In terms of the topic data centers, personally, I do not support them for any location in the Kentucky six congressional district. In fact, I do not support them for any location in the State of Kentucky. Why? Based on my conversations with leading tech experts from the biggest tech giants, the following facts are crucial to understand. First, they do not create any jobs and in fact can be completely remote which is most likely to happen. The only jobs are going to be security guards. Secondly, data centers use huge amounts of electricity and water, which means local utility bills are going through the roof even further. In space solar is used. Third, they have a massive negative impact on the surrounding animal population, either wild or domesticated and of course a major detrimental environmental impact. Fourth, the parties above are planning to put data centers in space because of the extremely low temperatures, but even in that environment three data centers will have to be attached and spun on an axis and liquid helium with cold space will be needed to cool the whole apparatus. They will operate one on then one off type of rotation due to heat production. As we can see there are no on-site humans. The whole thing is operated and managed remotely from earth. Fifth, the only way I would support a data center is if it were located in some extremely remote location on the Ohio River for example with the data center paying 25 times the residential electric rate, water rate and property tax rates. Even in this case, there must be a great effort to reforest another location and provide homes for the wild animals.

China is placing data centers under water near their coastlines primarily for cooling.

Finally, I will add that there’s a disturbing trend in the tech world. The data center is a crazy attempt to provide a product and service which is not needed. For example, modern computers can easily hold one terabyte of data which can be scaled easily and cheaply. So a home computer in its most robust form can hold 10 TB of data. How much data is one terabyte? It is enough to hold the entire Library of Congress as well as every book ever written in any language for the last six thousand years basically. The industry is taking home computer storage and charging for it. In my opinion, the whole data center industry needs to be shut down. Security wise it is much better to have data decentralized and spread out across the country over 350 million personal computers.

Plus properties within a five mile radius of a data center tend to loose 20% of their value.

The real data center driver is a crash in computer hardware sales, a crash in computer software sales all because almost everybody has a computer and cell phone and hence the hardware and software industry is facing massive sales and revenue declines. It is a mature industry now and they cannot keep building on Moore’s law. It has its limits. Therefore, the tech industry is focusing on data and trying to shift the entire tech world into a subscription environment, a.k.a. rent software, rent hardware and constantly pay an income stream to these insatiable mad men.

Let’s say no to data centers. Let’s put leaders in Congress that actually understand what’s going on in the economics so that we can protect our citizens and stop the economic cannibalization which the tech industry has forced onto America.