00:00Across America, the fight over artificial intelligence has moved off the internet and
00:05into city halls, courtrooms, and kitchen taps. Tonight, 14,000 people in one California city
00:14are trying to stop a data center from rising on their old golf course. And they are just the
00:20beginning. From a Marathon Florida hearing to a $500 billion megacampus on Cold War nuclear land.
00:28Here is where the backlash and the build-out collide.
00:32In Pittsburgh, California, a former golf course has become ground zero for one of the largest
00:39community revolts against artificial intelligence yet. More than 14,000 residents have now signed
00:47a petition demanding the city halt a 300,000-square-foot data center planned by developer
00:54AVAIO Digital for the Old Delta View golf course site. At a recent council meeting, more than 300
01:02people packed the chambers. With over a hundred public comments from teachers, parents, and school
01:09district leaders, they warned about noise, water use, and above all soaring power demand. City leaders
01:17insist the project will bring jobs and tax revenue. But the pressure has forced their hand. The mayor
01:24has now set aside an entire council meeting devoted to nothing but data centers. That opposition is now
01:31spilling into courtrooms across the country. Nowhere was that clearer than in Palm Beach County, Florida,
01:39where commissioners voted 5-1 to reject Project Tango after a hearing that stretched beyond
01:4612 grueling hours. The proposal called for a 3.6 million-square-foot hyperscale AI campus in the
01:54counties. Rural western reaches near Loxahatchee and Arden. Crowds were so large that officials opened
02:01overflow rooms. And deputies had to escort several residents out of the government center as tempers
02:08flared. Commissioner Maria Marino cast the lone vote in favor. Yet opponents are warning the fight
02:15is far from over. Before Tango even reached the board, the county had already approved a neighboring
02:22commerce center zoned for data center space. Meaning servers could still rise on the site. New regulations
02:30now head to a public hearing later this month. But the sheer scale of these projects explains why they
02:36keep coming. Consider what is taking shape in Pike County, Ohio. On some of the most unlikely land in
02:45America, OpenAI and NVIDIA are in advanced talks to build a data center campus costing more than $500
02:53billion on the site of the former Portsmouth uranium enrichment plant. A Cold War facility that once
03:01produced weapons-produced weapons-grade material before shutting down in 2000. One, the campus would
03:07draw a staggering 10 gigawatts of power. Enough for millions of homes. NVIDIA is reportedly weighing a
03:15$250 billion financial backstop. Using the strength of its credit to help OpenAI raise construction debt.
03:23Under the plan, OpenAI would sign a 20-year lease with SoftBank's SB Energy.
03:29With the first 800-megawatt phase targeted for 2028, projects this size need power on a scale the grid
03:38simply cannot deliver. And that is why companies are increasingly bypassing the grid altogether.
03:46In the West Texas town of Pecos, Chevron and Microsoft have signed a 20-year agreement for a project known
03:54as
03:54Kilby, one of the largest gas-powered data center efforts in the country. Chevron will supply up to
04:022.67 gigawatts of electricity behind the meter, generated by massive gas turbines from partner
04:09GE Vernova and fueled by natural gas produced locally in the Permian Basin. The roughly $7 billion
04:17complex would sprawl across more than 2,000 acres about 20 miles south of Pecos. And critically,
04:26it will not connect to the public grid at all. It is a bring-your-own-power model designed to
04:32sidestep the delays in neighborhood fights slowing. Other projects, power is only half the story.
04:39Though, water tells the other half. In Morgan County, Georgia, residents say a metadata center
04:48has turned their drinking water undrinkable. The dispute reached Washington when Representative
04:54Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held up jars of brown, murky well water during a congressional hearing,
05:01demanding answers about what construction near the facility had done to local groundwater.
05:06The Environmental Protection Agency was directed to contact Georgia regulators and county officials
05:13to investigate. Nearby in Mansfield, the mayor says water rates are set to climb 33% over the next
05:22two years. A cost local leaders tie directly to the strain data center's place on their systems
05:28One Georgia facility was even reported to have drained roughly 30 million gallons of water without
05:35paying. For it, stories like these are exactly why state and local lawmakers are now moving to act.
05:44In Indianapolis, that action is accelerating. A city-county council committee has advanced a sweeping
05:51moratorium that would pause new data center development through at least the end of 2027.
05:58The committee approved it 10-3 along strict party lines. Every Democrat in favor and every Republican
06:06opposed. And the measure now heads to a full council vote on August 10th. Council President Maggie Lewis
06:13threw her support behind the pause after months of public pressure. And Mayor Joe Hogsett backs it as well.
06:20Residents and environmental groups have cited the familiar trio of concerns. Enormous electricity and
06:28water consumption, air and noise pollution, and the fear that ordinary ratepayers will end up subsidizing
06:35the industry's costs. Yet even as regulators hit pause, construction crews elsewhere are breaking ground at a
06:43record pace. Nowhere is that momentum more visible than in the Midwest. Microsoft has just broken ground
06:51on a new data center project in La Porte, Indiana, and simultaneously cut the ribbon on a $3.3 billion
06:59facility in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, the very first data center at its sprawling Mount Pleasant campus.
07:08These are not isolated moves. According to ConstructConnect, North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois,
07:16and Michigan have each recorded more than $10 billion in new data center construction.
07:22Starts so far this year, analysts are tracking 85 projects in late-stage pre-construction,
07:29representing a combined $78 billion in planned value, with start dates before the end of the year.
07:36For every project a community manages to block, several more are quietly moving dirt,
07:43and the money behind that construction is almost impossible to comprehend.
07:48The latest figures make the scale unmistakable. Data center construction starts hit $22.3 billion in a single month,
07:58the second highest total ever recorded. According to ConstructConnect's August report,
08:04that comes on top of a year already defined by eye-watering commitments.
08:09The largest cloud and AI companies are collectively expected to pour more than $600 billion
08:15dollars into data centers and supporting infrastructure this year alone.
08:21Amazon leads with a $200 billion capital plan, followed by Microsoft and Meta,
08:27each guiding toward well over $100 billion.
08:30Private equity money is flooding in at a five-year high,
08:34chasing the returns promised by the artificial intelligence boom.
08:38The question echoing from Pittsburgh to Pike County is no longer whether this build-out can be stopped.
08:45But who ultimately pays for it?
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