Data Centers Are Democracy’s New Battleground
AI’s most consequential political debates aren’t in Washington, but in village council chambers. And the process is broken.
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Democratic debate on artificial intelligence is increasingly taking place not in Washington but in village council chambers. Here, small communities who never imagined their voices were relevant to the dialogue on AI are demanding answers to why local governments are signing away land and energy infrastructure to hyperscale data centers.
In packed council meetings like those in Perry Village and other small towns across Ohio, the dividing line hasn’t been party affiliation, but instead who profits and who pays. While these debates focus on the benefits and pitfalls of Big Tech, they tell us even more about how—and if—local democracy still functions.
Hyperscale data centers are the physical infrastructure of today’s AI. These are data centers that occupy over ten thousand square feet and house 5,000 or more servers. As of writing, 613 of the 4,000 data centers in the United States are hyperscale, with a combined 18,289 megawatts of capacity. But “hyperscale” is rapidly scaling up: an additional 916 hyperscale data centers currently planned and under construction will raise total capacity by more than an order of magnitude to 300,000 megawatts of capacity.
In the process of generating the computing power (known as “compute”) essential to AI leadership, these hyperscale data centers consume staggering energy and water resources with profound impacts on communities. The new data centers may provide no benefits to the citizens in these communities, yet in town after town, deals are being quietly struck between Big Tech, developers, and local officials before residents hear about them.Perry Village is an egregious case. In July 2024, Mayor James Gessic and the Village Council entered a purchase agreement with Province Group, a California-based developer, to buy 163 acres of village-owned land at $8.4 million. The scale of the data center has since expanded to 230 acres, one-sixth the size of Perry Village itself. The data center, which borders local homes, farms, and the school baseball field, would include six buildings of about 250,000 square feet each and consume 200,000 gallons of water daily.
Few of the village’s 1,600 residents heard even a whisper of the plan in the year after the deal was signed. Mayor Gessic and key council members had signed NDAs with Province Group before negotiations began. Binding elected officials to silence through NDAs has become a standard feature of data center development across Ohio, and their proliferation points to a deliberate strategy. It wasn’t until June 12 of last year, when the Council voted to approve the new zoning ordinances for the data center, that the village began to talk.
What followed is a demonstration of the local democratic process reasserting itself. Within two weeks of the council’s June 12 vote, residents gathered enough signatures to force a referendum, and the council rescinded the ordinances so they could do further research. Then, at a quiet evening meeting in September, the Council reinstated the ordinances, a move that sparked outrage not just among Perry residents but among county officials and community leaders from surrounding towns.
Morris Beverage III, a Republican commissioner for Lake County, was among those shocked by the move: “They scheduled a special meeting, presented it, then had a council meeting at 7PM to vote and approve it under emergency provisions so that it could not be referendumed. That’s actively trying to deceive your constituents.”
As the local movement to stop the data center gained steam, details of Perry Village’s finances and the data center contract shed light on why the Council may have felt pressure to push forward approvals. The Village’s finances were under stress, and the signed contract could bankrupt the Village if the deal didn’t go through.
“The contract they signed says they have to deliver a clean deed free of any referendum, or any deed restrictions with proper zoning in place for their intended purpose,” says Commissioner Beverage. “Either a data center was being built or they were going to financially ruin the village.”
Carl Setzer, a Democratic congressional candidate for the 14th District, where Perry Village is located, has made the data center debate a core pillar of his campaign, attending protests and council meetings while regularly sharing updates on his social channels.
“They want to slam these through, get a bunch of underprepared solicitors and village councils to agree to notorious terms, and get these things built ahead of the realization that these should be metered,” says Setzer. “They want to get as much free infrastructure into these communities as possible before governments realize there’s a tax structure being left on the table.”
An already troubling local story became something larger in January 2026, when Meta and Vistra announced a 20-year power purchase agreement covering three Ohio nuclear plants, including the Perry Nuclear Plant visible from the backyards of the Perry residents mobilizing against the data center.
Meta’s power purchase agreement for the Perry Nuclear Plant poured fuel on an already charged debate, and in January, citizens began organizing and seeking legal support to ensure they had a voice in the process.
Erin Derzon, an army veteran and owner of a nearby farm, helped form ConserveOhio, which is gathering signatures for a state-wide ban on new data centers that consume more than 25 megawatts.
“With this deal, Meta gets to take the power from that nuclear facility, and then our nuclear facility is no longer generating public power,” says Derzon. “Out here, if the wind blows wrong, the power’s out. We have rolling blackouts and brownouts year-round. Some people are without power for weeks on end.”
Derzon, who also works professionally in habitat restoration and wetland management, argues that the environmental costs extend well beyond the data center’s noise and heat: “They hyperfilter the groundwater and add PFAS-PFOS lubricant so the water can move through the small server coils. They don’t have to filter it back out. By default, my beef and maple syrup will be contaminated with PFAS, and I will never be able to get an organic certification.” (While data center cooling, manufacturing, and fire suppression systems are known to contribute to PFAS in water, Perry Technological Park states on its website that “The facility will not contribute to PFAS or other contaminants of concern.”)
John Nicely, a retired executive who moved back to Perry to care for his aging mother and now drives the town school bus, is concerned about more immediate dangers: “The community’s fire department is in the red. Its newest engine is 20 years old. There are no ladder trucks in Perry or the neighboring community of Madison. If fire breaks containment and becomes a structure fire, we have no way in this community to even comprehend how to battle it.”
Across Ohio, a similar pattern has played out with financially pressured local governments, well-resourced developers, NDAs, and contracts inked before residents discovered what had been signed in their names.
In Hilliard, a recent change to state law is allowing a proposal by Amazon Web Services for a fuel cell system to power a new hyperscale data center to bypass local zoning review entirely. In an October 2025 press release, the acting Hilliard mayor stated: “It’s regrettable that state lawmakers have overridden local oversight, particularly since this technology is unfamiliar and new not just to our City, but also the entire State.”
This development should concern anyone who cares about democratic governance. The response to community resistance, at corporate and often state legislative levels, has not been to improve transparency or democratic debate, but to eliminate it. Ohio legislators are reportedly advancing legislation that would bar counties, municipalities, and townships from passing laws that restrict data center development.
None of this makes sense to Setzer: “A data center is a manufacturing facility. It takes raw material—data—processes it, creates refined products, and sells them. If you’re making chicken tenders, you pay for the chickens going in and there’s a tax on what comes out. But with data centers, we’re not having that conversation. We’re leaving billions on the table.”
Setzer’s proposed response is to create a state-funded bipartisan legal defense fund that would send experienced lawyers to any village, township, or city that finds itself outgunned by a developer.
“It would cost Ohio two and a half million dollars a year and save billions in poorly negotiated tax abatements,” says Setzer.
It’s these kinds of practical, non-ideological proposals that too often get lost in the noise of our political conflicts, which is perhaps why unfettered and unmetered data centers are meeting such resistance across party lines.
“There’s only so much people can take,” says Derzon. “They will start voting people out because their government is not acting in their best interests.”
That is of course how democracy should work, if Ohio’s legislature will let it.
Perry Village is far from the first American community to discover that its land, water, and future were spoken for before anyone thought to ask. What is new is the industry, the scale, and the speed.
What is not new are the democratic principles residents of Perry are insisting upon with increasing force: transparency, fair compensation, and a democratic process that treats citizens as participants rather than obstacles.
Blake Stone-Banks is a writer and strategist who spent two decades working in technology, data, and marketing in China. Now based in the New York City area, he writes on artificial intelligence, democratic governance, and the political economy of Big Tech.
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