This article originally appeared as a Guest Column in the Morgan County Correspondent.
Just over 25 years ago, I was part of a team that flew to Cisco’s headquarters in San Jose and bought more than $2 million worth of routers and firewalls to connect multiple data centers together by a new 10,000-mile fiber ring.
Fast forward to tonight — Tues, Feb 4th, 2025 — when I attended the Morgan County Economic Development Corp.’s presentation of the “Morgan County Data Center Project 1 Planned Unit Development” at Monrovia Christian Church. It was a packed house. The proposed data center will be just outside the town limits of Monrovia. When they say “Project 1” in the title, it usually means there’s a “Project 2.”
There was a lot of information that could not be shared that night. Given that the identity of the client was top secret, it was revealed that the proposed buildings conformed to the client’s standard data center specifications. Those specifications could not be shared either. They also could not identify if this was a normal data center or a Hyperscaler Data Center for Artificial Intelligence, which would use 6.7 times more electricity. How many back up generators does the Monrovia facility need? No one knows. The Google data center coming to Fort Wayne has 36 diesel backup generators, each with a 6,000-gallon diesel storage tank. This means large quantities of pollution, including particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, benzene and formaldehyde. This pollution alone increases the risk of respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurological disorders.
The method and amount of water needed to cool the Monrovia facility could not be identified either, let alone shared. A single data center uses 1 to 5 million gallons per day. The Amazon data center and the General Motors Battery Plant developments in New Carlisle have been granted permission for the combined use of up to 24 million gallons per day from the Kankakee aquifer.
Does Citizen’s Water or Morgan County Rural Water have this kind of capacity? It was also stated that the project would be fully compliant with applicable state regulations.
It’s at this juncture that I should point out Senate Bill 28, currently worming its way through the Indiana legislature. The original version forced local family farmers to compensate data centers for lost profits if the data center runs out of water. This is the original summary of SB28 (see Section 3 of the latest version):
Provides that the owner or operator of a significant ground water withdrawal facility that withdraws water to irrigate crops or provide drinking water for livestock ***shall compensate*** (asterisks added) an impacted owner of a nonsignificant ground water withdrawal facility or significant ground water withdrawal facility that is not a utility in instances where an impacted nonsignificant ground water withdrawal facility or significant ground water withdrawal facility fails to furnish the normal supply of water or potable water.
In legislature speak, a “significant ground water withdrawal facility” that is not a utility is a data center. SB28 is currently a moving target, and this wording could easily be reinstated before it gets passed.
People kept asking what the benefit was to the town of Monrovia. The 50-year tax breaks for the data center’s owner from the state of Indiana weren’t mentioned. Neither was the enormous financial incentive that the zero employees of the data center would bring to the town. Also, in the event of a fire, there was no supplemental fire department on the premises, only an automated sprinkler system.
The entire meeting was summed up by one resident who said, “We don’t want you to line your pockets. We want our land and our sunsets.”
This article originally appeared as a Guest Column in the Morgan County Correspondent.