They had already planted yard signs, volunteered at the farmers’ market booth and signed each and every one of the petitions, so now the residents of Peculiar, Mo., took to the field outside their homes to pray.
For years, that golden wheat had been the backdrop of this 6,000-person hamlet, best known as a pit stop on trips from Kansas City to the Ozarks. Now, it was a battleground between a tech giant’s proposed data center and the rural community around it.
“Father God, we are Davids against Goliath,” said Susan Wells, the group’s prayer leader, that October night. “We pray for the Davids among us.”
The situation in Peculiar had not always been so precarious. When executives from Diode Ventures, the company developing the data center for its secret tech company client, last met with those residents, it was on a peaceful July night over wine slushies at the town’s beloved winery.
The 500-acre data center campus, the executives said, would be a boon to the town, bringing in new jobs and over a billion dollars in tax revenue, most of which would go to the school district. All they needed was the land rezoned for industrial use.
But that request jeopardized the project and pitted the people of Peculiar not just against Big Tech but also against their own local officials. Residents described a web of distrust filled with nondisclosure agreements, hurt feelings and a mysterious entity vying to become the town’s new neighbor.
After the data center plan was announced in January, Diode executives kept in touch with residents close to the project, even meeting in some of their living rooms to discuss concerns. But within weeks, they required a nondisclosure agreement to keep those talks going, said Becky Wiseman, whose property is abutted by the proposed site.
Diode declined to comment on the specifics of its Peculiar project, including its nondisclosure agreements and client.
Growing concerned, Ms. Wiseman and her neighbors decided to visit data center campuses for Meta and Google in Nebraska and Iowa, which were also “hyperscale” like the one proposed in Peculiar. When they arrived, they were terrified at what they saw and heard — the constant hum of generators behind guard towers with 24-hour security.
“Like living next to a maximum-security prison,” Ms. Wiseman said.
This, they were sure, could not happen in Peculiar.
‘Don’t Dump Data on Peculiar’
The saga in Peculiar is playing out in small towns across the country as tech giants look to build hundreds of new data centers — often lured by tax abatements — to house the thousands of computers that would power the booming and energy-intensive artificial intelligence industry.
“It’s important to note that data centers are increasingly becoming critical, necessary infrastructure to meet the growing needs of our connected, digital world,” Diode said in a statement. “Data centers also bring a multitude of benefits to communities, big and small.”
The insatiable demand for computing power has created a land grab in states like Missouri between companies like Google and Meta, which often work in anonymity through brokers like Diode to procure real estate.
Developers are drawn to places like Peculiar because of the cheap energy and abundant acreage, but residents and state officials say the financial benefits of these projects — the Peculiar data center would be built just feet from the town’s electrical substation — come at a cost.
“These corporate giants, they’re taking advantage of these small towns that are dying for a big fish,” said State Senator Rick Brattin, whose district includes Peculiar.
If the town needed a David to battle the giant, Chad Buck, 50, was happy to take on the challenge. He took a leave of absence from his job as a real estate developer and, along with his neighbor Vicki Howe, created a Facebook page called “Don’t Dump Data on Peculiar” to share intel. Without many local reporters in the county, the page, which quickly gained 1,000 members, became the movement’s town square.
Signs that read “No Data Centers” sprouted up in yards and windows across town. So many people started showing up at planning and zoning meetings that Peculiar officials had to move them from City Hall to the Lions Club, a larger venue a mile down the road.
Behind the scenes, Diode had been working with Peculiar’s mayor, Doug Stark, and city administrator, Mickey Ary, since September of last year, according to emails obtained through a public records request. But the resistance appeared to catch the company off guard.
Over virtual meetings and lunches at City Hall with Mr. Stark and Mr. Ary, Diode executives laid out a plan to win over Peculiar’s hearts and minds, from traffic studies to handwritten letters to new STEM scholarships at the local high school.
“We’re counting on you,” the executives wrote.
Looming over the project was the mystery of which tech company would become Peculiar’s new neighbor.
In a March presentation to residents at the Lions Club titled “Myth Busters,” Diode executives said their client had yet to be determined. The company also emphasized that it was not owned by the Chinese and, contrary to some fears, that data centers do not cause cancer.
But in private emails, the client appeared to be well established, referred to by Diode project managers using a code name: Satin.
At least four Peculiar residents recall face-to-face conversations in which Diode project managers said the site was likely to be a Google data center, though a Google spokeswoman denied that the company was involved. Other residents suspected Meta as the client on account of the shell company it used for a Kansas City data center last year, according to local news reports: Velvet. But a Meta spokesperson, too, denied that there were ties.
The remaining clues pointed in a different direction. In April, at an after-hours meeting at the town’s winery, Diode introduced the mystery client to Mr. Stark and Mr. Ary for the first time, emails show. In preparation for the meeting, Mr. Ary and Mr. Stark signed a nondisclosure agreement with a data center company called IPI.
IPI is owned by Iron Point Partners, a private equity firm, and Iconiq Capital, a Silicon Valley investor whose clients include Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. A spokesperson for IPI declined to comment.
In public, Mr. Stark and Mr. Ary, who had been in office since 2022 and 2021, lobbied hard for the project’s approval, framing it as a rare chance for economic development in a town that badly needed it.
The farms that had long fueled Peculiar’s economy were dwindling, and the two men had watched for years as neighboring towns like Raymore and Belton became booming exurbs of Kansas City, filled with high-rise apartments and shiny new retail centers.
