What Do We Owe This Place?

Butte has spent much of the past year arguing about data centers. The proposed Sabey facility raised legitimate concerns about electricity, water, public land, utility costs, transparency, and how much say citizens should have over a project of that scale. Even after Sabey backed away, citizens gathered more than 4,500 signatures seeking a vote on future data center development. The recent fight over whether those signatures should be accepted has only reinforced the feeling that important decisions are being made without enough public involvement.

I understand that frustration. But I keep wondering why the data center, specifically, has become the line in the sand.

Many are unaware that Butte already has a large data center. We also have REC Silicon, a major industrial user of energy and water, and, of course, we have the mine. Large industrial demands on this place are nothing new. That does not mean another data center is a good idea. It does make me wonder why this particular industry has become such a powerful rallying cry.

Part of the answer may be familiarity. Mining has been part of Butte for more than a century, and copper has an obvious physical presence in our lives. It becomes electrical wire, motors, buildings, vehicles, transmission systems, and countless other products. We understand what comes out of the mine and why someone might want it.

A data center is harder to understand in the same way. From the outside it is mostly a large building consuming an extraordinary amount of electricity. Nothing obvious leaves on a truck or railcar. What it produces is computation: data storage, communications, financial transactions, streaming, internet services, artificial intelligence, and much of the digital infrastructure on which the modern economy now depends.

It is tempting to see copper as necessary and all that computation as somehow superfluous, but that distinction gets difficult pretty quickly. Copper supports the physical infrastructure of our economy while data centers support much of its digital infrastructure. Neither category is automatically useful simply because something is being produced. Copper can go into critical infrastructure or another disposable consumer product. Computing can support scientific research, medicine, communication, and useful public services, or it can be devoted to advertising, financial speculation, surveillance, and an endless production of digital material nobody particularly needed.

So the question cannot simply be whether an industry produces something. We should be able to ask what it produces, for whom, and whether that production justifies what it requires from the world around it.

REC Silicon provides a useful local comparison. Its predecessor, Advanced Silicon Materials, was actively recruited to Butte in the 1990s and celebrated as economic diversification and high-tech manufacturing. The plant produced silane gas and extremely pure polysilicon used downstream in semiconductor manufacturing. For years that production was extraordinarily energy intensive, and high electricity costs eventually contributed to REC ending polysilicon production in Butte in 2024. Yet I do not remember its electrical demand provoking anything like the current opposition to data centers.

Perhaps REC made a trade that was easier for us to understand. There were manufacturing jobs and a physical product feeding an industry we considered important. A data center can require resources at an industrial scale while employing relatively few people and producing something largely invisible. If some of that computation seems frivolous, wasteful, or even harmful, skepticism about the bargain is entirely reasonable.

The mine complicates the picture further. I am an environmental engineer, and I do not pretend industrial-scale mining can occur without environmental consequences. But if we are going to mine copper, I can think of few places better prepared to do it than Butte. We already have a mine, a skilled workforce, processing and transportation infrastructure, extensive environmental monitoring, water-treatment systems, regulatory institutions, and generations of hard-earned experience with what happens when mining pollution is ignored.

That is not an argument for giving mining a free pass. It is an argument for doing it better. Butte has already paid dearly for the knowledge that environmental costs do not disappear when they are left off a company's balance sheet. The pollution remains somewhere. Someone treats the water. Someone pays for the cleanup. Someone lives downstream. Some organism loses habitat. Economists may call these costs externalities, but there is nothing external about them to whoever inherits them.

And that may be where this conversation begins to move beyond data centers.

Butte is not alone. Communities across the United States and around the world are wrestling with the same questions. Governments have imposed moratoria or restrictions on large data centers from New York to Amsterdam, while electricity constraints led Dublin to restrict new connections for years. Concerns are strikingly similar: water, electricity, land, utility costs, environmental impacts, and whether the economic benefits justify them.

The debate is happening even closer to home. Last week, the Fort Peck Tribal Executive Board voted to stop discussions with data center developers after three companies approached the reservation. Tribal leaders pointed to water concerns, previous experiences with companies damaging the land, and a basic unanswered question: what would the Tribes actually receive in return for allowing another industry to make intensive use of the place where they live?

