Curveballs and Big Decisions

Many of you might remember my wife and I moved out of the city of St. Paul in autumn of 2024 to a suburb on the outskirts of the Twin Cities. We then spent the following eighteen months doing painstaking and extensive renovations to the house in order to modernize it and make it our own.

Last week we learned of a massive data center being built by Meta in one of the neighboring communities about five miles away from us. This gargantuan complex will be sharing our aquifer and power stations and this has, historically, not played out well for local home owners in that regard. Municipal water typically ends up being polluted with heavy metals and microplastics and energy prices skyrocket for everyone because of increased demand. Residents around these facilities also often complain of the constant low-pitched hum of the data centers. Local regulators have every incentive to look the other way because of how much money these tech companies bring into the areas they’re built. To make matters worse we discovered this Meta facility is also just the first of many data centers slated to be built in this area.

I’ve seen these scenarios play out in the city my mother lives in—Johnstown, Ohio. Intel announced their plan to build a massive data center complex in a neighboring town about five years ago. Since then farmland and residential properties have been gobbled up and an area that was once lush, peaceful countryside looks like a dystopian nightmare.

After a bit of research I discovered one potential upside—real estate prices in areas around data centers tend to see double-digit increases in market values. These facilities usually trigger a deluge of new people moving into the area for high paying jobs the data centers create.

Therein lies the big decision part of the post.

We feel like we struck gold finding the house. We live in a small, private, community surrounded by protected wetlands, nature trails, and woods. After existing in the hellish chaos of post-pandemic Twin Cities for so long this place has been an oasis of peace and quiet for us these last, nearly, two years. However, this data center situation might be a great chance to get out of this cold, high-tax state and escape to greener (and warmer) pastures.

We will have to see how this plays out over the next few months. It’s strange how life can throw these unexpected curve balls at you when you’re least expecting it.

I'm sure many of us will be faced with similar decisions in the coming years as more of these data centers are built to power the AI that will help to shape the lives of future generations of humanity.