Festus voters fired every council member who approved the data center

Good morning — this is George.

Two community-win stories this week. Voters in one Missouri town fired every council member who approved a data center. A California city became the first in the Bay Area to hit pause. Round-up of what else is moving below.

Data Center News

Festus voters fired every council member who approved the data center.

On April 7, all four Festus, Missouri, city council members who had voted to approve a 6-billion-dollar data-center development lost their bids for reelection.

Dan Moore, who defeated Ward 3 incumbent Bobby Benz, told reporters: “This data center fight has struck this community to the core and really, honestly ignited a community-driven effort here.”

The biggest issue, according to voters: lack of transparency. The sense that council members had prioritized tax revenue over the concerns of the people who actually live next to the site. It is the first time a U.S. community has used a regular municipal election to remove every official who voted for a data-center approval.

On the same day, voters in Port Washington, Wisconsin, passed a ballot measure — the first of its kind in the country — requiring public approval for any future tax-increment district over 10 million dollars. 66.4% yes.

Read E&E News / Politico →

Oakley, California just became the first Bay Area city to pause new data centers.

On April 15, Oakley — about 50 miles east of Silicon Valley — approved a temporary moratorium on new data-center construction. The city council said it wanted time to study the industry's energy and water demands before any more applications moved forward.

The broader context: most of California's hyperscale proposals are not in Silicon Valley. They are in Imperial County, Kings County, and Sacramento suburbs — and increasingly in the East Bay and Central Valley, where land is cheaper and zoning is looser. Oakley's moratorium is the first municipal attempt to slow that pattern inside the Bay Area itself.

SF Chronicle coverage →

From the Communities Fighting Back

Michigan — Anthropic reportedly in talks for a 1.8M-sqft data center in Lyon Township (per Crain's), joining OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft projects already in the state. Thor Equities' Augusta Township project goes to a voter referendum August 4.

Illinois — Sangamon County voted 17 to 10 against a data-center rezoning. The Festus pattern is spreading to quieter local votes.

Indiana — Organic Indiana audience forming on the site. Meta's 1,500-acre Project Domino in Lebanon continues construction.

Colorado — SB 26-102 died in committee. Xcel's rate case is still pending. Drought continues.

Read This Week

States are struggling to meet clean-energy goals. Blame data centers.

Nevada's utility says it will need three times the electricity required to power Las Vegas just to handle proposed data centers. — PBS NewsHour

Anthropic in talks for 1.8M sqft Michigan data center

Project Flex Verrus in Lyon Township. Alphabet-backed developer. Conditional approval, sound study pending. — Crain's Detroit

Microsoft's Fairwater went live in Mount Pleasant, WI

$7.3 billion. 315 acres. 1.2 million sqft. Hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 GPUs wired as one computer. Ahead of schedule. — Microsoft

Missouri town fires half its city council over data-center deal

The full Festus story, with interviews and a timeline of the organizing effort. — E&E News / Politico

Insights — three Meta announcements, one week

April 17: the New York Post reported Meta is preparing to cut roughly 8,000 jobs on May 20 — about 10 percent of its workforce. Deepa Seetharaman at The Wall Street Journal confirmed the scope and noted Meta is simultaneously redirecting between $115 and $135 billion into AI infrastructure. April 18: Engineering at Meta announced “LevelUp,” a free four-week program preparing people “with no prior experience” to work as fiber technicians on data-center construction sites.

Three announcements in one week. The people being laid off are engineers, researchers, and middle managers on six-figure salaries. The budget that used to pay them is being moved into concrete, fiber, transformers, and GPUs. The jobs being trained for are construction-crew positions pulling that cable through conduit at the sites we track.

Meta calls the training program LevelUp. Look at the dollar figures next to each other and it is closer to the shape of the trade: the engineers leave, the data centers go up, and the wage floor for anyone touching this infrastructure slides down. All three announcements are public. We put them here next to each other because somebody has to.

Hot projects this week

Ranked by clicks on our map in the last seven days. Five different kinds of heat.

Project Bunkhouse Bartow County, GA

$19B, 1,830 MW, proposed. Developer listed as “Taurus DC SPE LLC” — a shell. Actual tenant: undisclosed.

Project Matador (Fermi America), Amarillo TX

11 gigawatts. Nuclear plus gas. Under construction. The number is not a typo — it's the largest single data-center campus in the US pipeline.

Trammell Crow Georgia Campus, Social Circle GA

2,400 MW proposed. Third GA project in our top five this week — Georgia is quietly becoming the next Loudoun County.

Natelli New Hill Digital Campus, Apex NC — CANCELED

250 MW proposal, killed after sustained community opposition. Clickers may be checking whether it's actually dead. It is.

Amazon Hobart Data Center, Hobart IN

2.4 GW, $15B, permit approved. Amazon's biggest current Indiana project.

See what is near you

If this round-up was useful, the best thing you can do right now is forward it to one person in a town where a data center has been proposed. The second best is a small coffee. This project runs on caffeine and FOIA fees.

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George

george@poweredbywho.com

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