We, your neighbors and constituents in Ames, oppose the construction of data centers in our city. We believe that data center projects like the one recently proposed by Lightedge would be profoundly harmful to the city, and that their benefits to a few would not outweigh their costs to our entire community.

Data centers are a massive drain on the communities around them: on our water, on our farmland, on our electrical grid, and on our wallets. Lightedge’s proposed data center project would completely negate the extra power capacity brought online by the Ames Municipal Energy Center project, leaving our city’s municipal power grid in the red and worse off than before. No estimate has been shared for the anticipated cost of this project: neither to Ames taxpayers underwriting its construction, nor to Ames residents paying higher utility bills to subsidize its operation.

Data centers do not bring economic opportunity to the communities around them. If completed, Lightedge’s proposed data center would employ fewer than ten people to work regularly on site. The profits from this data center would go to Big Tech oligarchs in Silicon Valley and hedge funds on Wall Street, but the costs would be paid here in Ames by the people who actually live here. And any “benefits” the city somehow manages to reap from a land use change around the airport cannot be reinvested back into our whole community--our schools, our healthcare, our roads and our buses and our parks--but must be spent exclusively for the benefit of the airport.

Data centers pose significant risks to the natural environments around them, both during their construction and once they are operational. The data center proposed by Lightedge sits near the headwater of a tributary waterway that flows into Worrell Creek and on to Ioway Creek. Despite this, there is no indication that any environmental impact research has been undertaken for this project, either to assess its impact on the watershed or its noise pollution during operation.

This is not just about Lightedge’s proposal. Any new data center we allow to be built here will set a precedent that we are a city where these kinds of projects are considered acceptable. If we let this data center break ground here, more proposals will come, and they will become harder to oppose, even if their impacts on Ames are worse.

As your neighbors and constituents in Ames, we strongly urge you to reject any proposal to build a data center in our city, and pass a city ordinance ensuring that no similar project be built in the future.