Tommy Tuberville

This is an opinion column.

Tommy Tuberville wants to bring more data centers to Alabama.

That wasn’t a gaffe. It wasn’t a flub.

A Tuberville administration will be a data center administration, and he’s proud of it. He calls the public’s concerns with these massive tech developments “bullcrap.”

“I mean, they’re listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that’s coming from China because China does not want us to grow,” Tuberville told the Alabama Sheriffs Association this week. “The state of Alabama will grow. We’re going to do data centers.”

That’s right. We are going to do data centers. In the days since he spoke to the sheriffs, Tuberville has been asked whether he meant what he said.

He doubled down. Then he tripled down.

I frequently disagree with the senator, but it’s rare that I don’t understand him. When he spews bigotry about Muslims, I can see what he’s up to. There’s a market for it, and he’s selling.

Why a candidate for any office in America would go full data center is beyond me.

Last year, Georgia held elections for that state’s Public Service Commission, and voters showed just how strongly the public has turned against these things. Republicans crossed party lines to elect Democrats who opposed further development.

Read that again. Voters crossed party lines. In the South. For politicians everywhere, even incumbents, that should be terrifying.

But Tuberville seems to see it as some kind of dare. Before Alabama takes the leap with him, it’s worth seeing what “do data centers” might actually look like.

And I know just the place.

Data Center, USA

I have to admit, I didn’t appreciate the animus toward these things until I saw some for myself.

After moving to my new home outside Washington, D.C., I got a little homesick. I couldn’t find a biscuit. Restaurants here say they serve grits, but I’m pretty sure it’s cream of wheat wearing a disguise. I began to crave Cracker Barrel. The nearest one was in Sterling, Va.

Until I drove there, I knew only one thing about Sterling. It was the boyhood home of one of my favorite comedians, Patton Oswalt. He rants about it on one of his old albums, crediting the boring life of a dull small town with setting him up for success in the comedy clubs.

Only, as I approached, I could see huge buildings rising over the treetops. This wasn’t a small town. This was Data Center, USA.

It’s hard to convey what a major data center looks like up close. I had a similar reaction the first time I saw a cruise ship docked in Mobile. And Sterling has been overrun with them. Construction there is so widespread and so swift that a hard count is difficult. Estimates begin at 80 and run well past a hundred.

For every finished data center I saw, it seemed five more were under construction. There are so many of these things that, in places, it’s hard to navigate without an iPhone. Sightlines are meaningless when you’re surrounded by massive concrete boxes.

Still, you can sense what Sterling once looked like. Think what Alabaster is to Birmingham, or Athens is to Huntsville. But today, it looks like the loading dock of the Death Star.

The closest thing to a small Southern town you’ll find there is a cut-and-paste Cracker Barrel.

NIMBY? Too bad.

Locals aren’t happy, either. Many data centers here use what the industry calls “behind-the-meter” power generation. In plain English, they don’t run off the power grid. They run off massive gas-fired generators that never stop.

Imagine someone parking a semi by your home and running the engine — forever. Then imagine they parked a dozen more next to it.

You’ve probably heard of NIMBY, not in my back yard. There are homes in Sterling as close to these things as they could be without the data centers literally being in their backyards. If somebody could zone your armpit for a data center, they probably would.

It’s reasonable to ask how this is any different from other heavy industry. Better a data center than a stinky paper mill, right?

But paper mills employ people. Once built, many data centers bring fewer jobs than a grocery store, and they take the land, water and power that bigger employers might need.

Ostensibly, data centers could bring a tax windfall to rural Alabama. But those rural counties often tax land at the state minimum of 10 mills, and if someone like Tuberville starts handing out incentives, whatever benefit remains disappears fast.

Whose call is it?

Look, maybe some Alabama communities will decide data centers work for them. Maybe they’ll weigh the water and the noise and the power bills and decide the trade is worth it. Fine.

But that decision belongs to the people who will have to live beside these things. Not a shadowy developer. Not a public official who swore himself to secrecy the day he signed an NDA. And certainly not a politician who has already declared the public’s concerns “bullcrap.”

Tommy Tuberville has made up his mind.

There’s still time for Alabamians to make up theirs.