But that vision for the town clashed with the wishes of longtime residents who cherished Peculiar’s unremarkable downtown for the remarkable peace it brought them. Other than the data center, there had been just two recent moments of controversy in Peculiar, recalled Chris Tittle, a local real estate agent: a dispute over the town’s chicken coop ordinance in 2012 and, this year, another dust-up over the chicken coop ordinance.
Mr. Tittle said he had no issues with A.I. — he regularly uses ChatGPT for work by asking it to write marketing materials that emphasize small-town values — but saw the data center as a referendum on failed local leadership.
“We want to keep being a sleeper city,” Mr. Tittle said. “We love Peculiar, and we will fight for it.”
The decision about the data center ultimately fell to the town’s elected aldermen, a group of six men, two in each ward, who are paid $200 a month for their duties. While the mayor and city administrator are on the city’s full-time staff, the aldermen, and their majority vote, hold the power in Peculiar.
Robert Wells was elected as an alderman for the first time in April, excited to don the signature blue polo that comes with the job. At first, he approached the data center with an open mind — he “had a love of data” as an information technology worker — but soon grew skeptical of Diode, the mayor and the city administrator.
According to internal Diode documents, Diode was pursuing 25-year tax abatements, and the data center would create just 100 jobs, most of which would be high-level technician roles, not blue-collar careers.
And Mr. Wells and some of the other aldermen found it off-putting that Diode executives preferred to meet with no more than three of them at a time — any more, and a public notice about the meetings would have to be posted online.
“I had a sour taste in my mouth the first time it actually happened,” Mr. Wells said of the meetings, adding that he stopped attending out of ethical concerns. “I told the mayor, ‘Do you know how this makes us look?’”
Suspicions about the project deepened when it was revealed, through a secretly recorded conversation between Mr. Ary and Ms. Howe later posted to Facebook, that the mayor and city administrator had signed nondisclosure agreements with Diode.
“I would probably rethink it next time around,” Mr. Ary said of the nondisclosure agreement in an interview. Mr. Stark did not respond to emails, phone calls and written questions handed to his clerk at City Hall.
Nick Jacobs, who worked in Peculiar government from 2005 to 2022, said the town was in need of an industrial project to fund new roads and infrastructure. But he described Peculiar as full of BANANAs: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
Before Diode, Peculiar nearly landed a billion-dollar Slim Jim factory that would have created 1,300 jobs, but Conagra, the maker of Slim Jims, ended up choosing a different town.
“You’re not going to stop progress,” said Glenn Yoakum, who runs a farm feed store in downtown Peculiar with his son Frank and would rather see the land repurposed to farm cattle. “But they should make sure it’s at least a good deal for the town.”
As the conflict drummed on, the tensions mounted on Facebook, where residents used A.I. to generate country songs about Mr. Stark — “He was pullin’ all the strings, makin’ deals on the sly,” according to the lyrics — and images of mobsters puppeteering the town with power lines.
Others saw the high-tech companies behind the data center as a threat to their decidedly low-tech ways of life.
“We have here in Peculiar what no one else has got,” said Larry Boucher, who repairs vintage clocks downtown and prefers the simplicity of a landline phone. “Peace, serenity.”
Mr. Boucher’s feelings toward the town’s politics can best be described by a sign that hangs in his store: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
‘Show your character!’
It all came to a head at a September meeting when Mr. Wells, the alderman, raised yet another concern about the data center and Mayor Stark interrupted.
“I hope everyone understands that while shooting from the hip like this, you’re destroying any future development that might want to come to Peculiar,” Mr. Stark said, according to a video recording of the meeting.
The audience erupted, and Mr. Buck, the leading opponent of the data center, stood up from his chair. “Show your character!” he yelled to Mr. Stark.
“You’ve shown yours!” Mr. Stark yelled back, as others in the room sprang up, ready to step in between the two men.
“What, you’re going to fight me as the mayor?” Mr. Buck said.
Days later, plans for a petition to recall the mayor spread online.
“This project might have had the ability to help this community in areas of great need,” Mr. Stark wrote in a Facebook post addressing the recall proposal, which was never formally submitted. “Unfortunately, we’ll just never know.”
The town reconvened one last time before the aldermen’s vote, and residents took turns at the lectern to speak in front of Mr. Stark and the aldermen.
Among them was Patti DiPardo Livergood, who lived next to the proposed site and told of how she had tried to sell her home after her husband died of cancer, but pulled the listing after the data center scared off potential buyers.
Holding back tears, she said Mr. Ary had called her employer, a congressional office, to complain about her speaking out against the project in public meetings.
“This billion-, trillion-, zillion-dollar industry just loves to swallow up towns across America, take over their government, destroy their land and kill the spirit of their people,” Ms. Livergood said. “You not only want to hurt my well-being, but now you want to take my job away from me?”
Then came the aldermen’s vote — by unanimous decision, the data center zoning was rejected. It is unclear where Diode will take its project. The group’s Facebook page has since been repurposed to plan the town’s Halloween festivities.
The Prayer Circle
Back at the prayer circle, held before the victory, Mr. Buck and his neighbors prayed for the health of the town. With watering eyes, they prayed for forgiveness for Mr. Stark and Mr. Ary.
Looking to the substation at the foot of the field, Mr. Buck thought about what, and who, might come next. The group shifted its prayer to a parable from the Gospel of Matthew, in which Jesus tells of the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to save the one that is missing: “Go out to search for the one that is lost.”
The group looked to Mr. Buck for the final word.
“Keep your eyes on the north,” he said. “Keep your eyes on the power lines.”
The post A Rural Missouri Town Fights Big Tech, and Itself appeared first on New York Times.
