Clevelanders showed up in City Council Chambers this week to say their piece on the possibility of more data centers cropping up in city limits in the near future, tackling one of the most heated issues of this year.
And more than a dozen who stood in front of the mic on Tuesday evening seemed to agree on one thing: Cleveland’s three-month ban on hyperscale data centers should probably extend past its late-October deadline.
Ward 13 Councilman Brian Kazy, who led Tuesday’s town hall, said that result could come from Council’s three listening sessions. Like the future of Burke, Kazy said Council hasn’t yet made its mind up on the issue and was seeking feedback.
“We made sure long before we moved the moratorium on data centers that we wanted to make sure we protected our residents and our customers,” Kazy said during his presentation.
“We’re at the point of our process where were really need to hear from the public,” he added. “We want input.”
Public scrutinity of or outright bans on data centers, especially those measuring several football fields wide, have swelled in the past year as tech companies eye sites around the country to construct centers to help crunch and power large amounts of information. Public pusbhack is already underway: eighteen Ohio cities have data centers bans on their ballots this November.
Cleveland’s own temporary ban, which kickstarted a month after a data center, Morabito, was shot down in Slavic Village, sunsets on October 20. Speaking to a group of about 50, Kazy framed his invite to the city as a stop-and-think session meant to both get facts straight and make a clearheaded decision on whether to welcome or outlaw further attempts to be a part of the AI Boom.
Those facts, in a 20-minute presentation, were straight-forward. Data centers can be nondescript, or they could be rural behemoths; they could use air-powered coolant systems or many swimming pool’s worth of Lake Erie water; they may be noisy; they may need to rely on (and could tinker with) our regional power grid. (And even our tax dollars.)
With blackouts experiences by many in Northeast Ohio this summer, the topic of electricity was, well, a lightning rod. Which may be the most dire outside water and noise worries. City Council legislation bars data companies from misusing Cleveland Public Power and its 74,000 customers, but it can’t legislate what happens to the regional grid, owned by PJM, in the dozen other states it covers.
“FirstEnergy and Cleveland Public Power all get their energy from PJM,” Kazy noted. “If something happens, like data center loss in the state of Virginia or Pennsylvania, it could affect us in Ohio, as well.”
What was probably no suprise to council members present on Tuesday—Charles Slife, Blaine Griffin, Tanmay Shah and Stephanie Howse-Jones—was the overall aversion from the masses, from public commenters who saw very few perks for their city by allowing Nvidia or Meta or Google to use Cleveland’s land to power their super intelligence.
“I don’t see how the city of Cleveland really needs this,” Joyce Duwell said.
“We’ve already got 283 in the state of Ohio,” she said. “Why is Cleveland trying to use our resources like Lake Erie, impact our grid, with these data centers—and give them tax incentives?”
Several commenters that night felt the AI Boom was a fad that they thought Cleveland should simply pass on.
Jeffrey Lutski linked a plausible future for the massive buildings going up around Columbus to, say, the vacant, crumbling structures that have pockmarked Cleveland’s industrial wasteland in the past half century.
“I worry that if we overbuild, that these are just going to be empty buildings that don’t really get used for anything of value,” he said. “I do think it’s important to look at from a financial perspective: Is there real demand? Or is it speculative?”
What seemed to be at a minimum Tuesday night were the corollaries of allowing the AI Boom to grow—to worsening forecast of white-collar work being subsumed by the technical ease brought about by Athropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
It’s what irritated Gabrielle Carnick, who reminded the room that not only did data centers grab billions in tax breaks last year, but AI has been proven to take away roughly 175,000 positions in the arts, in law, in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and other areas.
“How many in this room have known someone who’s lost a job to AI?” Carnick asked, looking behind her. About a dozen or so raised their hands.
“Yeah,” she said, turning back to Kazy. “It’s going to go up. You’re taking jobs from us. You’re poisoning our water.”
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