OPINION
In my original hometown of Boling, there's a new building under construction.
It will be just down the street from the egg farm that my dad worked for when he and my mom moved to Texas before I was born.
It's supposed to add around 25 jobs, but if the opposition to the facility doesn't win out, it could cost my first hometown a lot more than it will provide.
That's because this new building is a data center owned by Amazon Web Services.
I'm by no means the first to bemoan how many data centers are popping up throughout the country.
The Texas Tribune has reported about the proliferation of such facilities and the debates about preventing them.
'In March, state Rep. Helen Kerwin, a Republican who represents rural Glen Rose, penned a letter to Abbott calling for an 'IMMEDIATE PAUSE' on new large-scale data center developments to allow for impact studies, particularly on water availability and grid capacity,' according to the article by Taylor Goldenstein from May 7. 'Somervell County, which falls entirely in her district, has a tax abatement deal with Amazon for a 600-megawatt data center. Kerwin said she knows of at least five other potential applications in her district.'
The first data center I laid eyes on in person sits in Navarro County near the family ranch where Jim's first wife, Suzanne Brown Bardwell, grew up.
The area is full of working ranches, including the one that her brother Philip still cares for daily.
The area has long, hot and humid summers, and the Texas Almanac reports that the average annual rainfall there is 37.74 inches. Somerville County gets a bit less rain, according to the almanac, with an annual annual average of 32.65 inches. I'm no hydrologist, but it seems problematic to put a thirsty data center, most of which are water-cooled, into the midst of a temperate area that doesn't even get 50 inches of rain in a year.
As those of us living in North Texas know, water is becoming a more and more scarce resource.
Convenience is great, but should it really come at the cost of one of our most basic and necessary resources?
When Jim and I were sitting in Ernesto's a few weeks ago, I heard a woman telling her companion at dinner that he needed to use ChatGPT.
She proceeded to show him several mundane things he could use other resources to find or do without the use of AI.
I'm sure that, short of something catastrophic happening, we have to use some level of AI in our daily lives, because it's part of everything now—phones, a simple Google search and almost all other modern electronics.
We need guardrails sooner than later on its use and its proliferation, or we're going to suffer for lack of foresight.
Abigail Bardwell is the Editor & Publisher of the Post-Signal, and she serves on both the North and East Texas Press Association and the Texas Press Association boards. She can be reached at [email protected].
