00:00A $2 billion data center is planned 850 feet from an Indianapolis elementary school
00:07on a former Ford plant full of buried contaminants, and the school is now suing to stop it.
00:14In North Carolina, a judge just overrode a county's data center moratorium and handed
00:20the developer its legal fees. And in Alabama, the land under a hyperscale campus was flipped
00:27twice in one day for $66 million more. The fight is getting personal and expensive.
00:35We begin in Indianapolis, where one of the city's oldest charter schools has gone to court to stop
00:42a $2 billion data center from rising in its backyard. Irvington Community Elementary sits
00:49along the Pensy Trail on the east side of the city. And about 850 feet away, D.C. Blocks
00:56wants to build a two-building campus with as many as 31 backup generators.
01:02The land is the old Ford Motor Company plant, now classified as a brownfield, where state records
01:09show coal storage, hazardous waste, and sludge-burning left contaminants in the soil and
01:15groundwater. The school is one of several plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed last month.
01:21Chief Executive Rachel Maldonado says the network has kids with asthma and simply does not have
01:28enough research to know what construction dust or generator exhaust would do to them.
01:34She toured a D.C. Blocks facility in Atlanta and could hear the generators from 700 feet away.
01:41The project won approval just days before Indianapolis froze new data center applications through
01:482027. So it is one of three that can still proceed. D.C. Blocks did not respond to requests
01:55for comment. That kind of opposition is now being tested in courtrooms. And in North Carolina a judge
02:03just delivered a warning to every county that has passed a moratorium. Chatham County commissioners
02:10voted in February to block new data centers for a year. The problem is that Ecotip West already
02:17had a project underway at the Moncure Megasite, a 750-megawatt development on land-zoned heavy
02:24industrial, where data centers were a permitted use by Wright. The company says it had spent $11
02:31million, that county officials knew about it since at least October, and that the county itself had
02:38issued a document granting statutory vested rights. Superior Court Judge John Morris granted summary
02:46judgment to the developer, awarded attorney's fees, and reserved damages for later proceedings.
02:54Ecotip's lawyers called the moratorium a legal trainwreck that violated almost every statutory
03:00mandate and was rushed for political cover. The county argued the developer never obtained a
03:07development approval and had no vested right. At least 30 North Carolina local governments have
03:13passed similar moratoria. Every one of them is now on notice. And in Alabama, the legal fight over a
03:22single hyperscale campus keeps multiplying. In Birmingham's Oxmoor Valley neighborhood, a judge this
03:29week consolidated three lawsuits against the Nebius Data Center, all alleging the city illegally granted
03:36permits in a mixed-use district near homes and a school. Two brand-new suits were filed on top of
03:43that.
03:43The first comes from a region's financial shareholder, James Anderson, who says the bank sold the main
03:50parcel last fall, and then the same land was resold twice on the same day, adding $66 million to the
03:59price. He alleges Nebius and the intermediaries concealed a pre-arranged flip and wants that money.
04:05Return to regions with interest. The second suit, from resident Terry Michal, targets the Birmingham
04:13Industrial Development Board's 30-year, $3.2 billion tax abatement, approved at a May special meeting just
04:22before new state limits on incentives took effect. She says the board skipped public notice and never did an
04:29independent cost-benefit analysis. Board chair David Perry defends the deal, saying property taxes on
04:37the site will jump from $200,000 a year to $87 million. Judge Javin Patton-Cradon set the next
04:45hearing for March 8, while construction continues 12 hours a day, six days a week. But not every protest is
04:54drawing a crowd. And that contrast tells you something about where this movement's power really lives.
05:01Humans First, the self-described conservative group led by former Tea Party activist Amy Kramer,
05:09launched a National Data Center Revolt bus tour on September 12, 35 stops across 27 states, aimed at what it
05:18calls
05:18big AI globalists. When the bus reached Brenmar Park in Alexandria, Virginia, on Thursday, a handful of
05:27supporters and journalists showed up. 18 people had registered. A downtown Washington stop on Ellipse
05:34Road was canceled that same morning over permitting. Without any public announcement, about 20 people
05:41turned out in Effingham County, Georgia. A dozen showed up at July rallies in Atlanta and Tyler.
