The Hidden Costs of AI Data Centers on Rural American Communities
Data center infrastructure in the United States. In Lansing, New York, a town of roughly 12,000 just north of Ithaca, New York, hundreds of residents packed into a middle school auditorium last fall. They were there to confront representatives of a company most of them had never even heard of. TeraWulf, a digital infrastructure company, had signed an 80-year contract on 183 acres at the old Cayuga coal plant site to build a data center—a facility housing the servers that power AI—capable of...
