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What Happened When Small-Town America Became Data-Center, USA (msn.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Amazon's data-center expansion turned Umatilla, Oregon into an unlikely nerve center for American infrastructure investment. The community of roughly 8,000 residents has seen home prices double and local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year. Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, a Realtor and daughter of Mexican-born farmhands who once worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center, is now on pace to close 35 deals this year.

Federal data shows investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America's GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July. The region's hydroelectric dams and cheap power attracted Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Growth has brought rising costs for housing and child care. Political tensions over spending erupted this year when Mayor Caden Sipe sued the city manager and council members.
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What Happened When Small-Town America Became Data-Center, USA More

What Happened When Small-Town America Became Data-Center, USA

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  • Growth and rising costs, or stagnation. Take your pick.

    • Rising costs are a political decision. They could just build more suburbs instead of being strangled by urban growth boundaries.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Are you sure the terrain allows for more suburbs? I don't know about this case but lots of mountainous areas have limited buildable land.

      • Oh. I didn't realize suburbs are free. My bad.

        • The profits from agricultural land are tiny. So without government intervention, it's as good as free. Plenty more where that came from.

          The artificial inflation of land prices is one of the most significant increase in cost of living. In the middle of a huge city it's unavoidable, in some bumfuck community surrounded by agricultural land it's not.

      • Keep cutting down trees and paving over grass. What could possibly go wrong?

    • I don't need more. I just need to hang on to what I have.

  • Like oil fields in Nigeria (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Big Hairy Gorilla ( 9839972 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @10:14AM (#65772256)
    Poor people live among pipelines and drilling infrastructure... they are worse off, not better.
    The benefits accrue to Big Co, nothing trickles down to the people who actually live there.
    Different industry, same tactics.
    Nice Job, Amazon. /s
    • So, you didn't read the article?
      • of course not.
        but I did budgets for geothermal powerplants in a previous life, and after the shovels leave the ground, you only need a skeleton crew to run the place... same with datacenters, no?
        Jobs during construction, then pretty much just a maintenance crew

        • You didn't even read the summary, which specifies that someone who used to be a walmart employee is making 3 real estate deals a month now based on the local growth. Or that the city's budget is 20x what it was 15 years ago.

          Does that sound like "nothing trickles down" to the people who actually live there?

          Try at least reading the summary - it's right there, you don't even need to click anything.

          • It sounds like trickle down worked for a single individual. I'm happy she's found greater income.

            • So how do you figure this one individual pays enough taxes to raise the city's budget 20 fold?

            • Read what I wrote again, and then try again.

              Hint: the city's budget is 20x what it was 15 years ago. They aren't spending that on fireworks and glossy election mailers - they're building infrastructure and services for people who live there.

          • You've got a point there. I'll try to do better next time.
    • You don't think this data center should be where it is but you haven't provided a better alternative location.

    • Re:Like oil fields in Nigeria (Score:5, Informative)

      by DesScorp ( 410532 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @11:13AM (#65772454) Journal

      Poor people live among pipelines and drilling infrastructure... they are worse off, not better.
      The benefits accrue to Big Co, nothing trickles down to the people who actually live there.
      Different industry, same tactics.
      Nice Job, Amazon. /s

      Oregon isn't Nigeria. All of the worker creature comforts aren't being flown in at great expense because local infrastructure and services are shit. Houses and restaurants are being built. Stores are being built. That means employing the locals for the most part, raising their wages and improving their infrastructure.

      There are downsides to big companies coming into small towns. I live in one, and the increased traffic and general hassle of more people annoys the fuck out of me. But our standard of living has most definitely gone up, not down.

    • Sounds to me like their value of their houses went way up. Sounds like a benefit to me!

      • It brings with it a lot of noise for the air handlers on top or worse the diesel engines to supplement the power etc. More local industry, more noise, congestion, etc. starting to articles about this, way more to come as we bring industry back.

      • And with that higher property taxes, sucks if your home is paid off and you are retired. And generally more expensive homes relative to salary, sucks if you are a new home owner. The only benefit to increased housing prices is those looking to sell and get out.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • AI slop posting to /. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @10:23AM (#65772290)

    This is some AI slop generated summary of the article. While the article says "$144 million", the AI slop changed it to "a hundred and $44 million".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aitikin ( 909209 )

      This is some AI slop generated summary of the article. While the article says "$144 million", the AI slop changed it to "a hundred and $44 million".

      Came here to complain about that wording as well.

    • From human-generated slop provided by The Guardian, to AI slop in summaries, msmash is doing us all a great service.
    • how does a conversion error like this happen? is AI transcribing an audio clip?

      • No, it's repeating what someone else wrongly wrote. It's One-hundred-forty-four million. The only thing that kept the summary understandable was the $ in front of the 44 million, otherwise it was 1,000,000.44. The word "and" when speaking about money is the decimal.

        This is taught at about 3rd or 4th grade, or was when I was still in grade school.

    • Agreed, laziness by msmash

  • Easy come, easy go (Score:3)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @10:45AM (#65772360)

    Be careful of the tax-incentives offered to big business to set up shop cheaply in small towns. If from a bottom-line perspective they have little invested, then they have little reason to abandon those investments, leading to a boom/bust cycle for the town next time the big tech vendors concoct some new 'best practices' scheme to try to cause the businesses dependent on them to buy more crap.

    If the business has spent a lot of money out of their own coffers to build, they're more likely to treat that buildout so dismissively.

    • Re:Easy come, easy go (Score:4, Informative)

      by MachineShedFred ( 621896 ) on Tuesday November 04, 2025 @12:15PM (#65772614) Journal

      We're talking about AWS's us-west-2 region.

      You can't just pull up stakes and move that. It was put there for three very good reasons: cheap land, plentiful hydropower from the Columbia River, and also loads of nice cold water for cooling from the same river. And, if they're serious about nuclear power it's very close to both the Columbia River Nuclear Generating Station and Hanford.

      It's been there for a decade and is home to a double-digit percentage of all the stuff AWS runs. Context matters.

  • If it was One China or Kancho Boong Ga... it's hereditary. Get the Jab.

  • If this is not written by an AI it's written by someone clearly illiterate.

    local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year.

    Really?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      My first thought was a speech-to-text mechanism, without a proofread.
      • This is a clear example of why the current implementations of AI can not be trusted. Also a clear example of someone being too lazy while assuming AI won't do something stupid - more so since they are curating articles for Slashdot and should really know better by now.
  • There will be a christian blacklash\grift against it.

  • When small towns in America became homes to massive data centers, power and water costs often soared.

    Data centers devour electricity, not just for running servers but for constant cooling, forcing utilities to expand grids and invest in transformers, lines, and substations.

    Those infrastructure costs are spread across fewer local customers, so residential bills rise.

    They also consume enormous quantities of water, both for cooling systems and indirectly through power generation.

    In arid or rural areas, that st

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cigamit ( 200871 )
      Water and power were 2 of the main reasons why our city declined an incoming DC. While not the size of Dallas, we sit at ~250k residents, and the "AI" DC that was coming into the area was projected to double both our water and electricity usage. We already typically have water restrictions in the summer months, so water was going to be a major issue, and doubling our electrical usage would have required building even more transmission lines into the town. All for a measly 45 jobs and a projected 30M in t

      • and how is our representatives (better know as government, local, state and federal) legally allowed to sign a NDA.
        They represent US not rule US.
        Somehow way to many people forgot that they represent our interests not rule us.

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