05:48Texas. The Pro-AI Innovation Council calls the whole tour astroturf. And the group has not
05:55disclosed its donors. Spokesman Chris Barron shot back that no one in rural America is showing up for
06:02a pro-data center rally either. And that is the real story. In Utah, homegrown opposition packed a
06:10fairground gym in Box Elder County and helped end the career of Senate President Stuart Adams in his
06:17June primary. The energy is local, not on a bus. And the reason these fights keep escalating comes down to
06:26one question. Who pays for the power? In North Carolina, regulators just gave a rare answer. The
06:34utilities commission denied Duke Energy's request to build a $584 million natural gas turbine at its
06:42Sherwood H. Smith Energy complex near Hamlet, a plant that happens to sit next to the site of Amazon's
06:50planned $10 billion data center. Campus in Richmond County, the turbine would have added about 255
06:58megawatts by 2030. The commission said Duke has not shown the project as needed, and that much of the
07:06growth in its forecast appears tied to future data centers whose demand regulators have not finished
07:12reviewing. Approving it now, they wrote, would put customers at risk of paying for an expensive project
07:20that may never deliver enough value. The public staff, which represents customers, had called the
07:27cost staggering but still recommended approval. One commissioner dissented, warning about reliability,
07:34Duke can reapply, but it will have to explain how much of the demand is data centers, how its ratepayer
07:42protections would actually apply, and whether cheaper options exist. Yet despite that scrutiny, developers are
07:50pressing forward, and in Oklahoma one of them is trying a new tactic, buying out the neighbors. Cloverleaf
07:58infrastructure wants Piedmont, a small city northwest of Oklahoma City, to annex and rezone about 633 acres for
08:07Project OpenSky, a multi-building data center campus with its own on-site power generation. After months of
08:15resident pushback, Chief Development Officer Aaron Bilyeu came back with a revised deal. Homeowners inside a
08:23designated zone around the site could accept a market offer for their property and leave within a year or
08:31choose to stay. The company also added a cost funding commitment so the city pays nothing for roads
08:37and infrastructure, promised closed-loop cooling, and agreed to follow Piedmont's noise standards.
08:45Cloverleaf says the project means more than a billion dollars in taxable investment,
08:51a thousand construction jobs, 300 permanent positions, and about 13 million dollars a year for
08:58schools in the county. Resident Rodney Jones, who lives a quarter mile away, called it frustrating.
09:06The council postponed its decision again, to September 28, and Cloverleaf holds options on 337 acres in
09:15neighboring Kingfisher County. In case Piedmont says no, state and local officials are taking notice.
09:24But in Indiana they are pulling in opposite directions. In Michigan City, an effort to pause data center
09:31development has itself been paused. The city council voted 8-1 to table a moratorium that would have stopped
09:39permits and tax abatements for data center projects until the plan commission wrote new zoning rules.
09:47Google's project at the former federal mogul property was already exempt.
09:52Council attorney Nick Snow says the planning commission should lead any change to the zoning code.
09:57But residents heard a stall. Ashley Williams of Just Transition Northwest Indiana told the council it was
10:05opening the floodgates to harm. And critics point to a proposed data center district in the zoning
10:12ordinance as proof the city wants more projects, not fewer. Forty miles west, St. Joseph County is going
10:21the other way. Four Republican council members, Joe Thomas, Amy Drake, Randy Figg, and Andy Rutten,
10:30filed a resolution to ban new hyperscale data centers outright, exempting the Amazon and Microsoft
10:37campuses already underway. Democrat Jen Shabazz has signed on, giving them five votes on a nine-member council.
10:45Council president Brian Tanner is leaning no. Worried about lawsuits. The vote is Tuesday.
10:53And the money keeps finding its way into places nobody expected, including a dead power plant in Niagara Falls.
11:01Block Fusion, a crypto miner that turned a decommissioned plant into a mining campus,
11:07has signed Core Weave to a definitive 15-year anchor lease with two five-year renewal options.
11:13The deal covers up to 300 megawatts. And the 85 megawatts of guaranteed take-or-pay capacity alone is
11:22worth roughly $2.8 billion over the initial term, or about $5.4 billion if both renewals are exercised.
11:32Block Fusion is now retrofitting the site for high-density, liquid-cooled AI infrastructure.
11:37And it is going public through a merger with Blue Acquisition Corp.
11:43A NASDAQ-listed SPOC, chief executive Alex Martini Lomanto called it a defining milestone.
11:50Mayor Robert Restaino said the conversation about data centers is ultimately about whether the
11:56investment translates into real benefits for residents.
12:00For Core Weave, this is the latest in a string of leases with reformed crypto miners.
12:07Alongside Core Scientific, Galaxy, and Applied Digital, as it races to serve customers like OpenAI,
12:15Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Meta, old smokestacks, it turns out, are the new real estate.
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