Microsoft announces data center build in Kent County (Tech Tuesday) 12-16-25

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Trent, can it be a footable eye story? Joining us
now with that conversation and more, shining a light in
tech and how it affects you and your world. This
is Tech Talk Tuesday on Wood Radios, West Michigan Live.
All right, let's dig into it. Folks digging in right now.
Appreciate you being here with us. They're good friend. Trent

(00:20):
Kendebby is in with us as we speak. And like
I said, Trent, there's a story flowing around right now.
It's not the Midwesterner we had this earlier today. And
what's what's wild is Lion Township where this took place.
These residents are already learning about these data This is

(00:42):
one particular project, the data center projects that are picking
up a lot of controversy right now. This one they
learn about its approval three months later. You can't make
this up. Good morning, Welcome in, Trent, How are you?

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Good morning?

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Justin So let's walk through this story, but also the
broader angle of what's really going on with these data centers.
And the thing that I think people have most problem
with is they're not included in the process. Some people
may want them, some people may not want them. You know,
I think it's going to be very similar to like power,

(01:17):
like energy that we have. Essentially, we're gonna have to
deal with this on a very big level at some
point to compete on the world stage, but also just
for our own purposes right here in own backyard. We're
going to have to have access to power for industry,
for our homes, for whatever it might be, for whatever reason,
maybe even powering these data centers. And we need to

(01:40):
do it in a way that doesn't you know, put
us all in the you know, in the poorhouse for
trying to just pay our light bill. That has to
get addressed. But nobody, if you ever think about this,
ever wants a windmill, solar farm, coal plant, you know,
gas or or nuclear. Nobody wants any of those things

(02:02):
in their backyard. But we all need something. So this
is kind of along the same lines. The conversation it
happens here, I think needs to take plus where people
have to be well informed. They have to be well
educated on so they can make the best decisions, but
ultimately they ought to be involved in the process. That
didn't happen here in Line township. It sounds like, but

(02:23):
let's dig into the whole conversation, bring us entren.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, just a lot of good points that you touched
on there. Try to go through a few of them.
So communication, just to think of your small business, medium business.
They use press releases, they use you know, if you're
a retail store, you have a grand opening, you tell
people weeks, months, years in advance of your opening to
promote what you're doing, to gain publicity, to tell people

(02:50):
because it's exciting, it's positive. It's complete opposite for these
kind of big projects. And obviously it completely smells fishy
that they're hiding things. They're hiding the impact of these projects,
they're hiding the long term effects of these projects. They're
hiding the financial risks of these projects and the environmental

(03:11):
risk of these projects. And let's jump into that real quick.
So data centers, we hear about this all. Let's make
that clear. A data center might be an accurate name
for it because they're storing and working with large amounts
of data. But these are their express purpose of these
things is not a data center to sto server information
for your business or email server whatever. These are AI hubs.

(03:33):
The majority function of these systems, these server farms, these
data centers, So called our ais hubs, So maybe we
should call them AI centers instead of data centers to
make it crystal clear what the intention is goal is.
The next thing let's talk about real quick, is the
size of these It's really hard to cut through and
figure out how big is this project, what's the scope

(03:54):
of this. So this current project Endoor is proposed at
two hundred and seventy megawat And just to give you
a little example, every hundred megawat is approximately one hundred
thousand homes. Okay, City of Grand Rapids downtown has about
eighty five thousand homes. Okay, this is two hundred and

(04:15):
seventy using rough math, two hundred and seventy thousand homes,
and they have over five hundred acres at their proposed sites,
and they have room for future expansion. This is a
small half maybe quarter to a half size of what
the physical property can handle as far as further future expansion.

(04:36):
So they have the physical space to have one gigawatt,
which is a thousand data center, which is almost one
hundred thousand homes. So you're talking a massive amount of power.
And justin let's bring this all back full circle. What
if this AI center doesn't work. Where did the money

(04:57):
come from to fund this? Where did all the resources
go that built out the physical infrastructure, the parking lots,
the building, the servers, the racks, the storage. What's happening
with all this? Is this going to be a write
off that's coming off our bottom line as a tax
bailout as investors are going to get the losses on
their end if this fails. Justin look at the past

(05:19):
years of things that went boom and bus. Think of
when the cannabis industry took off and twenty eighteen twenty
twenty eight. In that timeframe, massive growth facilities were built
quickly with massive investor capital, billions of dollars invested, and
a lot of those went completely ballly up within a
year or two. And it's all just a waste, a

(05:40):
write off. Somebody's left paying that bill. And this is
on the scale of one hundred x times of some
of these past boom and bus. So not saying that
I'm against all AI and data centers or AI centers, whatever,
I think we need to really understand a lot better
who's holding the bill for this if it fails, and

(06:01):
if we can't even get basic information ahead of time
to start that vetting process, to start to understand the
impact on our communities, what this looks like for us.
That's a really scary proposition when you're talking about ten
to twenty times or one hundred times the power requirement
of all of the houses in downtown Grand Rapids prior

(06:21):
worth of power.

