A fiscal court meeting in Carroll County, Kentucky grew contentious when local residents started playing the sound of a data center to county officials. Spoiler: they didn’t seem to like it.
As local news station WHAS11 reported last week, Carroll County is the planned location for two separate data center projects, each of which will likely be around 800 megawatts and will overtake hundreds of acres of Kentucky land. At that size, the data centers are considered hyperscalers.
“I believe they talked about 800 megawatts, so it is a hyperscale unit,” Scott Nab, a magistrate on the fiscal court, told WHAS11 of one of the projects. “It’ll be multiple buildings. It’ll spread over 1,000 acres when completed.”
As the news station notes, a data center of that size would consume the equivalent of 560,000 average homes.
Nab is among the data centers’ proponents, arguing that data is the industry of the future. Local residents of the rural region, however, are pushing back. One of their strategies? Subject county officials to the horrible, 24/7 screech that large data centers emit.
“We’re going to be making them listen to it, so they can get a dose of what they’re asking us to endure,” Laura Beth Austin, a local resident who traveled to a nearby data center to record the sound, told WHAS11. The data center Austin and an associate, April Elwood, visited was reportedly just five megawatts — making it comparatively meager in size to the ones being planned in Carroll County.
In a video of the meeting shared by WHAS11, which went viral this week, Austin and an associate are seen interrupting a recent Carroll County fiscal court meeting with the recordings, leading to a tense exchange between Nab and concerned locals in the crowd.
“You guys have made your point, okay,” Nab tells the local residents.
“But we have to live with this now!” they urgently respond.
“Oh, ya have to live with it?” Nab shoots back, smirking as he speaks.
“Yes we do!” the locals reply, as other townies chime in. At one point, a security guard jumps in and warns everyone to act like “adults.”
The exchange is one of many contentious clashes between those who oppose data centers in their communities, which have earned bipartisan hatred, and those advocating for them. With some exceptions, like Elon Musk’s noxious data center project in Memphis, many planned data centers are to be built in rural communities, and thus stand to drastically change the landscape and living conditions of those who live nearby.
Data center proponents generally argue that the facilities will provide jobs and sustain the American lead in the global AI race. Opponents, meanwhile, urge that the infrastructure projects are associated with dangerous pollution, spiking energy costs, and loss of natural land. And then, of course, there’s the noise.
“We don’t need a data center in a community, let alone two hyperscale data centers in a community of less than a population of 12,000 people,” Austin told WHAS11.
Nab, however, is holding onto his guns, arguing data centers are an inevitability.
“We have significant — we have other industries in here that have similar amounts of land that are being used for industrial purposes,” Nab told WHAS11. “At the end of the day, if this doesn’t come to Carroll County, it’s going somewhere.”
More on data centers: Elon Musk’s Real Estate Goons Threaten Local Residents Not to Sue Over Deafening Data Center Noise
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