Missoula-area groups organizing to oppose data center
Laura Lundquist
BONNER (Missoula Current) - While hearings on a proposed Bonner data center are on hold, Missoula area residents are organizing to push for a moratorium.
Around 100 people showed up to the Bonner Kettlehouse Brewery on Wednesday evening to hear a presentation on the data center that Krambu LLC wants to install at the Bonner mill site and to voice their opposition.
As another bout of rain doused the Blackfoot Valley outside the brewery, Moira Odermann gave a presentation of at least eight contradictions that she’s found between Krambu’s claims about their proposed facility and the details they included in their paperwork to the county and other statistics from the data center industry. The contradictions ranged from how much water the facility might actually use in spite of claims of the benefits of closed-loop cooling to the need for backup diesel generators in case the power fails.
Odermann also highlighted all the tax incentives and breaks that the federal and state governments have created for data centers, even though they have the potential to make hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Montana offers a property tax reduction for large data centers that qualify, lowering the taxable value to 0.9% initially and then it gradually increases over 10 years.
“The AI revolution has supercharged the demand for data center capacity. The amount of computing power used to train the largest AI models has been doubling roughly every three to four months. That’s why tech companies are planning to spend over a trillion dollars on new data centers in the next few years,” Overman said. “The company is offering a lot of futuristic promises, but they’re not proposing anything new or futuristic. What is new is the scale and the speed. A 29-megawatt facility would have been unthinkable in the 1990s; today, it’s considered moderate. The question for us is whether our community is prepared to host an industrial facility of this size and resource intensity.”
Co-presenter Alessandro Mitchell talked about the energy demands of data centers and how NorthWestern Energy has little incentive to protect residential users from the demands of large-scale industrial users. So he pointed to other citizen efforts across the nation that have successfully passed either moratoriums or outright bans on AI data centers. For example, on Tuesday evening, the city of Seattle unanimously passed a one-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers. Mitchell said he’s been reaching out to the groups there and in other cities to put the Missoula effort together.
“Even if it’s not Krambu, we know that other data centers are going to want to come here, whether it’s here on this part of the river or downstream. Regardless, we know they’re not going to be regulated, they’re not going to be held accountable, and they’re going to try and pollute our communities,” Odermann said. “But we’re not the only ones doing this. We’re not alone, and there are successes.”
When others were invited to comment, it was clear that none wanted what Krambu is proposing and they weren’t shy about saying so.
Paul Barmore, who wrote a Change.org petition to ask the Missoula County Consolidated Land Use Board to reject the special exception for Krambu, said Montana residents don’t get the tax advantages of corporations like Krambu. For example, businesses in the Bonner Mill Site receive Tax Increment Financing from the county to pay for infrastructure.
“They will pay the upfront cost and be refunded by your tax dollars,” Barmore said. “These guys get the advantage of changing the rules, and they change their numbers. We don’t know what’s going on, we’re trying to keep up. But I feel very inadequate to understand a lot of what’s going on. But what I do understand is when a lot of money comes into town, they make promises they know they aren’t going to keep. And they pay the fines because it’s cheaper than fixing the problem. This is what we’re fighting against. This is the foot in the door for a data center company to come in. Everything about this is a negative. So what do we want?”
Two men who work in the tech industry said it’s not just about the environmental threats posed by data centers. They described how tech companies use people’s data to make more money and manipulate what information and advertisements people see. The control the companies are gaining over people’s lives is enabled by data centers.
“People here say they don’t know about tech, but I do. I know what they’re building. You should be afraid of what is coming because it’s not in your best interest. It’s not in anyone’s best interest. We all have careers, we all have lifestyles, we have a society that we’ve built together that’s going to be massively disrupted by what’s coming,” said Matt Thorson. “We need to create guardrails, legally speaking, on every aspect of this stuff before we allow it to keep going. This is mass surveillance and you need to be aware of it.”
Lea Bossler said of all the candidates that ran for the western Montana Congressional seat in the primary election, the only two that support data centers are the ones who won. While that’s unfortunate, Bossier said, a lot of people who worked for the other candidates have the know-how to help organize and fight against data centers. And since 70-80% of Montanans oppose data centers, political parties should add the need for data center regulations to their party platforms to encourage candidates to support their constituents.
Wednesday’s community conversation was organized by Missoula Neighbors United, a nonprofit started a year ago to address housing, environmental and education issues. But Nathan Stephens said another group is starting up in Missoula, and they’ve already had state senators talking to them about a bill to create a moratorium. But all the grassroots groups across Montana, such as the one fighting the 5,000-acre Quantica Infrastructure data center proposed near Broadview, should work together, Stephens said.
“This is a great start. I don’t want to take away from what this group is doing. We need to work together,” Stephens said. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and we can’t do it alone. We might have a little different way of going at it, but we’re all trying to do the same thing. Together, we can stop this thing. We need to set an example for the Billings community and Broadview and show them we can stop this thing.”
A man who identified himself as “Hutch” nervously stepped up, saying he just bought a house in Bonner and will have his first child in September.
“This is our favorite place. I want to spend the rest of my life here. I’ve worked my ass off my whole life to get to this point. Help me protect my backyard, everybody,” Hutch said.
The Missoula County Consolidated Land Use Board cancelled a July 1 review of the Krambu data center application. The public hearing schedule is now undetermined because the project developer “is continuing to finalize materials,” according to a June 8 Missoula County Voice post.
Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.