Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.
Mike Rogoway, who reports on the intersection of community and technology for The Oregonian, started covering his state’s first data center in 2006. As AI has advanced and data centers have proliferated, his beat has shifted to focus on the impact of these centers on life in Oregon, where tax breaks for Big Tech are causing an outcry and residents are increasingly seeking accountability. It isn’t always the easiest beat; corporations and local governments haven’t been entirely forthcoming, Rogoway told me, and litigation is sometimes required to get basic information. In 2022, for example, the city of The Dalles, about eighty miles east of Portland, filed a reverse public records lawsuit against Rogoway and The Oregonian to prevent them from getting information about Google’s local water usage. “I still find it very hard to get an executive at these companies on the phone to talk about what they’re doing in these communities and why,” he said.
Despite various promises to take care of locals, the power imbalance between the companies building data centers and the often rural communities that neighbor them persists, Rogoway said. “There is a recognition that data centers have provided some real benefits in small communities in Oregon and in many other parts of the country where they operate, especially communities that didn’t have a lot of other economic resources,” he told me. “At the same time, there’s a growing awareness that the real beneficiaries of the arrangements are the tech companies. They’re usually getting more out of each of these communities than what communities are getting in financial value.” It’s also unclear whether data centers will support a thriving AI industry far into the future or become, as one local official called the center in his community, “the largest hay shed” in Oregon. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
RS: Can you tell me how you ended up on the data center beat?
MR: I cover technology, and Oregon’s big industry is semiconductors, and so it was sort of a natural transition over to data centers, which are, of course, run by semiconductors. As the data center industry emerged, we got some of Big Tech’s first data centers. The first one opened in Oregon twenty years ago, in the small city of The Dalles. At the time, they were kind of a novelty—it was unusual to have Silicon Valley end up in small towns—so we wrote a series of stories, probably over more or less a decade, looking at various aspects of that. But the landscape has changed over the past seven or eight years as the scale of the installations has increased considerably, and it’s begun to affect power, water, tax revenue, and the physical landscape of some communities. So our coverage has changed somewhat to keep people abreast of how this industry is changing the state.
How difficult has it been to cover data centers? What are some of your considerations, and how do you approach stories?
It’s a very interesting beat to cover because often we cover technology companies from the top down: “What is Google doing? What is Apple doing? What technologies are they investing in?” And this is really covering technology on the ground. I mean, literally, right? You have Big Tech operating in really small communities, and it can be challenging because, particularly in the early years, and in no small measure today, the tech companies want to remain very discreet about what they’re doing and how they’re operating, so even basic information like their water consumption has sometimes been challenging to get. The tech companies are also very far from the communities where they’re operating. There are no senior Meta or Apple executives in Prineville, Oregon, for example. So if you want to find out what they plan in these communities, getting through the bulwarks of corporate PR can be very difficult, and there’s only so much available in public records, and the companies will often fight to keep some of that information secret.
That leads into something I wanted to ask you about. In 2022, The Dalles agreed to disclose records about its water usage to cool local data centers. But that followed a yearlong dispute that began when you filed public records requests. Can you tell me more about that incident and walk me through what happened?
This is a good example of clumsy reporting on my part. We’d heard that there was a new water agreement in the works between Google and the city of The Dalles, so I called up the public works director out there. He was very helpful, and we talked it all through, and at the end of the conversation I said goodbye and hung up. And then I thought, “Ah, I forgot to ask the most basic question. I forgot to ask how much water Google uses now.” And so I just sent him an email right then: “Hey, Dave, thanks for the call. I forgot to ask, how much water did Google use this year?” And that sort of set in motion a chain of events where the city treated that as a public records request and decided that it actually didn’t qualify for disclosure, so they wouldn’t tell us. In Oregon, the mechanism is, you appeal to the local DA and say, “How much water the public utility provides to its largest customer—that’s got to be a public record.” We’ve never had any trouble getting it in other jurisdictions. And the city fought that. The DA said, “You do have to provide this information to The Oregonian,” and the city responded by suing us. They argued that Google classified its water consumption as a trade secret.
It took a year, but finally Google backed down and provided the information to us and anyone else who wants it in The Dalles. They also began disclosing water use everywhere they operate, so it was a big departure for them. It’s been very helpful in understanding the landscape in The Dalles now, as Google continues to expand there. At the time, I think they were using something like a third of the city’s water, and now it’s 40 percent, and it stands to continue growing because Google has more data centers going in.
In terms of local governments, like in The Dalles, for example, do you find that they have motivations to keep information relating to data centers discreet, and is that something that you’ve run into often in your reporting?
The degree of responsiveness really varies. I’ll say in The Dalles, after this, there’s still some information that we can’t get from them. We can’t get forecasts of what Google says they’ll use in the future. But there are other things that I’ve found The Dalles to be very responsive about. I think the mayor has said as much. He feels that the secrecy around Google’s operations has sort of cast a pall over the company’s operations. In the same way that people might be a little suspicious of a large tech company coming to a small town, they are a little wary of newspapers coming from outside and reporting on the community, so it takes time to build trust, and people aren’t always going to be happy with what you write.
I’ve read some of your coverage about Hillsboro, Oregon, considering a pause on new data centers because people are frustrated about tax breaks for the industry. There’s been a bigger conversation, especially in recent months, about data centers and their consequences for communities. Do you think the pushback against them has increased, or was it there all along and it’s just becoming more public?
It’s funny, because you look at some of these data centers and they’re enormous in size, like several big-box stores smashed together, long data halls that go on for a third of a mile or longer. As big as they are, I think they’ve nonetheless kind of crept up on people. As far as pushback, and I can really only speak to Oregon right now, I would say that people didn’t anticipate the industry getting this large this fast, and I think there’s now a reckoning with that. You mentioned the possibility of moratoriums or restrictions taking place in a lot of the country already. I think in Oregon, people are just now thinking about that possibility. They’re just now looking around and saying, “Hey, what happened to all our industrial land? What’s happening to our electricity supply?”
There’s been a lot of conversation about the AI bubble bursting. Has it already burst? And what does that mean practically?
In Crook County, Oregon, the official in charge is a county judge, and I was talking to the county judge. This was many years ago now. And he says, “Well, if all this goes belly-up, then we’ll just have the largest hay shed in Central Oregon.” At this point, it’s happened so fast that people haven’t had time to wonder yet, “What happens if the industry transitions in some fundamental way?” Nobody’s banding together to say, “We’re going to tear these things down and pull up the foundations and return the land to make room for residential development or other industrial uses or agriculture.”
Now, it doesn’t seem like anybody’s shutting down large data centers anytime soon. But nobody’s taking the time—this has all moved so fast—to think about the long-range. Oregon is dotted with old timber mills that are just sitting there, or gravel extraction operations, things that nobody thought would shut down. Well, they did shut down eventually, and they’re taking up valuable land, and in some cases, there’s pollution associated with them. There’s a legacy with them that people didn’t anticipate—that, eventually, the economy changed, and they ended up being an albatross rather than a benefit.
This year, Microsoft started a “community-first AI infrastructure plan” and said it wouldn’t be using NDAs with local governments. Overall, do you think that more companies are becoming conscious of their impact? Is putting the community first even possible with data centers?
It’s early days. I think we’re seeing companies make pledges, and then it’s not exactly clear if they’ll stand by them in the long run. We’ve seen Big Tech equivocating on their clean-technology pledges over the past couple of years. Are they willing to compromise on their clean-tech renewable-power goals in order to move faster? Public disclosure might be another area where they may say, “We’re going to be forthcoming,” but then when it comes up, they might be a little recalcitrant.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
