Data Centers Along The River - Laura Beth Austin

What happens when artificial intelligence moves from your phone into your backyard?

AI may feel invisible, but the infrastructure powering it is anything but. Behind every large AI data center are acres of land, enormous electrical demands, cooling systems, fiber networks, substations, backup generators, tax incentives, utility agreements, and decisions that can shape a community for decades.

In Data Centers Along the River: An Everyday Person’s Guide to AI, Power, Water, Land & Who Pays, Laura Beth Austin takes readers beyond the headlines and explains the rapidly expanding world of AI data centers in language ordinary people can understand.

With a special focus on Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, and communities along the Ohio River, this fact-based guide explores how data centers work, why AI has dramatically increased their scale, and what communities should know before major projects are approved.

Readers will learn how to understand megawatts and electrical-load projections; follow electricity from the grid to the server rack; distinguish requested, studied, contracted, and actual power use; understand cooling and water demands; examine impacts on farmland, wildlife, noise, air, and local infrastructure; separate construction jobs from permanent employment; evaluate tax incentives and projected revenue; and determine who may ultimately pay when infrastructure is built for enormous new electrical loads.

Austin also provides practical questions residents and public officials can ask before a vote-and explains how to follow the public-record trail when a project involves multiple developers, utilities, government agencies, and corporate entities.

This is not a book about being simply for or against technology.

It is about something more fundamental:

Communities deserve to understand what is being built, what it requires, what it promises, and who carries the risk.

Because you shouldn’t have to be an engineer to understand what is coming to your community.

Our communities. Our resources. Our right to know.