Sarah Alexander Melotte

In this edition of the Rural Index, I wanted to explore a hypothesis that my colleague Julia Tilton and I have been throwing around over the last few weeks: Are data center developers targeting vulnerable and marginalized communities, where they know residents are not as likely to have the power to fight back? As is the case with most good hypotheses, I wasn’t able to come to a definitive conclusion.

Data centers have arrived in rural America. The Daily Yonder analyzed crowd-sourced data on the locations of data centers, how they connect to existing grid infrastructure, and where communities are fighting back. Though the majority of in-progress data centers are in metropolitan areas, our reporting and data analysis show that large data centers, characteristic of the current boom, represent outsized investments in rural areas.