Speaker 1 (06:22):
That's correct, all right, So let's talk about so part
of this is this is a really good point, but
it's just barely scratching the surface. Part of this is
where's the power going to come from? The power of
these well Trump administration. Trump has said one of the
things we need to do is when you cut red
tape so they can build and have their own power plants.
And I think that definitely is that if these people
want to come in and they want to build here,
they need to be self sufficient. In other words, they

(06:43):
shouldn't be a strain on the already strained grid. I mean,
we've already heard and seen issues with blackouts, brownouts and
things of that nature here and not just here and
miss all across the country in different ways. Is this
is before anybody plugs their tesla in. You know, they
were always pushing these electric vehicles and we said this
is this is not gonna We told you this from
the beginning. This is not going to end. Well, we

(07:03):
see a rising demand and uh, this is gonna go
along with you having to pay more for your electric bill.
It's just supply the man. That's how it works. That's
on the sort of the best end of the news.
The worst end of the news is during a very
frigid cold day like today or any other winter day
here in Michigan, maybe there won't be enough power to

(07:25):
actually power your home and the heat and keep things
warm and they'll have to turn things off. Or during
a very hot summer day. Those those are part of
the picture. The other issues we see is the water
in these places, all the water that they might use,
and are they going to tap in, you know, to

(07:45):
the Great Legs or to some of our aquifers and whatnot.
You know, if you look at this over over on,
I think the report about this particular one in Gains
Township this they say the mission is particularly a really
good place for our targets, for these ai or these

(08:05):
data centers. Well, why is that it's our natural resources?
For one. The other issue people wonder about is what
about when some of this stuff catches fire, and then
you have environmental concerns and impact that may be a
problem because a lot of these are not trying to
build in urban areas. They're trying to build these in farmland,

(08:27):
in areas, in rural areas where people, you know, for
the larger part, don't want that type of thing, and
the construction that might take, the traffic that will go
down the roads to build it. Then another piece is this,
and I don't know how much you're prepared to talk
about this, maybe it's something we put on hold for
another time, but this electromagnetic EMF sort of pollution they

(08:49):
call it, that can come off of these that would
possibly have impacts on people, and they probably don't even
understand what this is, but EMF can be a big
problem for some folks.

Speaker 2 (09:02):
Justin you mentioned a whole bunch of concerns there. So
EMF mainly that's local for staff members that man those facilities.
There's not a lot of EMF that would go long
enough range to affect people community though there is different
frequency resonance things that I'm sure will be talked about
years from now that we don't even understand yet. So
there's some legitimacy there. But to your point, in the

(09:25):
electrical grid, let's think about something called distortion and harmonics.
These computer systems, the type of power that they use
and how it's modulated makes the power grid very dirty.
It makes the power very not clean, and that shortens
the life span of the average Joe's appliances. So again,
if they make their own power and they have to
deal with their own power cleanliness, it's called to make

(09:48):
it simple, that could mitigate that. But I doubt they're
going to have any ability to disconnect these things from
the existing grid because short term, I don't think they're
going to have enough nuclear, local power whatever ability to
spoo up their own local power resources for this for redundancy,
it's going to go into the grid, and then the
power is very dirty to the people around the grid.

(10:08):
So you refrigerator, that frequency drives other appliances in your house,
the lifespan is severely shortened. We already have problems with
stuff last and over five or ten years, you know,
appliance as wise in the house. So last thing we
need is some other variable coming in there killing them.
And how do we prove that we how do we
say yep, the data center killed my fridge. It sounds crazy,

(10:30):
but it's factual. You can look it up justin. Harmonics
is a real thing and it shortens our appliance as lifespans.

Speaker 1 (10:37):
The data center killed my fridge, I can imagine. But yeah,
these are questions. What we're talking about here is something
simple and this is a big This is a big conversation,
but it ought to happen because everyone needs to be
a part of this and to break these things down.
And on one hand, you think that these types of movements,
as far as putting these data centers in, they should

(10:58):
be or could be down a little slower, right, That
would be maybe the wise way to take, the wise
approach to take. On the other hand, they're saying, and
Trump Administration's partially behind this, is saying, look, we've got
to get into this otherwise we'll never be able to
compete with people like China. So we're going to have
continued conversations on these data centers and dig into some

(11:19):
of the issues behind it a little bit further. Bottom
line is, no matter what happens, the people in these
areas need to be involved in decisions, whether they want
them or not, and then needs to be more education.
We need to take a step back and learn more
about it. We'll do that in the coming days with
trink it to be affordable, ice Store, Lake Michigan Drive
and stand out before we do. This kind of reminds
me as government goes full force on things like this.

(11:41):
We just saw the story of the outcome on this again,
poor Greta. Here's another piece of bad news for Greta.
Oh dare you ford to record nineteen point five billion
dollars in special charges related to EV pullback. So they're
cutting the lightning, they're canceling some of these programs. They
just didn't sell on the mark it and it kind
of reminds me of that. But at the same time,

(12:03):
Trump is out there in the administration saying we want
to hire one thousand specialists for a tech force to
build AI and finance projects. So it is a balanced
conversation and one we will have to continue to have
at another time because as I mentioned, there's just so

(12:23):
much nuance to all of this that we're not gonna
have all the answers today, But at least we can
begin the conversation to get you talking and thinking about it.
Always a pleasure my friend. Thank you so much for
being here with us and the last time of the year.
Next time we see you it'll be next year, so
we'll wish you both a merry Christmas and a happy

(12:43):
New Year as we send you off today. Trent, always
a pleasure, my friend. Thank you so taking for the
much for taking the time to be here with us.

Speaker 2 (12:51):
Thanks justin hope you have a good old year and
beginning Vener hope we see each other again a.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Couple of weeks you too, my friend. Trent can be
affordableized Storelin Miss and Drive and stand Ow and Grand
River Tech, Grandvertech dot com as well. Thank you,