My family first got online with Prodigy dial-up when I was 8. We connected to it via a local phone number, and so I thought that meant the offices of our local phone operator down the street was where “internet” lived. As I got older I began to understand it was far more complex than that.
One of my next-door neighbors growing up was a tall man named Craig. He spoke in a loud, but friendly, North Carolina accent that likely wouldn’t make you think he was the kind of guy who gets really into computers. With his characteristic strawberry-blond horseshoe mustache, he looked, talked and even dressed like a long-lost cousin of Dale Earnhardt.
But in the same way my dad just knew how to work on any car, Craig knew computers. Every so often he’d help my family out, upgrading our first desktop from a 2GB hard drive to 8GB and later helping us make the jump from Windows 95 to Windows 98.
I’ve been thinking about Craig recently because he was the first person I ever knew who worked in a data center. When I think about data centers, I still picture them exactly the way he described them: large, cold rooms filled with rows of whirring computers packed into racks and watched over day and night by people like him.
I can’t remember where Craig worked, and I may not have known at the time. For all I know, what he oversaw was a private network for a single company and not even part of the public internet. But the image sticks with me because it was likely the first time I understood, even vaguely, that rooms full of computers somewhere were doing something important enough that somebody had to watch over them day and night.
Where Internet Lives
As a kid, I understood that going online meant my computer was talking to other computers, but I mostly imagined they belonged to other people like me. And, to be fair, my first experiences with the internet in the 1990s came at a time when it was still personal and individual enough that sometimes that was true.
That changed pretty quickly with the dot-com boom and Web 2.0. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I’d set up my first blog on Xanga.com. Another followed pretty quickly on Blogger, and then WordPress. By then I understood that these websites weren’t running on somebody’s personal computer somewhere, but I definitely had no idea where they were actually hosted.
Three decades after I first got online, I now make web-based software for a living and I still don’t have a better answer to that question. I could look, but I don’t have to. My work requires me to trust, but rarely verify, that a data center exists somewhere, anywhere, ready to run whatever I put there.
In my head, I’ve never assigned “cyberspace” a physical address. I still tend to picture it the way the “information superhighway” was depicted on the PBS show Ghostwriter, which apparently made a lasting impression on my childhood understanding of how the internet worked.
It’s so heavily abstracted now that I never really have to think about it. And for a long time, that’s worked pretty well for me. I mean, I’ll probably never see the buildings, hear the machines or meet the people keeping them running. If my site loads quickly, stays online and doesn’t cost too much, should I even care where those machines actually live?
Aside from this blog and some GitHub Pages sites, the majority of my projects are hosted by Cloudflare. Until I looked just now, I had no idea Cloudflare even had a data center in Oklahoma City. I didn’t know because the serverless workers I use don’t require me to choose a region. So I don’t. Cloudflare figures out where my software should run, and I get to pretend the physical infrastructure behind it is somebody else’s problem.
It’s a pretty convenient arrangement when you’re the person using the cloud. It’s a lot more complicated when your backyard is where somebody else wants to put it.
Which is why the sudden data center boom in my hometown has been something of a head-scratcher. Tulsa isn’t exactly a place I’d ever thought of as an obvious destination for a bunch of enormous data centers. Oklahoma may be close to the geographic center of the country, but it’s definitely not the center of the country’s population mass. I had always assumed you built data centers to solve for latency and geography. That’s not why they’re building these at all.
Boomtown
Last week, Google announced it was behind a new 506-acre hyper-scale data center being built in the greater Tulsa area. This marks Google’s second data center in Oklahoma, and they have plans for two more. Earlier this year, Meta also broke ground on a data center in east Tulsa, their first in the state.
It’d be easy to just say my hometown needs data centers like I need a hole in the head. But I can accept that the internet, and the ever-growing amount of computing and storage required to power it, ultimately does have to live somewhere. I mean, the internet is a core part of our infrastructure now, so why should a data center be any less necessary than a power plant, refinery or sewer system?
Modern life has always depended on grotesque behemoths most of us would rather not live next to. Data centers just spent a lot of their existence hiding in plain sight. Calling them “the cloud” only reinforced that illusion, making the whole thing sound simple, abstract and almost weightless when in reality data centers are every bit as physical and resource-hungry as the industrial infrastructure we’re already familiar with, if uncomfortable with.
But looking at a map of Google’s existing and planned data centers, Tulsa doesn’t appear to fill some obvious hole in the network. That’s because adding capacity to the region isn’t really the point. This facility isn’t here to connect Oklahomans or bring the internet closer to its users. It’s coming because Oklahoma has dirt cheap land, equally cheap electricity and even cheaper politicians.
A century after oilmen rushed to Tulsa in pursuit of untapped natural resources, tech companies are rushing to exploit a whole new set of them.
