If you’re active on social media you will have noticed a sudden uptick in the number of random accounts all suddenly singing the praises of data centers. Like our fearless leader Adrastos who wrote about some of the problematic secrecy issues surrounding these projects, I also live in a state whose experience with data centers are not as neatly boxed up as the paid cheerleaders would suggest.

First, yes, data centers have been around for a long time. And yes, there is a data center near Mar-a-lago. This is what it looks like:

This is how big it is:

The company owns and operates two fully integrated tier 4 “Hyper-Scale” Data Centers in West Palm Beach, Florida.  The two diverse facilities have over 8300 square feet of state of the art redundant power, cooling, internet, battery back up, and emergency generators.

8300 square feet over 2 separate centers. The lie being pushed is that the data centers that people are upset about are just like that one.

The truth is that the data centers of 2026 are “hyperscale” centers designed to support AI computing. And in July the Palm Beach County Commissions voted against the construction of a new center 20 miles from Mar-a-lago. The details of this case can stand in for what is going on wherever the huge data centers are being proposed:

The decisive 5-1 vote, with Commissioner Maria Marino as the lone yes vote, effectively halts the proposed 3.6-million-square-foot hyperscale artificial intelligence data center campus slated for the western part of the county.

Commissioner Maria Sachs said no expert from the Project Tango team was able to compare and contrast the other 120 data centers that exist in Florida to the Project Tango proposal, which led to her decision.

The thing is:  the experts could actually make the contrasts and comparisons. They don’t want to because doing so would highlight how large their enormous data centers are:

PBA Holdings, the developer, requested a total of nearly 3.6 million square feet of development. This layout allocates 2.35 million square feet for warehouses, 1.03 million square feet for an AI data center, and 216,000 square feet for supporting utility structures.

And the data center being used by the propaganda mongers as their example is 8300 square feet. It’s just blatant lying, like when they say that the noise of the small centers is not an issue with the huge ones:

To address noise concerns, the developer said it would shift louder equipment away from neighbors, move cooling systems indoors, and proposed 216,000 square feet of utility structures as sound buffers.

Their own studies claim low-frequency hums from the data center would remain safely below the 60–65 dBC threshold for sleep disturbance.

An independent review by Dr. Santiago Lattanzio heavily influenced the opposition, warning the county against greenlighting the project and calling the developer’s noise claims wildly inaccurate.

While developers promised a facility “as quiet as a breeze,” Dr. Lattanzio noted their acoustic model only evaluated five fans and five chillers, underestimating the project’s true scale.

According to his review, cooling the facility would actually require roughly 180 modules (spanning 2.5 football fields), generating a continuous, low-frequency hum that local traffic could not mask.

Dr. Lattanzio criticized the developer for failing to provide transparent modeling, guaranteed equipment specs, or clear soundproofing plans.

Again, the developers could provide the facts about the noise studies. They simply won’t because they are being protected by Republican state governments. These are the realities of the hyperscale AI facilities. These are not the buildings that sit comfortably in office parks.

And when they’re not answering questions in public hearings, the people pushing data centers are making sure you can’t find out the truth. Think about the statement that data centers are no big deal because there’s one near Mar-a-lago and how finding out how much larger the hyperscale centers are destroys the lie. Adrastos’ piece from earlier this week detailed the use of NDAs to keep things secret. In WV the state GOP decided to bury the details in a much messier way:

HB 2014 deems confidential all petitions seeking certification of a high-impact data center, which could be any data storage or equipment facility with a critical power demand of at least 90 megawatts.

HB 2014 mandates that any information provided by a data center that it identifies as confidential business information is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act. The law requires the Department of Commerce secretary to make available to the governor and Legislature a list of all certified high-impact data centers “and all relevant information,” with specifically identifying information to be removed to ensure confidentiality.

So they’re lying to us now in a targeted social media campaign, they’re refusing to tell the truth about the impacts of these centers when they are at public meetings, and local and state politicians are doing what they can to hide the truth from us. If something is truly a good thing it doesn’t need a highly coordinated propaganda effort and a shocking lack of transparency.

The WV legislature has taken things even further by removing the targeted locations from exercising any sort of local control. It did this without a mandate or indeed any request from voters. But this news from Tuesday evening shows that voters still have agency:

Voters in Independence have successfully recalled a councilman after his vote to approve a multibillion-dollar data center.

District 1 Councilman John Perkins was recalled during a special election on Tuesday, with unofficial final results showing over 68 percent of voters in the district supported the recall.

Perkins’ term will end once election results are certified.

He had been elected to serve through June 2028.

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Not everyone in the community agreed with Perkins’ stance.

McKenna Cobb, who filed the recall petition, criticized the council’s decision to approve significant tax incentives for the project.

“There’s hours of public testimony and they still vote in favor of billions of dollars in tax incentives,” Cobb said.

That’s the crux of it, right? Elected officials ask for public input, and the public turns out with researched answers and statements, and then the elected officials just go and do what they want anyway. Vote them all out in November wherever you can.

I’ll leave you with this: