Burlison: 'You absolutely want a data center in your community'

A lot of Joplin citizens are concerned about possible plans to build an AI data center on the southwest side of the city.

The planning and zoning commission approved a plan to annex hundreds of acres of land in the Wildwood Ranch area and to re-zone it for heavy industry.

A lot of details still need to be worked out, and it would have to be approved by the city council, but residents are sounding off, saying these power-hungry facilities would raise utility bills and create pollution.

BUT Southwest Missouri Congressman Eric Burlison told Newstalk KZRG that you should want one of these data centers in the community.

"And the reason is that they're paying for your entire infrastructure. Google is going in and building, for example, because the power supply isn't available, they're front ending the cost of an entire nuclear power plant that every ratepayer in the community is going to benefit from."

Burlison claims that these data centers come in and strike a deal with the utility company will strike a deal and not use so much power during peak load times.

"And what that means is for utility provider is that they're able to keep, drive their cost dramatically down. And the reason for that is because they have to build to capacity for the peak load," he added. "Instead you are letting your utility company utilize to its full capacity throughout the rest of the day. And as a result, the data center is basically paying for you to have the capacity that your community needs."

Burlison says this is a critical moment in American history and that we need to get it right.

"Because the truth is this is a national security issue of critical importance. And I cannot stress this enough. You do not want your data being housed in China. You do not want AI, all of our AI processing happening in countries that hate us."

He goes on to say the anti data center rhetoric needs to end.

"People need to start spreading the proper information so that, so that this negative rhetoric stops, because at the end of the day we're going to destroy ourselves politically just like we did during this last 20 years of this green new scam."