Construction on Google’s project was unanimously approved by the Tulsa County Board of County Commissioners about a year ago. Typically, local governments approve projects and offer incentives to companies because, despite the tradeoffs, they expect a project to deliver one or more of the following:
- provide something the community needs
- create a meaningful number of new, long-term jobs
- generate new tax revenue
- attract complementary industries (creating even more jobs and tax revenue)
Because of what I do, and how much I personally benefit from cheap and effective data centers, I started writing this expecting to feel pretty neutral about this. I thought that data centers were just infrastructure and we didn’t have to like it, but we should suck it up and deal with it. But once I started examining those points carefully, it became harder to argue there were ever enough ends to justify the means, and the more I looked, the more frustrated I became.
I’ll start with the easiest one: Tulsa does not need this particular data center. The internet needs data centers somewhere, but this facility isn’t being built because Oklahomans are underserved or because Google needs to bring its network closer to us. The project solves a problem for Google, not Tulsa.
Next are the jobs. Project Clydesdale will definitely employ a lot of people while it’s being built, but construction jobs are temporary by definition. I couldn’t find any requirements that the project’s workers even be hired locally, so it’s hard to know how much of that activity represents genuinely new employment for the Tulsa area or if most of it will go to existing crews just slipping from one big project to another.
Once it’s built, the site’s headcount will get a lot smaller. Phase 1 is expected to permanently employ somewhere north of 50 people, with the developer claiming 100 permanent jobs overall. I’m still pretty unclear about exactly what stage of the buildout that figure applies, but even taking that higher number, that’s quite a small workforce for 506 acres of space. I used to work at a company with 350 employees on a 15-acre campus with separate office and manufacturing buildings. That’s less than 0.05 acres per employee, still more land per person than the footprint of my house. If Clydesdale ultimately employs 100 people across the full site, it would use more than 100 times as much land per permanent job.
And when it’s all said and done, most of those permanent jobs won’t necessarily be in tech. They’ll mostly be the various skilled trades and maintenance staff needed to keep a data center running: HVAC technicians, electricians, logistics and security. These are all unquestionably real jobs, but go scroll LinkedIn and you’ll see the Tulsa area already has a healthy number of well paying openings for these today. Adding more well-paying trades jobs to the pool is good because it further incentivizes it as a career path, but this is quite an expensive route to adding some.
But if you think the permanent jobs figure is underwhelming, the tax arrangement is even worse. Project Clydesdale received a 100% exemption from property taxes for the next 25 years. In exchange, for each phase the project will make a $1.5 million annual “payment in lieu of taxes,” or PILOT, increasing 1% each year. Phase 1 also includes annual payments of $500,000 to the county for community improvements.
That sounds like a lot until you actually compare it to what they would have actually paid. Based on the projected $1 billion value after phase one, the site might have generated roughly $11 million each year in ad valorem property taxes (before depreciation). That’s less than a penny of every dollar invested. A literal rounding error to someone as big as Google.
When I first started looking into this, I figured the schools were the ones really being stiffed, but that’s not actually the case. Normally, when hundreds of millions in property value are to a school district’s tax base, that would make the district appear a lot wealthier on paper. So, to compensate, Oklahoma’s school-funding formula would adjust how much funding they receive from the state downward. Because of the tax abatement, that isn’t happening. So the money being put into the PILOT will actually end up leaving more money in the schools pockets than if the data center DID pay its taxes.
I suppose it’s better that Google moving in doesn’t leave the school with less state funding, but it’s pretty insane that doing so could have done that int he first place. It doesn’t make me think I have clever county councilors, it makes me think Oklahoma has an extremely broken system.
Also, the largest beneficiary of the PILOT would be Owasso Public Schools, one of the largest and best-resourced districts in the state, with an annual budget over $100 million. Its share would amount to roughly another one percent of its budget each year. That’s not nothing, and no superintendent is going to turn it down, but it’s hardly transformative money for a district of its size.
But while they’re projected to come out ahead under the PILOT, other local services lose out. On the first $1 billion phase alone, ordinary taxation could have meant roughly $500,000 more for libraries, $600,000 more for community colleges and more than $1 million for technical education each year.
We are running out of potential wins, and the last best hope is that new data centers might attract complementary industry. There is little evidence of that around Google’s Mayes County facility. When Google moved into the industrial park nearly two decades ago, the site already hosted more than 75 companies and thousands of workers. More businesses have moved in since, but none that directly benefit from proximity to Google. In short, their data center did not create an economic hotspot. It moved into one.
The thing data centers are good at attracting is… more data centers. For now, Google is still the only hyper-scaler in Pryor, but whenever someone goes to the trouble of building out substations, adding high-voltage transmission lines and wiring up high-capacity fiber, that just makes the surrounding acreage a plug-and-play opportunity for the next operator to jump on.
So that’s it. There are still a few softer benefits around the edges, like promises of future phases and programs to train skilled tradespeople. The developer is also paying for infrastructure upgrades its own project requires. But after going through the usual case for economic development one point at a time, none of it feels substantial enough to justify the bargain county commissioners ultimately struck.
One final argument I haven’t really explored, and probably the strongest case I can steelman is that if we don’t accept projects like this now, something worse might come along and we’ll have less choice. Similar industrial land could end up hosting a fluoride-polluting aluminum smelter or a nuclear waste facility that also includes data centers. Not exactly appealing alternatives, but those projects are at least promising hundreds, if not thousands, of permanent jobs.
