilience, and local costs. And nationally, more than 500 organizations from 47 states have called for a moratorium on new AI data centers until stronger protections are in place around energy, water, pollution, electricity rates, and community impacts. Kimberly’s open letter argues that the Council should require independent review before making commitments around a lease, sale, rate classification, or incentive package. The letter specifically asks the Council to protect current utility customers, evaluate the proposal against Ames’ climate and planning commitments, and require evidence around jobs, tax revenue, and community benefit before moving forward. Key questions for any community facing a data center proposal Before a city approves a data center, residents can ask: 1. How much electricity will it use at each phase of development? Not just at opening, but at full buildout. 2. Who pays for grid upgrades, substations, transmission lines, and backup infrastructure? If the answer is “the utility,” ask whether that means current ratepayers. 3. How much water will it use, and what kind of water? Municipal drinking water, industrial water, reclaimed water, or something else? 4. What happens during peak heat, drought, or grid stress? Data centers may look different on an average day than they do during peak demand. 5. How many permanent local jobs will actually be created? Construction jobs are not the same as long-term local employment. 6. What tax incentives, abatements, or special rates are being offered? Public benefit should be measured against public cost. 7. What protections are binding? Promises in presentations are not the same as enforceable agreements. 8. What happens if the company leaves, expands, sells, or changes use? Communities need to think beyond the ribbon-cutting. 9. How does this project fit with the city’s climate, land-use, and economic-development plans? If a city wrote those plans, this is the moment to use them. Otherwise, congratulations, we invented decorative planning documents. 10. Who gets to decide? Public land, public utilities, and long-term infrastructure commitments deserve public scrutiny. Related reading and resources * City of Ames page on proposed Lightedge data center https://www.cityofames.org/News-articles/City-Council-to-Review-Proposed-Data-Center-Includes-Public-Input-Process [https://www.cityofames.org/News-articles/City-Council-to-Review-Proposed-Data-Center-Includes-Public-Input-Process?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Iowa State Daily coverage of Ames City Council data center discussion https://iowastatedaily.com/339765/city-of-ames/city-council-discusses-data-center-proposition/ [https://iowastatedaily.com/339765/city-of-ames/city-council-discusses-data-center-proposition/?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * NCSL: Which States Are Banning Data Centers? https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-centers [https://www.ncsl.org/fiscal/which-states-are-banning-data-centers?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Axios Indianapolis: Proposed data center rules move forward amid protest https://www.axios.com/local/indianapolis/2026/07/01/data-center-rules-vote-protest [https://www.axios.com/local/indianapolis/2026/07/01/data-center-rules-vote-protest?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Axios Cleveland: Cleveland pumps the brakes on data centers https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/06/29/cleveland-data-center-moratorium [https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/06/29/cleveland-data-center-moratorium?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Business Insider: AI data center fight over Colorado River water https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-data-center-lawsuit-california-imperial-valley-colorado-river-water-2026-6 [https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-data-center-lawsuit-california-imperial-valley-colorado-river-water-2026-6?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Food & Water Watch: 500+ groups call for nationwide AI data center moratorium https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/06/11/500-groups-from-47-states-call-for-nationwide-ai-data-center-moratorium/ [https://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/2026/06/11/500-groups-from-47-states-call-for-nationwide-ai-data-center-moratorium/?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Small Bottle, Big Pipe: Data centers and public water-system capacity https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02705 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02705?utm_source=chatgpt.com] * Assessing the Carbon Emissions and Energy Consumption of U.S. Hyperscale Data Centers https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05420 [https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05420?utm_source=chatgpt.com] Search terms AI data centers, data center water use, data center electricity use, data center zoning, AI environmental impact, AI infrastructure, Ames Iowa data center, Lightedge Ames data center, data center moratorium, data center tax incentives, data centers and public utilities, artificial intelligence infrastructure, data center local impact Listen for ... The most important shift in this conversation is from abstraction to infrastructure. AI is often sold as software, intelligence, productivity, creativity, automation, or innovation. But data centers reveal something much more concrete: land, water, power, money, regulation, and political choice. That is where communities still have leverage. And that is why the question is no longer just “Should we use AI?” It is also: Should our town subsidize, host, power, cool, and normalize the infrastructure behind it? Leave us a comment or a suggestion! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/support] Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/

Why Good Intentions Don't Stop Data Centers (or Bad AI Writing

We're back from a few weeks off (I went to Florida, Jessica bought a new house and went to a psilocybin retreat — more on that below) with a wide-ranging catch-up that ends up circling one idea: Incentives matter more than intentions. We trace that thread through a proposed data center near Ames, Iowa, through the words AI chatbots keep teaching us to use, and through our own complicated relationships with money, time, and control. In this episode: The data center fight in Ames, Iowa (Kimberly's current hometown). Ames is now considering airport-adjacent land for a data center, [https://www.cityofames.org/News-articles/City-Council-to-Review-Proposed-Data-Center-Includes-Public-Input-Process]and we walk through what that actually means at scale, including the energy draw, the water use, the construction-jobs pitch that's more one-time than it sounds, and what a community can realistically do about it.  Incentives over intentions. A phrase from Your Undivided Attention's [https://open.spotify.com/episode/62M20Ru669ETTJCCBEGHSh?si=OSWUJ4h0TWKcI4rbcQa5fg] recent episode on the Center for Humane Technology's [https://www.humanetech.com/]seven principles of humane tech becomes the throughline for the whole episode. We talk about tech executives who don't let their own kids use their platforms and, more personally, the unsolicited advice that's well-meant but lands as criticism anyway. "Claudish" and linguistic capitalism. Kimberly has been tracking word-frequency spikes in a web corpus — quiet, nuanced, connective tissue, and others — that track suspiciously well with the rise of generative AI in everyday writing. We talk through Frédéric Kaplan's 2014 concept of linguistic capitalism [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271899710_Linguistic_Capitalism_and_Algorithmic_Mediation] and how an SEO-shaped corpus of web writing became the training data now teaching all of us to sound a certain way. [https://substack.com/@kpb12177/p-200896894] Surveillance capitalism and bread and circuses. We talk about Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People] and what it reveals about how Meta's own leadership treated their products' addictiveness, plus the older idea of "bread and circuses" — distraction and convenience as tools of social control. If you're unfamiliar with surveillance capitalism, we highly recommend this book by Shoshana Zuboff [https://www.bookshop.org].  Frugal hedonism (and failing at it). A book recommendation for The Art of Frugal Hedonism [https://frugalhedonism.com/] by Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb leads to an honest conversation about the gap between the lifestyle we'd like to want and the one we actually have. Pit & Peach. Beach trips, a near-drowning rescue, a psilocybin retreat in Georgia, and stepping away from a long-held academic role. Also mentioned in this episode: * Ayana Gray, I, Medusa  [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/762979/i-medusa-by-ayana-gray/](Kimberly's beach read) Leave us a comment or a suggestion! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/support] Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/

Confidently Wrong: AI, Uncertainty, and Open Source

This is a special episode of WTBAI in which Kimberly sits down with her former colleague Derek Hanson to unpack what language research reveals about today’s AI systems, and together they consider where builders risk going wrong. Kimberly brings a corpus linguistics lens to large language models, reframing them as pattern-recognition systems trained on messy, biased “corpora” of the web. Her early insight was that AI is as powerful for feedback as it is for generation, and that this is an important distinction for education, ethics, and product design. Drawing from her EdTech startup (Moxie), she explains how embedding linguistic frameworks (e.g., Swales’ move-step analysis [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CARS_model]) enabled structured feedback ... until frontier models caught up. The conversation then turns to open source and WordPress, where AI integration is accelerating across a massive ecosystem. Key themes: * Corpus vs. model: what LLMs are actually sampling * “Normalized overconfidence” and confidently wrong outputs * Why feedback > generation in many real-world use cases * Guardrails, prompt design, and early “agent-like” systems * Auditability gap: code transparency vs. output transparency * Bias sources: training data + human annotators * Missing voices: humanities, age diversity, non-developers * Friction as a feature: slowing down for rigor and care * A critical question for builders: how does your system handle uncertainty? The practical takeaway for builders is that before shipping AI features, ask whether your system surfaces or suppresses uncertainty, and whether a human could actually defend its outputs. Links: * Women Talk About AI: https://womentalkaboutai.com * Kimberly Pace Becker (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/kimberlypacebecker * “Stochastic Parrots” paper (Bender et al., 2021): https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922 Leave us a comment or a suggestion! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/support] Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/

