February 27, 2025 • 16 mins
The Hopeful Primitive Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Georgia, has been standing for two hundred years. Now, with a huge, private equity-backed data center coming to town, it will soon be surrounded by towering power poles — and power lines will run through the yards of more than a hundred homes and private properties.
Today on the show, energy reporter Josh Saul reports on the AI boom, the demand it’s creating for data centers, and what it looks like on the ground in the communities where those are being built. Plus, the pastor from Hopeful Primitive Baptist talks about the community’s response.
Read more: Blackstone’s Data-Center Ambitions School a City on AI Power Strains
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Today, we're headed to Fayetteville, Georgia, just south of Atlanta,
and our first stop is the Hopeful Primitive Baptist Church.
This small, one room chapel has been standing for two
hundred years.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
When you walk in that door, you feel the history.
I mean, you can see the top hats and tails,
you can see the regalia of the time. You can
see the horses in the in there in what is
now the parking lot.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Scott Johnson is the pastor there and a longtime resident
of the area.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
It's close enough to the city to be close enough
to the city, but far enough away to be far
enough away. We love Fayetteville and it's a very special place.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah, you know, it's a small town. For a long time,
it's been a bedroom community, a lot of people commuting
to Atlanta, you know, working for Delta. People choose it
because it's because it's pretty a nice, quiet town.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Bloomberg reporter Josh Saul covers energy and that's what drew
his attention to Fayetteville, along with another one of our colleagues,
Don Lim.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
And then the reason we're interested in it is that
Blackstone came knocking.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Blackstone, the world's largest private equity firm.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
And Blackstone's data center development firm QTS decided that this
town in Georgia was a good place to build a really,
really big data center. And data centers are the thing
that underpin our modern technological lives. When I text a
gift to my wife, when you have a baby and
the doctor runs a bunch of tests, or if you
use chat GPT, all of that runs through data centers,
(01:34):
and there's a lot of money in them. Big gold
rush to build as many data centers and people pay
you to be in them.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Big tech companies in particular have been signing long term leases.
They've been building their own data centers and even exploring
the possibility of nuclear energy production to make sure there's
enough power to run all the data centers they'll need
in the future. At first, Fayetteville was excited to cash
in on this piece of the AI gold rush. That is,
town residents started to grasp how much power a data
(02:03):
center would need to operate.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Where people who live in the town really started noticing
that this was coming was when the local power company
started coming around and saying, we're going to need to
build a big power line to get electricity to the
data center, and the power line's going to need to
come through your yard.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
That was the message to more than one hundred homes
and private properties, including the Church of Scott Johnson, the pastor.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
These are not just regular street power line polls that
you think of. These are massive, high energy, high frequency
power lines. And so they're going to be draped on
two sides of our property up along New Hope Road
and across the intersection right at our corner. So on
two different corners, we will be draped with these invasive,
(02:48):
ugly monstrosities.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I'm David Gura, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg New Today on the show Not in My Backyard,
the Data Center Edition. What American demand for data centers
means through the communities across the country where they're built,
the companies that invest in them, and are power consumption.
(03:17):
The town of Fayetteville, Georgia, had been trying to get
a data center because of the tax revenue that would
come with it, So at first, landing a big data
center developer like QTS seemed like a big coup for
the community. QTS has data centers all across the US,
and claims to be the fastest growing data center company.
Microsoft soon expressed interest in the Fayetteville data center. In Bloomberg'
(03:40):
Josh Saul says Fayetteville had a lot to offer.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
One of the big reasons is that Georgia Power, the
power company there, is good at providing power. It's what
they do, so the electricity is relatively cheap, it's very reliable,
and there's open land.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
We're going to talk about the amount of power that
these things need, but maybe we could talk about what
they look like physically first. How big is a data center,
a modern data center?
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I guess the simplest way to say is that they
are huge. You could think of two walmarts stacked on
top of each other with no windows. The ones that
have been inside recently are relatively small, maybe a tenth
the size in terms of energy consumption as this one
in Georgia, and when you're inside them, they are still enormous,
you know, just huge, huge rooms. You could play a
sick game of paintball in there, and just really really big.
