Ordinary people fill information gaps when data centers come knocking

WARRENTON, Mo. — In the basement of Änna Farrar’s home, children fell asleep on little blue mats, the only light coming from a dim television playing “Despicable Me.”

For the kids, this was naptime.

For Farrar, it was the start of a 90-minute work block. Between bites of sausage pizza, she opened her laptop and began plugging away at work — her other work.

During these daily sessions, Farrar emailed city clerks, landowners and lawyers. She filed requests with government agencies for public records. And she searched every nook of the internet for government policies and community response.

Since discovering a data center proposed two miles from her parents’ home in Warrenton, Farrar has worked to find and share all the information she can about data centers across Missouri. She now publishes her own newsletter, is an admin on Facebook and is working on a book, “The Data Center Next Door.”

She’s part of a brigade of residents battling the secrecy and speed with which mega-sized data centers have spread across the country, fueled by the growth of cloud computing and generative artificial intelligence.

According to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index report, the United States hosts 5,457 data centers, ten times more than any other country, with hundreds more on the way. Two-thirds of planned data centers are in rural areas, according to the Pew Research Center, with most of the planned construction focused in the Midwest and South.

Missouri Business Alert identified at least 14 data centers in the approval process or being built in Missouri. Many are going into rural areas with limited resources, including a reduced local news presence. Only four of those 14 sites are in counties with a daily newspaper.

Now, residents find themselves deploying the skills of journalists: filing public records requests, demanding open meetings and trying to track secretive decision-making. Organizations have sprung up in Warren County, Montgomery County, Festus and other areas in the Midwest to fight for more transparency from local governments and data center developers.

Farrar said her hero growing up was Christiane Amanpour, the CNN anchor. “I don't have a background in journalism, but at a young age, I've always been very involved and focused and aware,” she said. “It's always been a special interest of mine to go after the truth.”

Discovering the data centers

Farrar didn’t start by looking into data centers. Her family lives “a quarter mile as the crow flies” from an electrical substation in Warren County, and Farrar says she was researching the possible construction of power lines nearby in the summer of 2025. She worried about how sounds and vibrations might affect her sister, who has autism.

In her search, Farrar eventually discovered something bigger: The substation might be connected to a proposed data center nearby. According to city documents, the project would include two 805,000-square-foot buildings. Farrar was now not worried just about power lines but an entire data center near her parents’ home.

She said learning about the data center by clicking links on the internet made her feel “frustrated, confused, crazy.”

Farrar said a news report in the Warren County Record emboldened her to ask Warrenton city officials about the development during August’s public meeting.

She remembers the room being stuffy and awkward. After passing her questions around, aldermen told her they didn’t know about the proposed data center and referred her to Warren County. One said nothing like a site plan had been brought forth to them.

“That’s my concern,” Farrar told the aldermen. “My concern is it’s all being behind closed doors until it has to be connected, and by the time it gets connected, the public will have no say in it because it’s already a done deal.”

Around the same time in Montgomery County, 20 miles away, Brenda Buechele grew concerned after attending a county commission meeting. She had gone to the assembly because she heard something was happening to Buechele Road, the public road near her home named after her family.

The commissioners described the matter as a road closure and told Buechele that they signed nondisclosure agreements to protect landowners, she said. What county officials didn’t tell her was that two of the biggest tech companies in the world, Amazon and Google, wanted to move in nearby. Her suspicions were further raised when she heard in September that Montgomery and Warren County commissioners visited a data center site in Iowa.

In October, Buechele came across one of Farrar’s posts on the Warren County Citizens for Responsible Development Facebook page and sent her a direct message. A few days later, they talked on the phone for the first time, and it wasn’t until then that Buechele said she fully grasped the scale of the data centers coming to Montgomery County.

“I'm not gonna lie, I cried when she told me, because she explained it in a way that I could understand,” Buechele said. “I was devastated.”

New neighbors: Google and Amazon

In November, roughly three months after publicly raising the data center issue, Farrar first published a newsletter titled “The AI Factory Next Door” on the website Substack. She wanted to tell community members what was happening, and the newsletter was a way to get her thoughts out and “find people who also care and find people who were affected.”

A Dec. 10 post featured Project Spade, later revealed to be the Google facility going in near Buechele’s farm.

Details eventually came out: The $15 billion project spans nearly a thousand acres between rural Montgomery County and the city of New Florence.

Just across Interstate 70, an $8.5 billion data center is being built for Amazon.

Seeking information on both sites, Buechele began filing requests for public records from the government.

So far, she has spent over $2,000 obtaining documents, trying to make sense of the situation and helping bridge an information gap in her community.

Stacks of thick binders stay by Buechele’s side throughout most of the week. They’re filled with hundreds of documents that uncover how Montgomery County quietly advanced plans with the commercial real-estate company Northpoint Development and the Missouri Department of Economic Development for the past several years to bring data centers to the county.

