The numbers coming out of the American West right now are hard to ignore. Phoenix data centers draw 1.5 gigawatts of power. Oregon's Morrow County gave Amazon nearly a billion dollars in tax breaks over 15 years. Google used 355 million gallons of water in The Dalles, Oregon in a single year — a quarter of the city's annual supply — and paid $100,000 to keep that figure out of the newspaper. A Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory study projects that data centers will consume between 6.7 and 12 percent of the nation's electricity by 2028.
These are infrastructure stories. They are also community stories. And in most of the places where this buildout is happening, the communications strategy hasn't kept pace with the construction schedule.
That gap is where things get expensive.
Santa Clara's planning commission chair recently called data centers "the tapeworms of the city." That quote didn't come from a protest sign — it came from a public official, on the record, after the city council had already approved 60 of them. In Morrow County, Oregon, residents attempted to recall three county commissioners, in part over the Amazon tax deals. In Phoenix, the deputy city manager said plainly that data centers "take a lot of land but don't provide enough jobs for the infrastructure investment." These aren't fringe reactions. They're the sound of communities that feel like decisions were made around them, not with them.
The companies building these facilities are not bad actors. Many of them have made genuine commitments — water-positive pledges, renewable energy agreements, reclaimed wastewater programs. Meta and Amazon are storing Columbia River water underground to expand summer supply for the whole Hermiston community. That's a real thing. The problem is that those stories rarely reach the people who live near the construction sites, pay the utility bills, or sit on the planning commissions.
The communities that have handled this well share one thing: someone was talking to people before the permits were filed. In Hermiston, the assistant city manager has a clear, specific answer when people ask about jobs and tax revenue. In Morrow County, the commissioner who survived the recall attempt had spent years building relationships with residents and could explain, in concrete terms, what the Amazon presence meant for school bonds and health districts. That kind of credibility doesn't come from a press release. It comes from sustained, honest engagement over time.
The energy transition — data centers, grid modernization, AI infrastructure — will be built in communities that have real questions about water, power costs, jobs, and what their town looks like in ten years. Those questions deserve real answers, delivered early, by people who understand both the technical realities and the political ones.
The companies and utilities that figure that out will build faster, face less opposition, and spend less time in front of hostile planning commissions. The ones that don't will keep reading about themselves in the newspaper.
Sigler works with utilities, infrastructure developers, and public agencies on the communications challenges that come with large-scale projects. If you're navigating a buildout in a community with questions, we'd like to talk.