(04:25):
And in parts of the country, like in northern Virginia,
when you drive through, you drive through areas that are
just all data centers, So you just drive by them
for a while and there's just data center after data center,
and there's some slightly different architectural elements, and they're oriented
in different directions, but they all look roughly the same
and all have the same small parking lots with you know,
a couple of techs or a couple of prospective clients
(04:47):
parked there.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
How different are the data centers that are being built
today from ones that we were seeing being built, you know,
five years ago, ten years ago. What sets them apart
from what we've seen in the.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Past, right, Well, they're just a lot bigger and a
lot more powerful. I mean you talk to old gues
in the industry and they're kind of like, yeah, I
mean when I started out, we had a data center
in our office, it was just called the computer room,
and it was just a room that had a couple
of computers on it, and at that point that was
enough to hold the whole office's technology. Now that is
definitely not the case. So yeah, the simplest way to
(05:16):
answer it is the way that data centers have changed
is that they continue to get bigger, they continue to
get more powerful, and they continue to take on new tasks.
Now AI is starting to just be a part of
our everyday life. And all of that runs through data
centers like the one in Georgia that we're talking about,
but also like the ones in northern Virginia or in
the deserts of Arizona, or Ireland or Singapore or kind
(05:38):
of any of these other places we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
How should we think about the amount of power that
these data centers require.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
It's so much power this one data center in Georgia
is going to use over giggle weep. I mean, you've
ever seen the Simpsons that whole nuclear plant. Mister Burns
never said exactly how what its capacity was, but that
nuclear plant. Imagine that whole thing powering just one big
data center.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I mean, that's astonishing.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
It's really a lot of power. It surprises you because
for a long time in the US, power demand was flat.
You know, even as people built more houses, things got
generally a little more efficient, and power demand would creep
up by one or two percent a year. It was
just just a very slow, very sleepy industry. That has
definitely changed. People and our economy just need a lot
more electricity than they used to. So we went from
(06:24):
that really slow load growth to just this kind of
hockey stick projection that we're seeing now. I mean, some
analysts I talk to compare it to you know, we
haven't seen this kind of change in our energy systems
in the US the amount of electricity we use since
World War Two.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
The US Department of Energy estimates that growth in electricity
usage by data centers has tripled over the last decade,
and it expects that growth to double or triple again
in the next three years. Josh, how wide is the
gap between the need what these data centers need in
terms of power and what these utilities are able to provide.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Well, the utilities are pretty happy about building a lot
more generation, and that's really changed the outlook for some
of these companies because instead of what we saw a
few years ago in terms of they were going to
be building more clean energy, shutting down their old coal
plants and building little or no new gas plants, now
they're sort of, WHOA, We're not going to shut down
(07:18):
our old coal plants. We need to build a lot
of new gas and we're going to build new clean
energy also. But it's completely changed the generation plans for
these companies.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Can you just talk a little bit about the investment
that's flowed into these data centers.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, I mean Blackstone Bough QTS and twenty twenty one,
they turned it into the fastest growing US data center landlord,
and it now makes a lot of money for them.
You know, they have a footprint right now that's got
roughly fifty billion dollars in data centers, and there's another
fifty billion of you know, prospective data centers perspective developments
in the pipeline. So it's a huge operation.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
In something it sounds like Lackstone, and I'm sure others
are very committed to. They see this as being an
opportunity now and certainly one into the future.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah. I means alone now has something like two and
a half gigawatts of signed power capacity, meaning that's data
centers with that much power that are signed to flow
into them. Their goal is to have more like six
gigawats as aiming towards and for capacity, I mean that's
more electricity than is used by the city of Miami.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
After the break, Fayetteville residents and city officials were surprised
by the amount of power their new neighbor is going
to require. And that is when the backlash started. That
data center in Fayetteville, Georgia is now under construction on
(08:38):
six hundred acres. When it's finished, ten hulking bunkers will
hold thousands of computers, and Bloomberg's Josh Saul says it's
expected to consume as much electricity as about a million
US households. A million households, Well, that figure came as
a surprise to some people in Fayetteville.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Town officials sort of assumed, I mean, like a new
super market or a new house, it's just going to
plug into our current electric rid. They did not know
that it was going to take massive new power lines.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
And is that simply a lack of people in that
town doing their due diligence or has he been reporting
on this in other communities? Is this perhaps common?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Well, it was a little hard to suss out. Local
officials told my co writer Don Lim that it was
their understanding or they were told by the companies that
the local infrastructure was sufficient, that yep, what's here is fine,
nothing new needs to be built. People close to QTS
told us that what they said to local officials was
based on what Georgia Power told them. And then when
(09:37):
we went to Georgia Power. Georgia Power said that transmission
planning is a long process and they don't disclose confidential
client information to town officials. So, I mean, that's all
very complicated. But what it boils down to, at least
from the stance from the viewpoint of homeowners and town officials,
was that they did not know this big transmission line
was going to be needed until the deal was basically done,
(10:00):
and there were Georgia Power workers knocking on people's doors
saying they wanted to buy an easement through their property.
