General Electric has lots of generators to sell.

Plenty of natural gas ones also. Same problem..

They work pretty well; in Europe, data centers are required, if not provided all their own electricity, to generate at least some of it. Solar and wind are top of the list.

Too bad our politicians don’t act in the interest of the public, though, and epecially those in Cantaloupe Caligula the Corpulent’s (mal)administration. The open hostility to green energy is depressing.

Those smarmy-looking carpetbaggers who came in to roll the rubes undoubtedly made it clear to the pols that they would be fine whether they ever won another election or not.

A few years ago I looked at some property in another state. The RE listing agent told me that the big landowner in the area (a logging company which periodically sold off clearcut former forest for development) was known to show up in the state capitol with hundreds of thousands in cash whenever he wanted favorable legislation passed to circumvent the "environmentally friendly" state's anti-development laws.

Also, I used to live in another state where the local board of supervisors pushed through one subdivision and other irresponsible development (the aquifer that supplied water to this desert area was being rapidly depleted) after another. The brother of one of the bos members was the largest commercial real estate developer in the area. Another bos member was the local roofer who put roofs on all of the new tract houses. Couldn't have been any dirtier but no one did anything.

My point is that the U.S. sure appears to be riddled with corruption at the local government levels that no one addresses and which means that local residents have almost zero power. These folks in the linked article have the right idea--I hope it works out for them.

They'll get massive tax breaks as well as some possible municipal/state loans. They'll take write-offs and depreciations, and eventually walk away leaving that area with unusable huge white elephants.

Noises like "We'll bring 100's of jobs to Festus" aren't going to help the locals. The jobs will be temp hires who'll construct the buildings, install the equipment, and then go to the next market. No humans except 1-2 periphery watchmen will be needed.

in the foreseeable future these big data centers will become obsolete as the size of the facility needed shrinks substantially.

So, these towns will be left with big ugly white elephant buildings. Perhaps they can be turned into concentration camps if the fascists don't get dislodged from power.

I'm so tired of greedy people spoiling the air, land, sea, and life for the rest of us.

I've said before and I'll say it again... AI and data centers are two of the main issues to campaign on the year. I know there are SO many because trump has screwed up our lives so badly... but people are really hip to how bad AI can screw up their lives personally, and had bad data centers can screw up their immediate environment and cost their personal checkbooks.