The Morrison County Record posts an editorial from Keith Anderson, director of news for Adams MultiMedia of East Central Minnesota…

Data centers, which have been around for years, are just now forcing their way into our lives thanks to massive proposals being flung at city councils and county boards across the nation, including Minnesota.

Data centers of old were certainly impressive, but the computational power to feed AI programs today requires even more energy now that an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion people worldwide have integrated AI into their daily lives.

Think back to the days when you entered a question into Google, and it popped out a series of potential resources you could peruse.

Now, our prompts into ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude are more comprehensive, such as, “Take this Excel spreadsheet of my 2025 budget and create a proposed budget for 2026 that also accounts for a 2% loss in retail sales through the first half of 2026; and offer five suggested correction plans that will help me recapture those lost sales in the second half of 2026; and show me specifically how to grow revenue by 3% for the remainder of the year by using AI?”

These are complicated queries by people like you and me who are seeking solutions to real-world problems. And the uses of AI by government agencies, such as the Pentagon, which has created thousands of digital AI agents to assist staff with tedious administrative duties, and to simulate situations the U.S. and allies might encounter on the battlefield, require extensive computing power 24 hours a day. According to the latest estimates, private sector consumption of AI power stands at roughly 80%, while government use could be as high as 20%. This thirst has ushered in a sea of data center proposals across the land, some as large as 2, 3, or 4 million square feet.

Can’t quite picture what that looks like? The Mall of America is roughly 5.6 million square feet across four levels.

The sheer size of some data center proposals is enough to give any of us pause. Toss in the unknowns about energy use, water consumption to cool processors, aesthetic impact, proximity to residential areas, loss of industrial space for other possible future tenants, and lack of transparency about the proposals in some cases, and you have the outline for opposition.