That's the point when TANN officials found out, oh kind
of package up with this deal is going to be
a huge new transmission line that's really going to change
the face of our town.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
The power lines were set to encroach on more than
one hundred properties and houses.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
I mean, nobody likes a big transmission line coming through
their property. You know, sometimes when I'm working on this
kind of story, I think about the house I grew
up in Alaska, and like, if a big transmission line
was built right through the view in front of the
house that my mom and dad built with their hands,
you know, it's like that doesn't make anybody happy. That's
roughly the reaction that people in Fayetteville had is like, no,
I don't want even for ten grand or one hundred grand. No,
(10:39):
I don't want to sell you an easement for a
massive power line to come through where I like to
you know, watch deer. But underneath all of that was
sort of the understood truth that this was a David
versus Glad situation and the power line was coming. And
people are also scared of eminent domain, which is rarely used,
but kind of is you know, underpins all these negotiations,
which is, you know, if there's a few holdouts along
(11:01):
the path of an important piece of public infrastructure like
a highway or a power line, you know, a company
like Georgia Power can go to court and can get
the right to buy the land and buy the easement
by force. So yeah, people were you know, protesting and unhappy,
but they, I think at some point understood that the
power line was coming.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Josh, what did those homeowners tell you about their response
when they started getting those knocks on doors?
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, well, kind of right from the beginning, there were
some some ring leaders or some organizers, and people would
get together and talk about, well, if none of us
sell out, then the power line won't come through here
and maybe it'll have to go somewhere else, or maybe
they'll they won't build this data center after all. There
was even a group of people who went to one
of the meetings held by the regulators Halloween's to everyone,
(11:50):
the state commission that regulates utilities like Georgia Power. We
do have some folks signed up for a public comment
and they went there to speak before the regulation saying like,
we don't want this thing here Ross. We and the
community are extremely upset, which is why we are here
today appealing to you to police help us commissioners. These
people are being asked to do is destroy the value
(12:14):
of their property and they're only serving one customer, the
data set, so there was a lot of resistance.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
One home owner told Josh and his co reporter that
Georgia Power first offered only twenty eight hundred dollars for
an easement on her property. Months later, that offer came
up to around one hundred and forty thousand dollars, but
she still felt like that wasn't enough to make up
for what she thought it would do to her home value.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
We talked to some appraisers for the story, and one
told us that the range that big power lines can
drop a property's value can be, you know, ten to
thirty percent. It can be higher in rural areas because
people are in those areas because they value that quiet,
those pretty lanes.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
After the community backlash, some locals claim there were adjustments
to the power the power lines, including moving one of
the power lines farther away from Pastor Scott Johnson's church.
Georgia Power, owned by Southern Company, disputes the power line
would have been on church land and said it engaged
with dozens of property owners and residents to work to
address their concerns. QTS said it had no input on
(13:19):
the location of power infrastructure, but even with the lines
now across the street, Pastor Johnson still is not happy.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
We all appreciate electricity. We're not trying to be bad neighbors,
but we don't want you to be a bad neighbor either.
Simply bury the lines, that's all we ask, and it
has been ignored. They said it would cost too much,
so you know it's costing homeowners. We know it looks
(13:46):
like it's happening, and we've resigned ourselves to that likelihood.
