BESSEMER, Ala. — Kenneth E. Gulley, the mayor of Bessemer, Ala., confesses to some befuddlement as to why the people in his community would oppose the construction of a $14.5 billion artificial intelligence data center in a woodland just outside of town. “A data center is probably the most unintrusive thing,” Gulley said in his office one morning this month. “You know, it’s like a big computer sitting in your backyard.”
Several residents whose backyards may soon adjoin a digital facility the size of 18 Walmarts freely acknowledge their displeasure. “This is as pristine a forest that you’ll find in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains,” said Ron Morgan, a diesel machinist and retired military veteran, who drove a reporter through the dense timberland behind his house in an all-terrain vehicle. “And if they have their way, all this will be gone.”
Morgan’s sentiments are echoed by his neighbor Marshall Killingsworth, who bought his own land 58 years ago and now fears that the hoot owls in his backyard will no longer serenade him at night. Also fretful is Ronnie Buchanan, a retired rubber plant manager whose family has lived adjacent to the proposed site since 1979. “If that data center takes in all the water everyone says it will, it’s going to flood my land,” Buchanan said. “I’ll have to move.”
The seemingly overnight explosion in AI usage by American businesses and individuals has spawned a corresponding proliferation of facilities to store and manage all that digital information. As it stands, around 5,400 data centers exist in the United States. By 2030 they are expected to multiply by almost 50 percent. In a social media post Jan. 12, President Trump expressed his view that “Data Centers are key” to America’s preeminence over China in the AI arms race.
But the president’s cheerleading of AI — codified in an executive order last month in which he declared that the administration will “sustain and enhance the United States’ global AI dominance” — has not spurred equal fervor for the data center in Bessemer among Republican political leaders in Alabama. Senator Tommy Tuberville and the state’s governor, Kay Ivey, have not issued statements celebrating the project, and they did not respond to requests for comment.
Alabama’s other senator, Katie Britt, also a Republican, said in a statement that she hoped that the facility would not raise utility costs. “I remain motivated to ensure that ratepayers are not footing the bill for data center buildouts,” she said.
Representative Terri A. Sewell, Democrat of Alabama, whose district includes Bessemer and who declined a request for comment, said during a House hearing last year that some of her Bessemer constituents were “voicing their deep concern” about the project.
Gulley expressed exasperation. “It’s the largest single project in the state of Alabama’s history,” he said. “I would have liked to have heard more from those other individuals.”
But as multibillion-dollar economic projects go, AI data centers lack ribbon-cutting allure. Their warehouse-like appearance and the continuous 50-decibel whir of their server fans do not project neighborliness. Any local tax revenues they might bring in are, to some extent, often offset by abatements that states like Alabama have put in place to attract such businesses to begin with.
Their workforces tend to be small, requiring a highly skilled labor pool most likely drawn from elsewhere. “You can’t spin them as big job creators,” said Michael Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., who has written extensively about data centers. “And beyond that, after all the tax incentives are offered, the local effects of these data centers are so vanishingly small, there’s no discernible economic benefit.”
Early last year, TPA Group, an Atlanta-based real estate development firm, convened a secret meeting with several state and local officials in a conference room of the Bessemer Public Library. Everyone in attendance was required to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would remain in force until public zoning hearings took place months later.
According to three attendees, TPA unveiled a slide presentation of what it called Project Marvel. The firm, which declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story, had built at least one data center in Georgia, and a second Georgia facility was in the works.
The firm was now setting its sights on 675 woodland acres about 5 miles from Bessemer, in an unincorporated area of Jefferson County. The land had previously been annexed by the city for a landfill project, but the project was scuttled by local opposition. The acreage had ample access to electrical power, as well as water from the Warrior River Water Authority, which pumps its water from the Black Warrior River.
The land’s Mississippi-based owner was willing to sell the 675 acres for what TPA said would be a 100-acre data center campus.
Local officials said that TPA’s representatives at the meeting told them the data center would generate 990 construction jobs and 330 full-time jobs, and bring the Bessemer school district roughly $25 million in annual tax revenue. The officials said TPA assured them the project would not damage any wetlands or threaten any endangered species.
City and county officials interviewed for this story said that they independently verified TPA’s economic claims. But such estimates pertaining to data centers have been disputed. In TPA’s home state, Georgia, a government audit last month found that the data centers there had produced less than one-third of the jobs and economic value that had been projected. Hicks said that the projected job gains from the Bessemer data center struck him as “wildly high” and estimated that such a center would more probably “have 40 workers on a shift, so perhaps 120 to 160 overall.”
Still, said Aaron Killings Jr., Bessemer’s city attorney, who attended the meeting, “it was just no question about whether we should proceed.”
But questions did arise from the area’s residents once they learned about the rezoning plans.
“We tried talking to the mayor and other city officials,” said David Havron, an accountant whose property lies about 200 yards from the site. “They told us they had signed NDAs and couldn’t reveal anything.” Havron and other residents enlisted two Birmingham, Alabama-based groups, the Alabama Rivers Alliance and the Southern Environmental Law Center, to help them organize opposition to the data center. A third group, the Center for Biological Diversity, petitioned the US Fish and Wildlife Service to classify the Birmingham darter, a fish newly discovered in one of the land’s creeks, as an endangered species.
Still, Bessemer city officials remained confident that Project Marvel would be widely viewed as a winner for the community. “We can’t allow just a few people to impede the progress and the work that is going to take place here, because it’s going to have such an incredible impact,” said Michael Turner, the superintendent of Bessemer’s public school system, which stands to reap millions in tax revenue from the data center.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.