Murdock meeting puts farmers and Sierra Club against labor
Resistance to data center projects has surfaced in Republican-dominated states including Nebraska, Texas, and Wyoming, in swing-state Pennsylvania, and in Democratic-leaning New Mexico.
An August gathering in Murdock, Nebraska, illustrated the breadth of that opposition. Conservative farmers and representatives of the state Sierra Club chapter met with labor leaders at the local firehouse in the rural community of roughly 275 residents to discuss the rapid buildout of computing infrastructure powering artificial intelligence.
At the meeting, the farmers and Sierra Club representatives “found common cause against labor leaders,” aligning against data center development while labor leaders took a different position. The gathering drew characterization as “an unlikely coalition.”
Concerns raised at the meeting spanned the range of issues animating the broader opposition. Participants cited dwindling farmland, declining water supplies, rising electricity bills, and the prospect of small towns being reshaped into nodes in a national network of computing warehouses.