We still would like to hope that that one of
the rocks in our sling will find the forehead and
they will break and say, you know, let's bury the lines,
do the right thing.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Josh, let me ask you about the other side of this.
So what has QTS said about what protesters have alleged
and what if they said about just the benefits of
building this data center and sort of the effect it
might have on this community.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
I mean, QTS makes the very fair point that these
data centers are in huge demand. QTS is not creating
the demand we all are with our phones and with
the companies that we use. And I don't know, he's
like all parts of our technologically driven world or AI,
but I mean it's all around us. So QTS would
say that they're fulfilling a need, like there's data centers
(14:36):
that are going to get built. There's companies and people
that want to fill them. And they would also make
points about town officials wanted a data center here, and
they would also make points about, you know, the tax
revenue of having a data center in your town. I mean,
I think the first year that QTS operates this data center,
it's going to throw off enough tax revenue just for
the school board for the equivalent of half a dozen
(14:57):
teacher salaries. So I mean, I think, as I do
this kind of reporting, I think a lot about these balancing,
balancing these different desires. And I mean, I like green spaces,
I like going for walks with my kids. I like
having woods and being able to walk through them. But
you know, I also like the idea teacher salaries, and
I like the idea of the US being a technological leader.
So it's just hard. It's hard to balance all these things.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
As we noted, the data center boom is being propelled
in part by consumer and business demand for AI, which
needs massive amounts of computing power. But the release of
China's deep Seek AI model did raise some questions over
whether all this computing power is really needed, And this
week there was one sign that companies might be rethinking
their own power demands. T. D. Cowen reported that Microsoft
(15:47):
had canceled some leases for US data center capacity. This
is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura.
This episode is produced by Alex tie. It was edited
by Tracy Samuelson and Kara Wetzel. It was fact checked
by Adriana Tapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Segura.
Special thanks to Don lim Our Senior producer is Naomi
(16:10):
shaven Our, Senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our Executive producer
is Nicole Beemster. Bor Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and
review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It
helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be
back tomorrow
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Today, we're headed to Fayetteville, Georgia, just south of Atlanta,
and our first stop is the Hopeful Primitive Baptist Church.
This small, one room chapel has been standing for two
hundred years.
Speaker 3 (00:18):
When you walk in that door, you feel the history.
I mean, you can see the top hats and tails,
you can see the regalia of the time. You can
see the horses in the in there in what is
now the parking lot.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
Scott Johnson is the pastor there and a longtime resident
of the area.
Speaker 3 (00:35):
It's close enough to the city to be close enough
to the city, but far enough away to be far
enough away. We love Fayetteville and it's a very special place.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
Yeah, you know, it's a small town. For a long time,
it's been a bedroom community, a lot of people commuting
to Atlanta, you know, working for Delta. People choose it
because it's because it's pretty a nice, quiet town.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
Bloomberg reporter Josh Saul covers energy and that's what drew
his attention to Fayetteville, along with another one of our colleagues,
Don Lim.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
And then the reason we're interested in it is that
Blackstone came knocking.
Speaker 2 (01:08):
Blackstone, the world's largest private equity firm.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
And Blackstone's data center development firm QTS decided that this
town in Georgia was a good place to build a really,
really big data center. And data centers are the thing
that underpin our modern technological lives. When I text a
gift to my wife, when you have a baby and
the doctor runs a bunch of tests, or if you
use chat GPT, all of that runs through data centers,
(01:34):
and there's a lot of money in them. Big gold
rush to build as many data centers and people pay
you to be in them.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Big tech companies in particular have been signing long term leases.
They've been building their own data centers and even exploring
the possibility of nuclear energy production to make sure there's
enough power to run all the data centers they'll need
in the future. At first, Fayetteville was excited to cash
in on this piece of the AI gold rush. That is,
town residents started to grasp how much power a data
(02:03):
center would need to operate.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
Where people who live in the town really started noticing
that this was coming was when the local power company
started coming around and saying, we're going to need to
build a big power line to get electricity to the
data center, and the power line's going to need to
come through your yard.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
That was the message to more than one hundred homes
and private properties, including the Church of Scott Johnson, the pastor.
