Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center
One week after the meeting, Salem announced a data center moratorium that would halt all data center developments in the city for one year as it considers zoning laws to accommodate developments such as this. This adds Salem to the long list of jurisdictions that have passed similar moratoriums, including Seattle, Washington, and the State of New York.
Unfortunately, the Verrus project will likely not be affected by this delay as it filed its application three days before the announcement. Despite this, Governor Tina Kotek (D) announced that Oregon will terminate a deal to sell a 32-acre plot of land that forms part of the three plots of land on which the project will sit. While it still leaves Verrus with approximately 43 acres, it means that it would have to go back to the drawing board to change its plans. This is similar to what Nashville did when it used its eminent domain power to deny the land that another developer wanted to use to build a data center near the historic Nashville Zoo.
But because Verrus submitted its application before the moratorium announcement, the city is still processing its proposed data center project. That does not mean that it will get an immediate green light, though. It still has to go through an extensive permitting process, which includes technical studies, permit conditions, and enforceable agreements, among others.
Oregon is one of the first states to enact a law that ensures large consumers, like data centers, pay for the majority of the grid upgrades needed to serve their needs. This allowed Portland General Electric, the state’s largest power provider, to increase the bills of users who used more than 20 MW by 30%, while also affecting a 1.3% cut in residential electricity costs. But despite this protection that stops ratepayers from price shocks, many people are still against data center projects in their towns and cities.
Kansas Town Silences Public Comment On Gigawatt AI Data Center After Receiving Death Threats
Kansas Town Silences Public Comment On Gigawatt AI Data Center After Receiving Death Threats, Moves To Virtual Meetings — Shift Follows Physics Teacher's Arrest For Clapping
“In the interest of public safety, the Emporia City Commission meetings scheduled for Wednesday, August 5, 2026, and Wednesday, August 19, 2026, will be conducted virtually. No public comment period will be provided during either meeting,” the city said on its Facebook page.
The move to a virtual meeting is an understandable move given the death threats on some of the city leaders. However, it also canceled public comments and instead directed citizens to an email address and phone number where they can air their concerns privately. This led to some citizens airing their complaints in a protest outside the Emporia municipal auditorium.
“While I don't doubt that there are credible threats, my big question is on how many there are and from where they are coming. Mayor Smith did mention in yesterday's meeting that the threats don't seem to really be coming from locals but ‘it only takes one’ to ruin a meeting so they went virtual. I feel like we're being punished for the actions of outsiders,” Lux Claridge, the person arrested in the previous council meeting, told 404 Media.
“I'm not so upset about going virtual, it makes sense, but back it up with examples of these threats. I'm more upset that they opted to close public comment and I don't understand why.”
One of the things that the council considered during the meeting was the petition to put a data center ban on the ballot, with the members voting unanimously to send it for judicial review. The council claimed that doing otherwise could open the city to a lawsuit from either side, although it did not elaborate on the reason why this would happen.
While we haven’t heard of a local jurisdiction getting sued for passing a data center ban, one Texas senator warned a county in the state that it cannot legally impose this. So, the commissioners are likely being careful to avoid legal issues, even if they’re in another state.
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Related Stories
The Global Government Affairs team over at X dropped a bombshell Thursday night, revealing that the X Safety team had uncovered proof positive of a foreign influence campaign targeting the build out of AI and data centers in the United States:
It turns out that, after launching an investigation, the team uncovered a massive bot farm consisting of roughly 200,000 "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," including hundreds that appear to have been trying to manipulate debate in the U.S. over artificial intelligence, data centers, and the associated energy costs.
This development comes after President Trump warned last month that "other nations are trying to get us to slow down" and are spending money on "propaganda" to convince Americans that data centers aren't a positive thing.
According to X, about 200 accounts within the bot farm network were posting claims that data centers drive up household electricity prices and put excessive strain on the power grid. Some of the accounts, ironically, posted AI-generated cartoons depicting data center operators getting rich while ordinary American citizens were stuck paying the bill.
