Support Ohio amendment to ban big data centers

“It’s a very loud industrial noise. Sounds like a helicopter hovering, loud fans like you’re at an airport.”

“It’s a constant electrical hum that I can almost feel behind my eyes.”

“We don’t see the dark of night anymore.”

“There comes a point when your mental health is very affected.”

“This was my perfect spot. But it isn’t anymore.”

“I feel a lot of helplessness, a lot of anger. I wanted to go break something.”

“We’re living in a nightmare.”

I sure don’t want any massive data centers built near my house. Do you? Here in Ohio, there’s a petition to put a proposed amendment on the ballot to ban the construction of data centers that consume over 25 megawatts of energy. If you live in the Buckeye State, look for a volunteer collecting signatures or download, print, and sign the petition yourself.

In Waterford, a small community in southeast Ohio, residents have formed a group to fight a proposed data center. When the county commissioners were first approached about building a data center, they almost immediately signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company. As a result, residents have been kept in the dark about what’s happening. They don’t know how much water or electricity the data center would need. They haven’t even been told the name of the company that would own it.

In Jerome Township, near Columbus, trustees put a moratorium on building new data centers. “My primary focus is protecting Jerome Township’s infrastructure and prioritizing higher-value development. While seemingly appealing, data centers offer minimal jobs and a low return on investment,” said township trustee Wezlynn Davis. Unfortunately, the moratorium didn’t stop new data centers from being approved.

In 2024 and 2025, companies like Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon extracted over $2 billion from Ohioans in tax breaks alone.

In a recent talk in Chesterhill, Ohio, Dr. Kenton Butcher compared massive data centers to another extractive industry that’s left its mark here in our corner of Ohio: coal mining. Why were industrialists from the big cities able to come in and strip-mine our hills and pollute our water? Because they saw the people here as trash.

Why would you think you have the right to destroy the places that we call home? I ask this not just of Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle, but also of you — if you are a person who uses the generative AI that these massive data centers are being built for.

If this ballot measure passes, hopefully it will make Ohio a little better — but ultimately those enormous data centers are going to keep getting built somewhere as long as there’s demand for LLMs and image/video/audio generators. If not in Ohio, then in another state. If not in the US, then in another country.

Wherever it is, people will have to live with air pollution, noise pollution, water shortages, and rising electric bills. And we are all paying the price — though the Global South are paying most dearly — as hyperscale data centers drive rising ocean levels and extreme weather.

Those of us who manage websites have seen how wasteful LLMs are. One of my company’s clients had a site hosted on Amazon Web Services that was getting traffic spikes that amounted to distributed denial of service attacks on a daily basis. Where were those DDoS attacks coming from? Crawlers scraping data to train LLMs. And where were those crawlers hosted? Amazon Web Services. Amazon was making money (1) from our client’s normal hosting fees, (2) from the AI crawlers’ hosting fees, (3) from additional usage fees heaped on our client for the DDoS, and (4) from selling our client firewall rules to block the crawlers.

A relative who’d spotted data centers in her rural area asked me, “What do you suppose they do in those data plants?” Well, there’s your answer.

Have you ever gotten wrong answers from a chatbot? Been tricked by AI-generated images on social media? Had to clean up someone else’s AI slop at work? Every time that happened, big tech companies made a little more profit.

“AI” is a magic word that companies can say to investors. “We’re laying off hundreds of employees, but don’t worry — AI.” Ultimately, who wins from all this hype about AI? The wealthy people at the top. And who loses? The rest of us. Most of all, people who are forced out of their homes because of noisy, stinky, greedy data centers.

So let’s do what we can to keep big data centers out of our communities. But let’s not forget that it’s a bandaid. The next time you reach for an LLM — is it really so great that it’s worth destroying someone’s home?