“Least bad” isn’t really an exciting sell when you’re talking about economic development either. I’m not arguing we should roll out the red carper for a fluoride-emitting smelter or a nuclear wasteland simply because they have jobs numbers that look better in a press release. I’m actually arguing that sometimes “none of the above” could sometimes be the better option my government officials seem to be overlooking.
I refuse to accept that my corner of the country is in such dire straits that we have to choose between toxic heavy industry and server farms exempted from ordinary property taxes for 25 years. I consider myself a pragmatist and value compromise, but this isn’t pragmatic compromise. It’s subsidized extraction.
Talking Points
Tomorrow is Election Day for the Tulsa City Council—the leaders of my city, not the county officials who approved Google’s data center. None of the mailers piling up at my house from the candidates have said anything about their views on data centers. I’d considered reaching out to ask, but after considering it for a second I realized a “good” answer would be a mealy-mouthed diatribe about how their role is to seriously consider the merits of the applications put in front of them.
Normally, that’s exactly what I want a politician to say. I don’t think someone who promises to reject something without a second of consideration is worthy of my trust. The problem is the system itself is heavily biased towards saying yes.
Rubber-stamp ready local governments isn’t really a new problem. For decades now, state and local governments have all been competing in a kind of economic development sweepstakes, all trying to out-do one another with tax breaks, land and infrastructure buildouts just to get anything they can plausibly sell to constituents as a political win.
Through that lens, data centers almost fit the bill too well. The don’t have any polluting smokestacks, don’t have any dangerous chemicals to spill, and their headcount is so low it doesn’t affect local traffic.
But when that data center would snatch up hundreds of acres of viable ranch land, add a ton of pressure to an aging power grid, and barely contribute back to the tax base it forced this on, well residents might just end up seeing it as badly as the Superfund site local leaders thought would be avoiding.
The problem isn’t that communities are being forced to weigh the tradeoffs, that just what governing is. The issue is that competing for economic development has turned it all into a race to the bottom. Tulsa County shouldn’t have to give away the store to show it’s open for business, and companies shouldn’t need 25-years of tax breaks to build the infrastructure they knew they needed.
But demanding that leaders “just say no” isn’t necessarily viable policy either. In some places, projects are able to move forward because the rules can’t stop them. If a developer wants to build on land that’s properly zoned, and the project is fully compliant with all applicable laws, a local government may have almost no legal basis to reject it outright. In any case, the bigger issues have far more to do with a lack of regulation on how these kinds of projects operate. But writing new regulations is a slow, time-consuming and often perilous task, because the less regulations you have the more likely your locality is to win the next economic development opportunity. It can make it feel like you legitimately can’t win.
A big part of why I typically avoid writing about this stuff online is that there’s a lot of nuance that can disappear pretty quickly. I think of this all as an important civic discussion. I have my own politics and thoughts about AI, but I don’t think we have to share either of them to look at a deal like this and wonder if the community was getting enough in return.
But if you still disagree with me, and think we should demand our local representatives stop every single AI or data center project, I promise that’s not a workable position. Pitchforks and torches are an effective way to rally people, but terrible one to change policy. I both hear and respect the people who say they feel something genuinely unjust is being done to their communities, both physically and culturally by AI and I too want to see the accomplishments of humans celebrated more than machines. But some other rhetoric I see online goes far beyond skepticism about AI or data centers. I’ve even seen people argue, essentially, that it would be better to slow things like cancer research than allow AI to become more entrenched. If your position on AI has siding with cancer, you may want to reconsider if that absolute stance is truly how you feel.
Somewhere along the line, this whole thing stops being a disagreement over what specific trade-offs a community can accept and becomes a total break down about whether any trade-offs can be accepted at all. Except that’s a dead-end because when the only acceptable answers to problems are absolutes there can’t be common ground.
It makes me wonder whether we’re actually ready to have serious conversations about what we want the future of this country to look like, because the ongoing disagreements we see hashed out online about AI are just proxy fights for the larger, societal problems that are harder to assign blame for and address.
For instance, we’ve spent decades failing to have a serious national conversation about man-made climate change, severe drought and historically low waterways, but the second someone posts an AI slop party flyer everybody cares about about water usage and cooling systems.
And though wages have been stagnant, labor protections have eroded and the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009, if you believe social media you might think AI job displacement was the biggest threat to working conditions and what’s driving the affordability crisis.
I don’t say all of this to imply the negative effects of AI slop or data centers aren’t real, or that we shouldn’t take them seriously. I think we should. But if we want to have a serious conversation about them, it has to start with the world as it actually exists. Not one where AI alone is somehow responsible for drought, deregulation and underfunded infrastructure. I’m not saying AI is innocent or even needs to be exonerated, but let’s hold the right people accountable.
Honestly, it’s a lot. It’s exhausting, and it’s far more than I can even attempt to settle here. But it also makes me think about how the more “connected” we’ve made ourselves the less we really know about our own neighbors. I don’t actually know all my next door neighbors the way I did when I was a kid. Having good neighbors was something I mostly took for granted.
When the clouds do come home, they should at least be good neighbors.