Speaker 3 (02:27):
These are not just regular street power line polls that
you think of. These are massive, high energy, high frequency
power lines. And so they're going to be draped on
two sides of our property up along New Hope Road
and across the intersection right at our corner. So on
two different corners, we will be draped with these invasive,
(02:48):
ugly monstrosities.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I'm David Gura, and this is the big take from
Bloomberg New Today on the show Not in My Backyard,
the Data Center Edition. What American demand for data centers
means through the communities across the country where they're built,
the companies that invest in them, and are power consumption.
(03:17):
The town of Fayetteville, Georgia, had been trying to get
a data center because of the tax revenue that would
come with it, So at first, landing a big data
center developer like QTS seemed like a big coup for
the community. QTS has data centers all across the US,
and claims to be the fastest growing data center company.
Microsoft soon expressed interest in the Fayetteville data center. In Bloomberg'
(03:40):
Josh Saul says Fayetteville had a lot to offer.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
One of the big reasons is that Georgia Power, the
power company there, is good at providing power. It's what
they do, so the electricity is relatively cheap, it's very reliable,
and there's open land.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
We're going to talk about the amount of power that
these things need, but maybe we could talk about what
they look like physically first. How big is a data center,
a modern data center?
Speaker 1 (04:02):
I guess the simplest way to say is that they
are huge. You could think of two walmarts stacked on
top of each other with no windows. The ones that
have been inside recently are relatively small, maybe a tenth
the size in terms of energy consumption as this one
in Georgia, and when you're inside them, they are still enormous,
you know, just huge, huge rooms. You could play a
sick game of paintball in there, and just really really big.
(04:25):
And in parts of the country, like in northern Virginia,
when you drive through, you drive through areas that are
just all data centers, So you just drive by them
for a while and there's just data center after data center,
and there's some slightly different architectural elements, and they're oriented
in different directions, but they all look roughly the same
and all have the same small parking lots with you know,
a couple of techs or a couple of prospective clients
(04:47):
parked there.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
How different are the data centers that are being built
today from ones that we were seeing being built, you know,
five years ago, ten years ago. What sets them apart
from what we've seen in the.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Past, right, Well, they're just a lot bigger and a
lot more powerful. I mean you talk to old gues
in the industry and they're kind of like, yeah, I
mean when I started out, we had a data center
in our office, it was just called the computer room,
and it was just a room that had a couple
of computers on it, and at that point that was
enough to hold the whole office's technology. Now that is
definitely not the case. So yeah, the simplest way to
(05:16):
answer it is the way that data centers have changed
is that they continue to get bigger, they continue to
get more powerful, and they continue to take on new tasks.
Now AI is starting to just be a part of
our everyday life. And all of that runs through data
centers like the one in Georgia that we're talking about,
but also like the ones in northern Virginia or in
the deserts of Arizona, or Ireland or Singapore or kind
(05:38):
of any of these other places we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
How should we think about the amount of power that
these data centers require.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
It's so much power this one data center in Georgia
is going to use over giggle weep. I mean, you've
ever seen the Simpsons that whole nuclear plant. Mister Burns
never said exactly how what its capacity was, but that
nuclear plant. Imagine that whole thing powering just one big
data center.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I mean, that's astonishing.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
It's really a lot of power. It surprises you because
for a long time in the US, power demand was flat.
You know, even as people built more houses, things got
generally a little more efficient, and power demand would creep
up by one or two percent a year. It was
just just a very slow, very sleepy industry. That has
definitely changed. People and our economy just need a lot
more electricity than they used to. So we went from
(06:24):
that really slow load growth to just this kind of
hockey stick projection that we're seeing now. I mean, some
analysts I talk to compare it to you know, we
haven't seen this kind of change in our energy systems
in the US the amount of electricity we use since
World War Two.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
The US Department of Energy estimates that growth in electricity
usage by data centers has tripled over the last decade,
and it expects that growth to double or triple again
in the next three years. Josh, how wide is the
gap between the need what these data centers need in
terms of power and what these utilities are able to provide.
