The Entrepreneurial Community Editorial: Data Centers Deserve Understanding As Well as Scrutiny

Johnnie Aycock, the host of the Noon Show on Catfish 100.1 and the longtime former president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama, is a contributing columnist for the Thread. The Entrepreneurial Community: An Editorial will look at the people, institutions and ideas that shape this corner of the state and be published every Monday.

Data centers are becoming one of the more controversial developments in communities across America. They consume enormous amounts of electricity. Some require significant water for cooling. They occupy large tracts of land while creating fewer permanent jobs than a traditional manufacturing plant.

Those concerns are legitimate. They deserve honest answers. But so does another question: Can we afford not to build the infrastructure that increasingly powers the modern economy?

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Data centers are not simply warehouses filled with computers. They are becoming part of the basic infrastructure of the 21st century—the places where information is stored, processed and transferred; where cloud computing operates; where artificial intelligence is developed and deployed; and where businesses, universities, hospitals, financial institutions and governments increasingly conduct and save their work.

There is also a larger issue. Computing capacity is becoming a matter of national competitiveness and national security. The United States is competing globally for leadership in artificial intelligence, advanced research, cybersecurity, and other technologies that will influence economic and geopolitical power for decades.

That does not mean every proposed data center is a good development.

Communities should ask hard questions: Who provides the electricity? Who pays for new infrastructure? How much water will be consumed? What environmental safeguards are required? What incentives are being offered? What permanent economic benefits will remain locally?

But we should ask another question with equal seriousness: What opportunities might we lose by simply saying no?

The right conversation is neither "data centers at any cost" nor "data centers are bad." It is about responsible growth.

Good economic development requires communities to understand emerging infrastructure, negotiate from a position of knowledge, and insist that private investment and public interest coexist.

Data centers deserve scrutiny. They also deserve understanding.

The Entrepreneurial Community: an Editorial appears regularly on the Tuscaloosa Thread. Aycock and his co-host Lisa Jones can be heard on the Noon Shoow on Catfish 100.1 every weekday from 12 to 1 p.m.