Big Data Is a Bad Idea: Why AI Factory Farms Will Not Save Rural America |
One word—plastics. That was the golden grail that Dustin Hoffman learned about from some well-wisher in the movie The Graduate. I remember watching the film as a farm kid and thinking about the updated version I was being told by my guidance counselors—one word: computers. We are now in the midst of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” and the latest mantra is: artificial intelligence. Such free advice, though, could really be a costly warning in disguise.
Granted, there is a lot of poverty in the “richest” nation on Earth, and marginalized US communities often have few choices for economic (mal) development. It becomes a twisted game of pick your own poison: supermax prison, toxic waste dump, ethanol facility, tar sands pipeline… Now, AI data centers have been added to the limited menu. Someone recently shared a map of looming AI data centers across the world. It reminded me of how a tumor spreads and Edward Abbey’s quote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
The fact that Big Data has targeted Rural America for its latest mastitis should be no surprise. We have lots of available land to grab, thanks to the legacy of settler colonialism and family-farm foreclosure. Back in August I remember driving past Beaver Dam, Wisconsin and watching bulldozers flattening over 800 acres along Hwy 151 and my first hunch was: data center. Sure enough, the secretive $1 billion deal with Meta was finally revealed in a November press release. Just north of Madison in the town of DeForest, Blackstone subsidiary QTS Realty Trust is aiming to build another $12 billion data center on close to 1,600 acres. And if we need to free up more land for AI, we quaint rural folks could just abandon growing real Xmas trees and force people to buy plastic ones instead, as one Fox News “expert” suggested over the holidays. Former President Joe Biden visited Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin in May 2024 to promote Microsoft’s new $3.3 billion 300 acre AI campus on the former site of flat screen maker, Foxconn, that welcomed President Donald Trump for its groundbreaking back in 2018. Foxconn abandoned that $10 billion project and its 13,000 job promise, after getting millions in state subsidies and local tax deferrals.
The Microsoft AI complex in Mt. Pleasant will also require over 8 million gallons of water per year from Lake Michigan. We still have some clean water, though that may not last long thanks to agrochemical monocultures, CAFO manure dumping, and PFAS-laden sludge spreading. And AI certainly is thirsty—the Alliance for the Great Lakes noted in its August 2025 report that a hyperscale AI data center needs up to 365 million gallons of water to keep itself cool—that is as much water as is needed by 12,000 people! A recent investigative report by Bloomberg News found that over two-thirds of the AI data centers built since 2022 are in parts of the country already facing water stress. And it is really hard to drink data.
But is all the AI hype just another bubble about to burst? Rural communities (and public taxpayers) have been offered many “amazing” schemes in the past that ended up being just a “bait and switch”—another hollow promise.
In the Midwest we also have potential access to vast electricity (fracked natural gas, wind and solar farms, methane digesters), and relatively under-stressed high voltage grids (unlike California or Texas), though the loss of “cheaper” imported Canadian hydropower with the latest trade war could be a serious challenge. In 2023 the US had over a $2 billion electricity trade deficit vis-a-vis Canada. According to a recent Clean Wisconsin report, just two of our proposed AI data centers will require 3.9 gigawatts—1.5 times the current power demand of all 4.3 million homes in the state.
But, no worry, there are dilapidated US nuclear reactors with massive waste dumps that could be put back online such as Palisades in Michigan, despite opposition from environmental activists and family farmers. The Trump administration also just announced a $1 billion low-interest loan to reanimate Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania for the sake of AI. Until all that happens, though, regular ratepayers can expect a huge hike in their energy bills as Big Data has the market clout to siphon off what it needs first, especially as it colludes with utility monopolies. Many people in Wisconsin are already paying for $1 billion in stranded assets—mostly defunct coal plants, as well as nuclear waste storage facilities—while utility investors continue to receive guaranteed dividends of 9-10%.
But is all the AI hype just another bubble about to burst? Rural communities (and public taxpayers) have been offered many “amazing” schemes in the past that ended up being just a “bait and switch”—another hollow promise. If we subsidize a massive data center, will the projected “market” for increasing algorithms actually come? Many within the AI industry don’t think so, and are now invoking the lessons we should have learned from the Enron scandal decades ago or the even worse sequel in the subprime mortgage-fueled financial meltdown. Corporate cheerleaders can be quite clever when it comes to inflating prices (and stocks) for goods and services that may not even exist, while hiding their massive debt obligations in a whole cascading series of shadowy shell subsidiaries and dishonest accounting shenanigans.
Many industry insiders are ringing alarm bells. "These models are being hyped up, and we're investing more than we should," said Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 Nobel Economics Prize, quoted in a recent NPR story about the current AI boom or bubble. OpenAI says it will spend $1.4 trillion on data centers over the next eight years, while Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are going to throw in another $400 billion. Meanwhile, just 3% of people who use AI now pay for it, and many are frantically trying to figure out how to turn off AI mode on their internet searches and to reject AI eavesdropping on their Zoom calls. Where is the real revenue going to come from to pay for all this AI speculation? The same NPR story notes that such a flood of leveraged capital is equal to every iPhone user on Earth forking over $250 to “enjoy” the benefits of AI—and “that’s not going to happen,” adds Paul Kedrosky, a venture capitalist who is now a research fellow at MIT's Institute for the Digital Economy. Morgan Stanley estimates AI companies will shell out $3 trillion by 2028 for this data center buildout—but less than 50% of that money will come from them. Hmmm...
Special purpose vehicle (SPV) may sound like a fancy name for a retrofitted tractor, but that is how Big Data is creating a Potemkin Village to hide their Ponzi Scheme. Here is one example from Richland Parish, Louisiana where Meta is now building its Hyperion Data Center—a massive $27 billion project. A Wall Street outfit, Blue Owl, borrows $27 billion, using Meta’s future rent payments for a data center to back up its loan. Meta’s 20% “mortgage” on the facility gives them 100% control of the purported data crunching from the facility. This debt never shows up on Meta’s books and remains hidden from carefree investors and shallow analysts, but, like other synthetic financial instruments such as the now infamous mortgage backed security (MBS), the reality only comes home to roost when the house of cards collapses and Meta has to eventually pay off Blue Owl.
In the meantime, as the Louisiana Illuminator reports, the residents of Richland Parish (where 25% live below the poverty level) are bearing the brunt of all the real costs of having an AI factory farm. Dozens of crashes involving construction vehicles; damage to local roads; and massive future energy demands (three times that required for the entire city of New Orleans), which will entail new natural gas power plants to be built (subsidized by existing ratepayers even as fossil fuel-induced climate change floods the Louisiana delta). Beyond the initial building flurry, AI data centers are ultimately job poor. It just doesn’t take that many people to tend........