I live in Nashville. This story is all over the place in general. People assume all the things like it will make their rates go up, etc.

I'm not opposed to data centers in general but the location is right next to our zoo which has grown tremendously along with the city over the past twenty years. Took my kids there when they were small and we still have a couples membership.

It's very difficult even here to get facts about this whole thing, but I'm pretty sure the million dollar an acre price was a factor in the original deal.

Now on top of that take a city government who's still recovering from many criticisms from the ice storm earlier this year where people were without power for weeks. The demand for action has been great and very loud.

But ... eminent domain to take over the land? That is a terrible precedent to set and very dangerous. Honestly if the politics were on the other side here (say, the state government who claimed eminent domain), it would probably be seen as the terrible thing it is (the state government is incredibly maga but the city is very left).

Chattanooga (just hours away) has a DC Blox data center, approximately 50,000sqft (tiny!), located on the southwest corner of Main Street and Center Streets – yet if you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. It is entirely surrounded by apartment buildings and smaller retail.

I spent most of my IBEW apprenticeship working in data centers of all sizes (5-300,000 sqft), and micro co-location facilities (like DCb's) are entirely different from the likes of the AWSes and cryptomining operations of this world (250,000sqft+).

Happy for the zoo exhibits/animals, but this particular co-lo wasn't even among the egregious data center owners.

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My recommendation to data center planners: small cities have cheaper land, and lots of love/power/cronyism. You may get further by buddying up with the smaller fishes/communities.

Agreed and disagreed. It is a terrible precedent for sure. On the other hand, government inaction, usually hiding behind arcane codes, process, and blame circles gets really frustrating. In that world, they'd still be waiting on a court date(if even) when the data center cuts its ribbon.

It's kinda nice to see them just drop the nuclear option on something the people didn't want. At this point, it's kinda nice to see a government accomplish anything nice at all.

This sounds like one of those cases where the opposition may be right about the project and still wrong about the mechanism