Data centers are cropping up across the country, and Kentucky is no stranger to the developments.

Just this week, a new massive development was announced for Northeast Kentucky.

But not everyone is on board.

Our Emily Prince sat down with Connor Giffin of The Courier-Journal today to learn more about data centers moving in across the Commonwealth.

More in our Reporter's Notebook segment.

Connor, thank you so much for joining us.

Thanks for having.

Me.

Absolutely.

So from your reporting, we know that there are a handful of data center developments out there that are either in progress or their perspective.

So where are some of these locations at and just how much money is being invested to make these happen?

Yeah.

So we've seen a few of these crop up around the state.

There's a few of them that are now, you know, in a planning phase and are seem to be moving forward.

There's tens of billions of dollars at this point that companies have said they're intending to spend on these projects.

You know, to put that in perspective, the annual city budget of a city like Louisville, Kentucky's biggest city, is a little more than $1 billion a year.

So this is a huge amount of investment, for the state to see.

And we've seen a lot of them kind of crop up, around kind of the Ohio River corridor.

In part because there's a lot of industrial land around the river.

And they also have access to kind of that existing electric transmission.

So that's kind of part of why you're seeing them crop up along, those areas.

Possibly the latest announcement was in northeast Kentucky just announced this week, plans for a data center around the Boyd County, Greene County, those kind of areas.

Tell me more about what are the plans there and who is the company behind this?

Yeah.

On on Tuesday, we learned that a company called Terra Wolf had plans to build a data center in the East Park Industrial Park, on about 285 acres.

That industrial park is on the border of, Boyd County and Greenup County.

And had plans to scale up to about a gigawatt of power.

That's 1000MW by 2030.

That scale would make it among the largest projects we've seen proposed anywhere in the state.

Yeah.

And it's an important note that this company, Terra Wolf, is the same company who's driving another data center in Hancock County, right?

Right.

Yeah.

So that that company might sound familiar because they're building, another large hyperscale data center in Hancock County.

And in that project.

It's kind of interesting.

They found a site again along the Ohio River that's on the site of the former Century Aluminum, smelter outside Hartsville, if you're familiar with that area.

And that smelter had been idled for a few years since 2022.

The company had, laid off its, its employee employees.

About 600 people worked there.

And, said that they weren't able to operate due to steep energy costs.

And now, Terra Wolf has acquired that land in about a $200 million sale.

They're going to be building a data center there.

And in their statement, earlier this week, we heard them say that, they found Kentucky to be a, you know, an appealing state, largely because of our access to, energy.

Yeah, that's a great point, cause I think what's on a lot of people's minds is, you know, why?

Why are these companies picking Kentucky?

So that's a good point there.

I want to turn back to Northeast Kentucky because there has been a lot of controversy from the community.

I think that's not uncommon when we see these announcements, but a lot of folks in the community are complaining about maybe the lack of transparency from the elected officials or just concerns that they have about a data center coming to town.

Tell me more about the arguments there.

What are you hearing from those folks?

And and for the people who don't want this to come.

Why is that?

Yeah, we're hearing almost as far as I've seen every, every project of this scale that we've seen, proposed or announced, has pretty quickly seen public backlash.

There's there's definitely, a large, concern among the community that these projects are going to harm environmental quality, quality of life.

There's a lot of concern that because of the heavy draw on infrastructure, including, electric utilities, that they can see their rates increase.

And in, in Boyd County, specifically the judge executive, he made a post kind of giving a statement, sharing his arguments for why he was in favor of this.

What did he say?

Yeah.

Eric Chaney, the judge for County, he was saying that this is a project that would, you know, it would bring an industrial, project to a site that was intended for an industrial project, one that had sat vacant for a long time.

He said that local and state officials had spent a lot of time collaborating to make sure that this project maybe wouldn't fall into the same pitfalls that other projects around the country have had.

And I've asked Terry Wolf for more details about things like tax revenue that this might bring and, total jobs and construction and permanent operational jobs.

So we're waiting to kind of see some of the specific details, about this project.

Certainly.

And then on the state response level as well, you also got a statement from Governor Andy Beshear, his office and kind of their, again, their argument why they are a proponent for this and tell me more about what they had to say.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

We haven't seen Governor Andy Beshear speak about data centers, one way or another, very strongly.

We've seen some kind of, general remarks about how, you know, obviously, the state once these to be beneficial and that, you know, the administration is going to look carefully to make sure that they're not causing harm to communities.

In in the governor's statement this week.

He said that the company had agreed to pay all of its own power and that it would ensure no detrimental impacts to the local community, and, of course, that it would bring a lot of jobs and investment.

I should add that his statement also included that the administration would be watching the project's development, closely to make sure that it fulfilled the promises it had made and kind of their dealmaking process.

Well, I'm sure this will not be the last announcement that we see for the state of Kentucky.

I feel pretty certain about that.

But we want to thank you so much, Conor, for your excellent reporting.

We'll keep following this, but thank you for sharing with us about it.

Yeah, thanks for having me.