Speaker 1 (06:57):
Well, the utilities are pretty happy about building a lot
more generation, and that's really changed the outlook for some
of these companies because instead of what we saw a
few years ago in terms of they were going to
be building more clean energy, shutting down their old coal
plants and building little or no new gas plants, now
they're sort of, WHOA, We're not going to shut down
(07:18):
our old coal plants. We need to build a lot
of new gas and we're going to build new clean
energy also. But it's completely changed the generation plans for
these companies.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Can you just talk a little bit about the investment
that's flowed into these data centers.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, I mean Blackstone Bough QTS and twenty twenty one,
they turned it into the fastest growing US data center landlord,
and it now makes a lot of money for them.
You know, they have a footprint right now that's got
roughly fifty billion dollars in data centers, and there's another
fifty billion of you know, prospective data centers perspective developments
in the pipeline. So it's a huge operation.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
In something it sounds like Lackstone, and I'm sure others
are very committed to. They see this as being an
opportunity now and certainly one into the future.
Speaker 1 (07:59):
Yeah. I means alone now has something like two and
a half gigawatts of signed power capacity, meaning that's data
centers with that much power that are signed to flow
into them. Their goal is to have more like six
gigawats as aiming towards and for capacity, I mean that's
more electricity than is used by the city of Miami.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
After the break, Fayetteville residents and city officials were surprised
by the amount of power their new neighbor is going
to require. And that is when the backlash started. That
data center in Fayetteville, Georgia is now under construction on
(08:38):
six hundred acres. When it's finished, ten hulking bunkers will
hold thousands of computers, and Bloomberg's Josh Saul says it's
expected to consume as much electricity as about a million
US households. A million households, Well, that figure came as
a surprise to some people in Fayetteville.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
Town officials sort of assumed, I mean, like a new
super market or a new house, it's just going to
plug into our current electric rid. They did not know
that it was going to take massive new power lines.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
And is that simply a lack of people in that
town doing their due diligence or has he been reporting
on this in other communities? Is this perhaps common?
Speaker 1 (09:16):
Well, it was a little hard to suss out. Local
officials told my co writer Don Lim that it was
their understanding or they were told by the companies that
the local infrastructure was sufficient, that yep, what's here is fine,
nothing new needs to be built. People close to QTS
told us that what they said to local officials was
based on what Georgia Power told them. And then when
(09:37):
we went to Georgia Power. Georgia Power said that transmission
planning is a long process and they don't disclose confidential
client information to town officials. So, I mean, that's all
very complicated. But what it boils down to, at least
from the stance from the viewpoint of homeowners and town officials,
was that they did not know this big transmission line
was going to be needed until the deal was basically done,
(10:00):
and there were Georgia Power workers knocking on people's doors
saying they wanted to buy an easement through their property.
That's the point when TANN officials found out, oh kind
of package up with this deal is going to be
a huge new transmission line that's really going to change
the face of our town.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
The power lines were set to encroach on more than
one hundred properties and houses.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
I mean, nobody likes a big transmission line coming through
their property. You know, sometimes when I'm working on this
kind of story, I think about the house I grew
up in Alaska, and like, if a big transmission line
was built right through the view in front of the
house that my mom and dad built with their hands,
you know, it's like that doesn't make anybody happy. That's
roughly the reaction that people in Fayetteville had is like, no,
I don't want even for ten grand or one hundred grand. No,
(10:39):
I don't want to sell you an easement for a
massive power line to come through where I like to
you know, watch deer. But underneath all of that was
sort of the understood truth that this was a David
versus Glad situation and the power line was coming. And
people are also scared of eminent domain, which is rarely used,
but kind of is you know, underpins all these negotiations,
which is, you know, if there's a few holdouts along
(11:01):
the path of an important piece of public infrastructure like
a highway or a power line, you know, a company
like Georgia Power can go to court and can get
the right to buy the land and buy the easement
by force. So yeah, people were you know, protesting and unhappy,
but they, I think at some point understood that the
power line was coming.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Josh, what did those homeowners tell you about their response
when they started getting those knocks on doors?