[...] The insidious thing about this kind of foreign influence operation is that it preys on the concerns that many Americans already have about the data centers popping up in their communities – debates about things like electric bills and the robustness of the power grid are already happening here. All a foreign adversary like China has to do is amplify those fears and sow distrust to make it harder for the U.S. to keep building out its AI infrastructure.
Related:
- Protesters Haul A Guillotine To City Council Meeting About A Potential AI Data Center
- Texas Halts Data Center Connections to Power Grid Amid Overwhelming Demand
- The Fight Against AI Data Centers is Important – but It's Just a Starting Point
- 'Cost Me the Election': Data Centers Trigger Voter Backlash
(Score: 2, Troll) by epitaxial on Wednesday August 12, @02:30PM (1 child)
The people have spoken. Put those things in Nevada where the feds own 80% of the land.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12, @04:32PM
No one owns Nevada, any more than you can own a cat.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 12, @06:10PM (3 children)
Big corporate legacy media is forbidden from reporting on financial bubbles in other fields such as the AI bubble.
So the people can talk about the eyesore of abandoned data centers after the bubble pops, but legacy corporate media has to pretend no financial bubbles exist, have ever existed, could ever exist in the future, etc. "Journalism" truly is worthless.
My sister in law moved out of a small town because they bulldozed her favorite shopping mall to put in a data center, and post bubble its going to be like, maybe, a decade until that land pays property taxes again, maybe longer ... until then the town residents will be stuck paying extra property taxes to make up for the shortfall, thus lower property values. Meanwhile right down the road she will pay less taxes and have a higher property value as a result of not having a data center in her town.
No one can seem to explain why they had to bulldoze the strip mall when there's infinite farmland a few hundred feet away, you'll get a weird explanation of water, sewer, power infra, costs of rezoning land, but its only a couple hundred, maybe thousand feet until you hit farmland it seems like a no brainer. This is a small town, its not like they have 100s of food stores they now only have 2 instead of 3 IIRC.
Right now AI is a good way to turn $100B of capex into $10B of revenue. Everyone in the finance dept hopes model growth rates slow down so they can be holding the bag when $100B of capex generates $200B of revenue because models are not obsolete as fast. Meanwhile in operations and marketing the models are pretty useless for higher end work so they're praying for faster model obsolete rates because its hard to sell "last years not so useful stuff" in perpetuity. Meanwhile on the revenue side, the executives paying for AI are starting to notice $ per token going up exponentially faster than measured productivity due to AI which company wide seems to average down to about zero, although it's very easy to measure the high and growing expense...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 12, @07:27PM (2 children)
My impression is that the big corporate legacy media, the business world in general, and politicians are all absolutely terrified about what will happen when the AI bubble pops. Because right now:
- Unemployment is up, a lot.
- Available jobs are down, a lot.
- Wages and salaries are down, a lot.
- Stocks would be down but for the AI bubble.
- GDP would be down but for the AI bubble.
- Personal net worth is averaging at approximately 0.
Blue-collar people are already completely f'd and have been for about 30 years. AI has been the excuse to do the same thing to the remaining white-collar workers since the 2008 crash aftermath didn't completely wipe them out. And when the AI bubble pops, that's going to take out the rich investor class too.
Oh, and if you hadn't noticed the other news, climatologists now pretty much all agree we've blown right past the temperature target which would prevent things from becoming unmanageably bad environmentally speaking.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13, @02:37AM (1 child)
Maybe it's getting bad enough that the algos showing me stuff like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKCvf8E7V1g [youtube.com]
The hiring more people is last resort is not that true (esp in the start up phase) but still way more accurate than saying the rich are "job creators".
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday August 14, @03:07PM
Probably accurate for 1% startup nepotism type companies. They're just shuffling around excess printed money from the fed to somewhat reduce inflation and somewhat increate monetary velocity but its not really a "creative" endeavor. At most, shuffling jobs around, like fire 10K people from a legacy industry to hire 5K to 15K in the new industry, probably in another country of course.