She shares what she learns to inform community members, encourage them to be civically engaged and ask questions.

“If people start attending commissioners’ meetings and planning and zoning meetings and port authority meetings, and start holding them accountable for what they're doing, if there’s eyes and warm bodies sitting there looking at them, listening to what they're doing in that meeting, they're less likely to repeat what they did,” Buechele said.

Information gap

When Denise Naughton heard about the data centers over Thanksgiving, she jumped to find out as much as possible. She grew up in Montgomery County, and the majority of her family still lives there. She now lives in St. Louis after spending 20 years as a local news producer in Phoenix.

“I got mad as soon as I saw it,” said Naughton, who has since helped organize press releases and meeting coverage. “Like, nobody's fighting for these people. The government should be representing the people. When they're not, then (the) media should be at least (be) the Fourth Estate coming in and providing some accountability, and none of that was happening.”

Tammy Ridgley, a Montgomery County resident who is active with local movements against data center construction, said “citizens communicating with citizens” has spread more awareness on the data center proposals than the local newspaper, the Montgomery Standard.

The paper has only one reporter, Theo Tate, who also serves as the managing editor. Tate said a typical news day involves covering a high school football game or someone’s 104th birthday.

When he walked into his first meeting of the local opposition group Preserve Montgomery County recently, he was taken aback.

“Man, this is like, wow,” he said, looking across the packed room at the community library.

Community members demanding answers from their local government and two of the world’s largest tech companies was something he had never seen before in his 30 years of being a journalist.

“We're starting to really pick it up here, and I don't know how long this issue will go on as far as coverage is concerned, but our job is just to continue to feed the community,” Tate said.

A dearth of information and a lack of transparency are common complaints in communities where data centers come knocking.

Chad Stebbins, executive director at the Missouri Press Association, said many Missouri newsrooms are under-resourced with just one or two reporters on staff.

“I know of several papers where the remaining staff work mightily to try to keep up with all the news coverage,” Stebbins said. He added that ultimately, “because of declining revenue, increased costs, and cutbacks in general, the quantity of news coverage just isn’t what it once was.”

Community organizing

Hundreds of residents streamed into Montgomery High School's gymnasium Jan. 29, taking the few remaining seats left and sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bleachers. They were there for a town hall organized by Preserve Montgomery County.

In attendance were Farrar and Buechele. They watched as an expert spoke about groundwater and the county's geology, and a lawyer touched on tax incentives being provided for construction. The mic was opened to the crowd afterward.

A trickle of residents spoke, then a flood: workers, parents, farmers, former teachers. Many shared uncertainty and a fear about the data centers’ effects on their communities.

Preserve Montgomery County filed a lawsuit in February to halt the construction of the Amazon data center, alleging Montgomery County officials violated several provisions of the Missouri Sunshine Law, designed to promote government transparency.

Montgomery County commissioners continue to defend the data centers publicly, but they did not agree to an interview.

Despite the lawsuit, both data centers are moving forward. Construction on the Google site is well underway, with bulldozers visible to drivers cruising by on I-70.

Much has happened for Farrar, too, since first discovering the data center in Warren County. She ran for Warrenton alderman but lost in April. Still, she had promised, win or lose, “I am not stopping.”

She temporarily suspended her daycare business, once she made sure all of the children landed somewhere else, in order to devote more time to data centers.

Farrar now works as a part-time nanny and for the Missouri Workers Center with their “No MO Dirty Data Centers” campaign, which aims to get increased benefits for locals, protections against resource overuse and more transparency in the construction process.

As for the Warrenton data center that started Farrar’s whole journey: The city approved the project’s site plan and a 75% tax abatement for equipment. But Farrar said public pressure forced improvements to the plan.

“We've already moved generators; we've already asked for different easements; we've already asked just for different decibel levels; we've already got deliverables,” she said. “No, it didn't shut the project down entirely, but it did get us closer to our end goal.”

Farrar still speaks at public meetings, but now, she feels confident and informed. She will look the mayor in the eye until he looks away. It’s a far cry from the person Farrar was last year, when she felt timid and confused at that first meeting.

“Before the data centers, I was very isolated in a box of my own self-being, and I was concerned about my family and my health and all of that. After the data centers, it has been a layer of self-awareness that I wasn't anticipating,” she said. “It has been transformative to the way I see almost every individual I interact with.”

Thanks to Farrar, Buechele and other engaged residents, many more people across Missouri are aware of data centers being proposed for their communities. Facebook groups are active. Town hall meetings are packed.

Farrar said her goal is to make sure new technologies benefit local communities. That’s especially the case for artificial intelligence.

“I think the argument is not whether or not AI should be here; it's who needs to be in control of AI,” she said. “And the people need to be in control of AI.”

Abby Cornell contributed to this story.

This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.