Speaker 1 (11:27):
Yeah, well, kind of right from the beginning, there were
some some ring leaders or some organizers, and people would
get together and talk about, well, if none of us
sell out, then the power line won't come through here
and maybe it'll have to go somewhere else, or maybe
they'll they won't build this data center after all. There
was even a group of people who went to one
of the meetings held by the regulators Halloween's to everyone,
(11:50):
the state commission that regulates utilities like Georgia Power. We
do have some folks signed up for a public comment
and they went there to speak before the regulation saying like,
we don't want this thing here Ross. We and the
community are extremely upset, which is why we are here
today appealing to you to police help us commissioners. These
people are being asked to do is destroy the value
(12:14):
of their property and they're only serving one customer, the
data set, so there was a lot of resistance.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
One home owner told Josh and his co reporter that
Georgia Power first offered only twenty eight hundred dollars for
an easement on her property. Months later, that offer came
up to around one hundred and forty thousand dollars, but
she still felt like that wasn't enough to make up
for what she thought it would do to her home value.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
We talked to some appraisers for the story, and one
told us that the range that big power lines can
drop a property's value can be, you know, ten to
thirty percent. It can be higher in rural areas because
people are in those areas because they value that quiet,
those pretty lanes.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
After the community backlash, some locals claim there were adjustments
to the power the power lines, including moving one of
the power lines farther away from Pastor Scott Johnson's church.
Georgia Power, owned by Southern Company, disputes the power line
would have been on church land and said it engaged
with dozens of property owners and residents to work to
address their concerns. QTS said it had no input on
(13:19):
the location of power infrastructure, but even with the lines
now across the street, Pastor Johnson still is not happy.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
We all appreciate electricity. We're not trying to be bad neighbors,
but we don't want you to be a bad neighbor either.
Simply bury the lines, that's all we ask, and it
has been ignored. They said it would cost too much,
so you know it's costing homeowners. We know it looks
(13:46):
like it's happening, and we've resigned ourselves to that likelihood.
We still would like to hope that that one of
the rocks in our sling will find the forehead and
they will break and say, you know, let's bury the lines,
do the right thing.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Josh, let me ask you about the other side of this.
So what has QTS said about what protesters have alleged
and what if they said about just the benefits of
building this data center and sort of the effect it
might have on this community.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
I mean, QTS makes the very fair point that these
data centers are in huge demand. QTS is not creating
the demand we all are with our phones and with
the companies that we use. And I don't know, he's
like all parts of our technologically driven world or AI,
but I mean it's all around us. So QTS would
say that they're fulfilling a need, like there's data centers
(14:36):
that are going to get built. There's companies and people
that want to fill them. And they would also make
points about town officials wanted a data center here, and
they would also make points about, you know, the tax
revenue of having a data center in your town. I mean,
I think the first year that QTS operates this data center,
it's going to throw off enough tax revenue just for
the school board for the equivalent of half a dozen
(14:57):
teacher salaries. So I mean, I think, as I do
this kind of reporting, I think a lot about these balancing,
balancing these different desires. And I mean, I like green spaces,
I like going for walks with my kids. I like
having woods and being able to walk through them. But
you know, I also like the idea teacher salaries, and
I like the idea of the US being a technological leader.
So it's just hard. It's hard to balance all these things.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
As we noted, the data center boom is being propelled
in part by consumer and business demand for AI, which
needs massive amounts of computing power. But the release of
China's deep Seek AI model did raise some questions over
whether all this computing power is really needed, And this
week there was one sign that companies might be rethinking
their own power demands. T. D. Cowen reported that Microsoft
(15:47):
had canceled some leases for US data center capacity. This
is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm David Gura.
This episode is produced by Alex tie. It was edited
by Tracy Samuelson and Kara Wetzel. It was fact checked
by Adriana Tapia and mixed and sound designed by Alex Segura.
Special thanks to Don lim Our Senior producer is Naomi
(16:10):
shaven Our, Senior editor is Elizabeth Ponso. Our Executive producer
is Nicole Beemster. Bor Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's head of podcasts.
If you liked this episode, make sure to subscribe and
review The Big Take wherever you listen to podcasts. It
helps people find the show. Thanks for listening. We'll be
back tomorrow
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