This is also fairly accurate. To some extent, it's a fixed pool of productivity, so a dude opening a restaurant is just eating the revenue that used to go to the bar, its not like his customers magically made more money. There can be a minor increase in monetary flow rates, if people spend more money on short term restaurant food that becomes poop in a day, vs spending money on car repair tools as a hobby that last forever and don't really increase economic activity much. There are technological advance job increases but people confuse those with scammers doing "financial innovation".
(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday August 12, @06:21PM
It looks pretty real from the included video. Don't think I have seen many being pulled by a bicycle before tho. Very eco-friendly of the idiot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday August 12, @06:39PM
LOL no.
They're only paying the capex not the opex and sometimes the capex is financed so they're not even paying that.
The problem is the grid was not originally designed for huge point sinks of power that disappear.
Either via Moores Law growth or financial bubble collapse, those data centers will be closing and now you've got a VERY expensive capital infrastructure to deliver unneeded power, and someone's going to have to pay for that...
For example in my state its like vaguely couple thousand miles of 345+ KV transmission lines and maybe 5000 miles of 150 KV and lower lines. If you upgrade a thousand miles of 150 KV lines to 350 KV with giant new towers and giant new substations, if the load pulls the plug either due to technological improvement or financial collapse (why not both?) then the remaining ratepayers are stuck paying for the more expensive 350KV lines for at LEAST a quarter century. They could be downsized to 150 KV towers maybe in 2075 or so, but until then someone has to pay for the more expensive towers and its not going to be the bankrupt AI companies LOL. And this is just a transmission line analysis not generation capacity.... You can build a new nuke, sure, but the labor cost of running it at 0% output is darn near the cost of running it at 100% output, and its expensive....
Even stuff like line connections matter. We have TWO regional state hubs both in high cost of land areas near where I live and both terminate over a dozen long high voltage distribution lines. We have some towers with as many as three stacked lines for some segments LOL. This is also expensive... if you want to terminate a new 500 KV line at the station, its downtown where land is not cheap and adding that line is going to cost like 1/15th the cost of the entire station because its got 14 terminations already.
You're looking at like "meh" percent of construction cost per year for ongoing maint, figure for a 500 KV line $100K/mile/year is not ridiculous, but a 150 KV line is maybe only a fifth that, maybe less, lets call it $20K/yr/mile. So if you upgrade say, 50 miles of transmission line to build out in the farmlands, that'll be maybe a quarter billion bucks some bank in NYC can pay upfront as the capex to put in 50 miles of line at $5M/mile. No problem. However for the next half century someone has to cough up an extra $4M/year to maintain that more expensive line. Until the AI company goes out of business that'll be the AI company, ideally. More likely when it goes out of business next year that'll mean Joe 6 Pack dairy farmer needs to cough up an extra $4M/year in his electric bill. Someone has to pay to maintain the lines unless they're planning on shutting down the powerco completely. 1K townies will have to pay an extra $4000/year for the capacity they don't need. Maybe they can squeeze the farmers, probably not.
500 KV power lines going to literally nowhere are too expensive even as a free gift from out of towners...
I think the power generation side is less of a problem. Maybe power will be cheap enough to turn the USA into a net exporter of aluminum. We only locally refine about 40% of what we use, and maybe once the AI bubble dies we'll have cheap enough power to be a net aluminum exporter again. Its interesting that now a days we refine a multiple of more tons of aluminum scrap than we refined of ore during WWII. Like in the USA we recycle more tons of soda cans than we made WWII fighter and bomber planes.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12, @07:22PM
I would think that attendees are screened for weapons before being let in.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12, @08:05PM
What if it were a Confederate flag? Now the shoe's on the other foot. It's never Mao's Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot's killing fields... until it is.
(Score: 2) by jb on Thursday August 13, @05:58AM
whose main claim to fame in history was its witch hunts?