AI companies are rushing to build data centers to support their feverish growth, and many are clamoring to attract them. Some cities are saying whoa, not so fast.
This is the case in both St. Louis and St. Charles, Missouri, two cities located just 30 minutes apart in the center of the state.
On August 22, St. Charles, in a unanimous city council vote, imposed a one-year moratorium on new data center construction after news broke of a secret data center project that was allegedly coming to the city, sparking protests from local residents.
In St. Louis, the head of that city’s planning agency proposed a similar moratorium this week “while the city develops a full understanding of the issue and develops quality land use, environmental and other regulations,” according to St. Louis Public Radio in the area. It’s a pause the mayor supports.
There’s good reason for these cities to be worried. Data centers packed with thousands of computers to handle basically everything you do online have a voracious need for electricity and water, and not a small amount of land or building space. The advent of generative AI has dramatically increased the demand for such capabilities for companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.
Between 2021 and 2024, the number of data centers in the region will nearly double, as AI advances rapidly. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan has offered full support for building data centers and committing resources to support them.
Two of the biggest concerns about data centers are the large amount of water needed to cool the servers and the strain they place on the electrical grid.
I heard objections to AI data centers from residents of Pennsylvania and Louisiana this summer as I researched the environmental and energy impacts of these options. A retired school principal who had organized community resistance told me, “I worry about the kind of world I’m going to leave to my grandchildren. It’s not safer, it’s not better, and we’re selling to these big corporations. You know, it’s not in their backyard, it’s in my backyard.”
Data Center Pressure in St. Charles
When St. Charles residents learned of the data center plans for their city, hundreds showed up at a town hall meeting to make their opposition heard. The center, known as the Project Hub, would sit on about 440 acres in the area.
“The impact on everything that this facility would have, long-term, short-term, you name it, our house would feel it, whether it’s the subsidized costs of building additional infrastructure, bringing in water, electricity,” St. Charles resident Andrew Gardner told the St. Louis Journal at the time.
The opposition and action of the population worked.
In an August email to St. Louis Public Radio, the developers of the Cumulus project told the city of St. Charles that they were withdrawing their application for a conditional use permit. They said they would incorporate public feedback and prepare a revised proposal.
Days later, the city imposed its own one-year moratorium on the construction of a new data center.
According to St. Louis Public Radio , the company behind Project Cumulus appears to be Google, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet. On the other side of the coin, Google is building a $1 billion data center in the Kansas City, Missouri, area .
Google did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment.
A pause on data centers, not a ban
In St. Louis, Mayor Cara Spencer is supporting a freeze on new building permits for data centers while the city develops new regulations, rather than banning data center construction altogether.
“While I have concerns about the impact of data centers on the environment, utility prices, dynamism, and urban life,” Spencer told CNET in a statement, “I also recognize their importance to key industries in St. Louis, including biotech, geospatial, agtech, and healthcare, and my office is committed to ensuring they are appropriate.”
Currently, Missouri has nearly 50 active data centers with the majority located in Kansas City and St. Louis.
