A proposal to build the state’s largest data center near the Clinton’s airport has been making headlines — not all of them good.
Deemed by some as economic opportunities for the state, the centers are running into rising resistance from Iowans, including residents who increasingly are frustrated with tech giants buying up land across the state — in this case, 1,100 acres — to build the massive complexes.
Clinton drafting an ordinance to guide data center developments and establish enforceable standards before site plans or proposals are considered, but the Register reported that some residents feel as if they’re being lied to about what’s actually going on in their backyards.
Here’s what to know about the data center controversy in Clinton and around Iowa.
What is a data center?
When we store data in the cloud, it has to be housed somewhere. That’s where data centers come into play.
According to IBM, “a data center is a physical room, building or facility that houses IT infrastructure for building, running and delivering applications and services.”
A typical cloud computing data center could hold the data of millions of customers at a time. Some centers, called hyperscale data centers, can occupy as much as 60,000 square feet, contain 5,000 servers at minimum and utilize miles of equipment.
Who is the company proposing the Clinton data center?
Quality Technology Services (QTS) is a digital infrastructure company based out of Sterling, Virginia.
The company, founded in Overland Park, Kansas, in 2003, proclaims itself to be “the global data leader across North America and Europe,” and has more than 25 data centers either “under consideration,” “in development” or up and running across 15 states in the U.S.
What other data centers are in Iowa?
Microsoft is building its sixth campus in the Des Moines metro, extending its West Des Moines development into Madison County. Meta has expanded its Altoona facility, the company’s largest data center footprint in the United States.
In Council Bluffs, Google is expanding a massive campus on the western side of the state.
In addition to these expansion projects, several other new builds have been proposed across the state.
The city of Ames received a proposal from a Des Moines-based company called LightEdge in early May, seeking to build on land owned by the city at the Ames Regional Airport. So far, no steps have been taken to confirm the request, though it remains under consideration.
Google has also proposed building a new center in Palo. More than a dozen residents gathered to protest the center’s construction at a City Council meeting on June 1. Despite their complaints, council members voted to pass an ordinance giving Google the go-ahead.
Fairfax and Linn counties also have been approached by developers seeking to buy up land near Morgan Creek, but nothing official is on the books.
Why are data centers so controversial?
Iowa’s continued struggles with water quality, as well as it’s heavy focus on agriculture, have many people worried about the strain a new data center could place on the state’s ecosystem.
Consumer Reports found that a data center can use around 5 million gallons of water every day to keep the computing mechanisms cool enough to operate. Actually keeping the centers switched on and operation requires electricity, which, in turn, requires the same amount of water, if not more.
The same report says that roughly two-thirds of the data centers that have been built in the last four years are already under stress for lack of sufficient amounts of water to keep up with their demands.
While more storage is generally seen as a good thing, the resources needed to keep data centers running is more than enough to make some Iowa residents wary.
Lee Rood contributed to this reporting.
Norah Judson is a reporter for the Register. Reach her at njudson@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: What to know about about the biggest proposed data center in Iowa
Reporting by Norah Judson, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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By Norah Judson, Des Moines Register | USA TODAY Network