Motherhood and Higher Ed Burnout in an AI Moment

In this episode, Kimberly Becker and Professor Laura Dumin pull back the curtain on motherhood, higher ed burnout, and AI's effects on teaching. They talk pretty candidly about midcareer life with Laura sharing the reality of juggling three internal grants, release time, her kids' summer camp rush, and student needs and Kimberly tracing her own path out of Moxie, the AI feedback startup she co-founded with Jessica, and into a job completely outside academia after half a year of applications with zero interviews. Together, they discuss rising intolerance for institutional nonsense and why higher ed initiatives often feel like yet another layer of unpaid labor. Key themes: * 4–4 teaching loads and the myth of “just add research” * Being the primary earner: health insurance, risk, and career choices * Closing an edtech startup and facing a brutal job market * Midlife in academia: burnout, boundaries, and “less tolerance for everything” * Why many of us are choosing “good enough” over constant hustle Suggested links to include: * LinkedIn profiles for Kimberly [http://www.linkedin.com/kimberlypacebecker] and Laura [https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-dumin157/] * Prior WTBAI episode about Moxie  [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/episodes/17723850] Leave us a comment or a suggestion! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/support] Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/

The Pope Joins the Chat that Women Were Already Having

When Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html], his landmark encyclical on AI and human dignity, it lit up LinkedIn, Substacks, and newsfeeds worldwide. Kimberly read it the morning it dropped. Jessica, whose complicated relationship with religious institutions runs deep, read it anyway. And both of us had the same reaction as Abi Awomosu's [https://abiawomosu.substack.com/]: women have been saying this, uncited.  In this episode, we explore the encyclical's arguments, like: * technology is never neutral * unchecked growth impoverishes rather than enriches * treating limitations as defects is a category error, and  * concentrated technocratic power may be beyond the reach of regulation.  And we also name what's missing: the women, the scholars of color, and the critics who were making these exact arguments years before the Vatican caught up. We draw threads from the Pope's letter through late-stage capitalism, the bread-and-circus dynamics of the attention economy, and what Jolene Blais called AI's role as a "catabolic agent. [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/episodes/18406320]" We talk about certainty language, the death of expertise, and why scientists are trained to live with uncertainty (and why that training is increasingly under attack). We end up, somehow, at microplastics, frugal hedonism, egg freezing, and communes. It's that kind of episode. In this episode: * What encyclicals are and why this one matters — even if you're not Catholic * The specific passages we highlighted and why they resonated * Abi Awomosu's [https://abiawomosu.substack.com] critique: women have been saying this, uncited — and her piece "Vatican Washing: Why All the Tech Broligarchs' Roads Now Lead to Rome" [https://abiawomosu.substack.com] * The "Who Said It First" problem and why it's more complicated than it looks * Posthumanism and transhumanism, and the Pope's sharp warning about treating some lives as less worthy * Data centers, extractive infrastructure, and colonial parallels * Why scientists hedge (and why that's a feature, not a bug) * Late-stage capitalism, the disintegration of community, and why collective action is harder when the technology driving us apart is the same technology we'd need to organize against * Frugal hedonism as a form of resistance * Pit & Peach: Kimberly's mom heads back to Mississippi (with a plan), and Jessica takes her first step toward freezing her eggs References & Links The encyclical: * Magnifica Humanitas — Full text, Vatican.va [https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html] * Why is Anthropic helping launch the Pope's encyclical? — National Catholic Reporter [https://www.ncronline.org/news/why-ai-company-anthropic-helping-launch-pope-leo-xivs-encyclical] (co-founder Chris Olah spoke at the Vatican presentation — yes, really) Scholarship & criticism: * Abi Awomosu, "How Not to Use AI" — Substack [https://abiawomosu.substack.com] * Bender, Gebru et al., "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" (2021) [https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922] — the paper Timnit Gebru was fired from Google over; a preview of nearly every argument that followed * Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise (2017) [https://www.amazon.com/Death-Expertise-Campaign-Established-Knowledge/dp/0190469412] Books: * Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/653825/klara-and-the-sun-a-gma-book-club-pick-by-kazuo-ishiguro/] * He, She and It — Marge Piercy [https://margepiercy.com/he-she-and-it] — feminist cyborg novel from 1991 that remains eerily prescient on AI, corporate power, and community * The Art of Frugal Hedonism — Annie Raser-Rowland & Adam Grubb [https://frugalhedonism.com/] From our archives: * WTBAI: "The Trojan Horse of AI" with Jolene Blais & Jon Ippolito [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/episodes/18406320] * Our paper in Frontiers in Education: AI as Cultural Intermediary  [https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/education/articles/10.3389/feduc.2026.1827603/full?sfnsn=scwspwa] Leave us a comment or a suggestion! [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/fan_mail/new] Support the show [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2411501/support] Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/