There is something important in that question.

It’s tempting to use the phrase “our resources” when talking about these issues, but I am increasingly uncomfortable with it. Even the word resources can smuggle in an assumption that land, water, forests, minerals, rivers, and energy exist primarily for human use. They do not. They are parts of ecological systems in which we participate and upon which human and nonhuman communities depend. Calling them resources may be economically convenient, but it should not settle the moral question of what we are entitled to do with them.

And yet our economic system largely begins from exactly the opposite assumption. Land, water, minerals, energy, labor, and increasingly information are inputs. Capital seeks opportunities to combine those inputs in ways that generate additional capital. Communities compete to attract that investment because investment promises jobs, tax revenue, and economic growth.

That system has produced extraordinary material wealth. It also depends on continual expansion.

This is where I think the data center debate intersects with a much larger problem. For decades we have talked about addressing climate change primarily by cleaning up our energy supply. Replace coal and gas with wind, solar, storage, nuclear power, and other lower-carbon sources. Electrify vehicles and buildings. Those transitions are essential.

But they become much harder if total demand keeps expanding.

Data-center electricity consumption grew 17 percent globally just last year, and the International Energy Agency projects it will roughly double by 2030. AI-focused data centers are growing even faster. The IEA also notes a familiar paradox: individual computing tasks are becoming dramatically more energy efficient, while total consumption continues rising because we keep finding more things to compute and doing them at vastly greater scale.

That is not just a technology problem. It is a growth problem.

Efficiency gains are continually followed by new consumption. We build renewable generation, but instead of allowing all of it to displace fossil fuels, some is absorbed by new demand. We make machines more efficient, then make more machines. We consume less energy per unit of economic activity while insisting that the amount of economic activity must continue growing.

Some growth in electricity demand is desirable. Using electricity instead of gasoline to move a car or instead of natural gas to heat a building can reduce fossil-fuel use overall. But adding enormous new loads is different from shifting existing activities toward cleaner energy. At some point we have to ask whether supplying every economically profitable new demand is compatible with the ecological limits we claim to recognize.

That question is uncomfortable because it points toward something deeper than poor planning or a badly designed data center. It points toward capitalism's dependence on perpetual growth.

A company is supposed to grow. Investors expect returns. Utilities benefit from selling more electricity. Local governments pursue new taxable value. Workers need employment. Communities fear stagnation if investment goes elsewhere. Within that system, saying “perhaps we have enough” is surprisingly difficult.

And so the question we usually ask is, “How do we get more?”

More investment. More development. More energy. More production. More consumption.

Butte knows something about where that logic can lead. Extraordinary wealth has been extracted from this hill for more than a century. Some of it built this community and supported generations of families. Much of it went elsewhere. Many of the environmental costs stayed here.

That pattern is hardly unique to mining. One of capitalism's recurring tricks is to privatize the value produced while distributing some of the costs across workers, ratepayers, taxpayers, communities, future generations, and the rest of the living world.

Data centers did not invent that arrangement. They may simply make it unusually easy to see.

That is why I do not want to dismiss the people fighting them. I think many of the questions being raised are exactly the right ones. How much electricity? How much water? What does the community receive? Who profits? What happens if the industry leaves? What are the environmental consequences? Who gets to make the decision?

My concern is that we stop asking those questions once the building contains something other than computer servers.

Perhaps the lesson of the data center fight should not be that one particular technology deserves extraordinary scrutiny. Perhaps it should be that any activity making extraordinary demands on land, water, energy, ecosystems, or communities owes an extraordinary justification for doing so.

And perhaps even that does not go far enough. We might also ask whether perpetual economic growth should remain the unquestioned goal around which those decisions are organized.

Butte has spent more than a century learning what happens when tremendous wealth can leave a place while tremendous costs remain behind. That history should not make us afraid of every new industry. It should make us better at asking what development is for, who benefits from it, and what it asks other people and the living world to bear.

The data center fight has brought those questions into public view.

We should keep asking them.

Just not only about data centers.