Data center moratorium is welcome

After reading about some issues surrounding AI and data centers, I am glad to live in Johnson County, where supervisors had the good sense to enact a one-year moratorium on new data centers in county-zoned areas.

Data centers famously consume large volumes of electricity and water and employ few people once they are built. So it would seem the economic benefits from data centers accrue mainly to whoever provides electrical power for them. Host communities get a handful of jobs, some property tax revenue and an extractive industry that depletes their groundwater and drives up their electricity rates.

Meanwhile, AI is struggling to live up to the hype that it will transform our economy, touching all aspects of our working and social lives. Some cognitive scientists believe it will never achieve that degree of reliability because each degree of improvement requires exponentially more training data. The joke that a fully functioning general AI would consume all of the world’s resources may not be that far from the truth.

AI apparently is not working out as a business model, either. None of the companies developing it have figured out how to make money from it, and until they do they are taking on massive debt.

So I am glad for Johnson County’s one-year moratorium (five would be better). We can see if Linn County gets burned by its headlong pitch into data center serfdom. Maybe it will work out for them and maybe not — only time will tell.

Derek Maurer

Iowa City