Photograph by SNEHIT PHOTO via Adobe Stock
Just 90 minutes east of Cincinnati, Piketon has possibly the highest cancer rate in Ohio due in large part to an almost 50-year history of U.S. government-led uranium enriching there. The community has been remediating and recovering since the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS) closed in 2001, but then a new plant opened on the same site in 2023, the first new uranium plant in the U.S. in almost 70 years.
Uranium enriched in Piketon will supply new nuclear reactors being proposed nearby that will in turn help power what’s planned to be the world’s largest data center when it opens in 2032. Partially backed by chip-maker Nvidia, the eight-gigawatt facility is expected to be leased to OpenAI in order to power artificial intelligence computing and cloud storage. The amount of electricity needed to power the data center continuously 24 hours a day is equal to the amount used by six million average homes over an entire year; a little less than 12 million people live in Ohio.
“When you mix the nuclear part of it and the radiation part of it, I don’t think people realize what a dangerous combination this is for a small community like Piketon,” says Gina Doyle, a lifelong resident of the city and founder of citizen groups Don’t Dump On Us and Scioto Valley Cancer Support Group.
The former PORTS site is on federal property, so Doyle says she and Piketon’s 27,000 other residents can’t do anything about it. “It’s coming,” she says. “But we want transparency, we want honesty, and we want safety. We want people’s health around here to be improved, not to keep getting worse. We want a lot, and it’s not really anything that we shouldn’t be asking for as a community living with the legacy of that filthy, dirty plant.”
Data centers have existed since the 1940s but were smaller in size compared to today’s behemoths. They store emails, streaming videos, hospital records, and banking data, but they’re noisy and use a lot of electricity to operate and water to keep the machinery cool. Doyle says she lives in a drought-prone area in southern Ohio, and additional strain on local water resources can lead to water shortages for homeowners.
On the other hand, data centers create jobs and bring tax revenues to cities. With more than 200 existing data centers, Ohio ranks sixth most among states hosting data centers. More than 3,000 are currently operating in the U.S., with another 1,500 in development, mostly in undeveloped rural areas. Cincinnati has 26 centers and counting.
Less than an hour from Piketon, another fight against data center rages in Adams County. Emily Harper, Jessica Adams Baker, Danielle Kinhalt, and Nikki Gerber work with the advocacy group Conserve Ohio, which Baker founded, to collect signatures to add a state constitutional amendment to ban data centers that cosume more than 25 megawatts. They’re shooting to get the amendment on the November 2027 ballot. “Some people are like, Oh, you’re anti-development,” says Harper. “So to appease the people who think I’m anti-development and an extreme radical leftist, I would be happy to settle for a 25-megawatt data center. Ideally, though, I don’t want any.”
Adams County is home to rare species of wildlife and most of its land is unzoned, which residents like Harper prefer. The area is known as the Little Smokies of Ohio, and its ecotourism attracts people from all over the world to stargaze at Moeller Observatory. Harper, a naturalist and tree hugger—she proudly declares she was once arrested for doing so—lives in the Shawnee State Forest Wilderness area and has been attending county commissioner meetings since February.
“They think we’re ignorant hillbillies, like we don’t know anything and we’re uneducated,” she says. “But there are a lot of educated people out here, and even if we aren’t educated, you still have a lot of smart, resourceful Appalachian rural families who survive off a shoestring budget, grow their food, and forage in the woods.”
Harper says she’s afraid to drink water from her faucet because the water supply comes from the contaminated Scioto River near Piketon.
Photograph courtesy Nikki Gerber
Amazon plans to build a data center near the old Stuart nuclear site, which would make it the largest in Ohio. “I’m ready to lay down if I have to or hug a tree if I have to,” Harper says.
Like Doyle, she’s frustrated with data center owners’ lack of transparency and secrecy. “We go to the commissioner meetings a month or so in, and they’re like, Well, you can’t say anything. No public comment allowed,” she says. That’s the biggest thing that bothers me, that we’re not getting a say. How much money is it going to bring to our community? Who’s getting the money? How is it being used? We’ve seen so much mismanagement of funds within our county, it’s ridiculous.”
Since January, Marshall University film student and Ironton, Ohio, native Shelby Blair has been filming a documentary, Damage Center, about the increase in data center building. She’s been driving around the state interviewing activists and residents. “Ohio is the only place in the world with a natural bog, the cranberry bog,” she says. “We have so much empty land, which is why they’re here in the first place. They aren’t here for some concrete jungle.”
Blair has talked to people, mainly women, who have been threatened with violence for speaking up, reminiscent of the groundbreaking 1976 documentary film Harlan County, U.S.A. People have threatened Blair as well, though in her conversations she’s discovered both Republicans and Democrats are against the center-building explosion.
“They all agree that they don’t care what you are as long as you’re in this fight with them,” says Blair. “We’re in this together to protect our state and to protect our homes and families. Conserve Ohio has taught me I’m allowed to take up space, that I have a voice, and that I should be loud about it.”
Blair says she gets frustrated with the dearth of regulations and considerations in an already exploited and oppressed region of Appalachia. “Our politicians aren’t willing to speak against these data centers, because they’ve already got the paycheck for it,” she says. “They’ve already got that extra dollar in their wallet that they would much rather prioritize over anyone in Appalachia.”
For those opposing the wave of data centers, they could look across the Ohio River to Maysville, Kentucky, where farm owners Delsia Bare and Ida Huddleston rejected a $26.4 million offer from an AI company to buy their land and build a data center. Residents in Trenton, Ohio, recently won a victory when the Ohio Supreme Court certified their petition to allow residents to vote on banning the construction of new data centers.
“Any progress against them, any progress stopping them, is a win,” says Blair. “It’s little wins by little wins.”
