Latest Post
By Evan Thompson and Arya Krishnagiri
When the White House released its AI Action Plan last summer, leaning on the slogan “Build, Baby, Build,” the implications were not abstract. In Eastern Oregon, lining the Columbia River Gorge — an 80-mile-long economic and energy lifeline supporting over 150 hydroelectric dams that generate approximately 40% of all the hydroelectric power — the impacts were visible in towns such as The Dalles and Hermiston, where corporations such as Amazon and Google have been building some of the United States’ largest data center campuses.
In May 2026, two researchers from the University of Oregon’s Intelligent Futures Lab drove through The Dalles, Boardman, Hermiston, and Umatilla to understand what the hyper-scale buildout of data centers means for the locals. We interviewed residents, utility officials, environmental advocates, former tech employees, and construction workers. What came of it was deeper than the surface-level argument that each side of the argument usually poses.
Eastern Oregon is an ideal location for a data center buildout. Cheap hydroelectric power from the Columbia River and its various dams, affordable land, a dry climate that makes evaporative cooling efficient, and generous tax arrangements for corporations like Google make the region an attractive hub for data center infrastructure. Google, first arriving in the Dalles in 2006, now consumes roughly a third of the city’s municipal water supply (water for drinking/public use). This figure was kept secret until The Oregonian won a legal battle forcing them to disclose the number in 2022. Amazon (AWS) has built seven hyper-scale facilities in Morrow County, with five more planned, drawing cooling water from the sole aquifer that supplies drinking water to around 45,000 residents in the area.
While driving through the gorge, the scale of these facilities is astounding. Hyper-scale data centers are large, blocky, grey, lifeless structures surrounded by chain-link fences, staffed with few permanent workers, and an ongoing cycle of contractors that perform work for them.
Interviewees as a whole could not agree on what to make of data centers. A senior utility executive whose district has served Google since its arrival spoke highly of their partnership that has lasted over two decades, growing local franchise fee revenue from $200,000 to nearly $5 million annually, while keeping electricity rates among the lowest in the country. “Every customer class pays its own way”, he states. A pragmatic AWS employee passing through The Dalles, OR, commented: “As long as there are economic needs, data centers will be here.” One woman we spoke to in Hermiston, OR, described her husband’s new job with an Amazon data center as something close to a second chance at life: a stable, well-benefited job after enduring years of uncertainty.
With this said, these voices were by far the minority in the conversations we had. More common were the ideas spoken on, such as a small business owner in Hermiston who told us, “Take, take, take, and not really giving.” He had personally applied to work at an AWS facility five times and been rejected each time, in addition to the learning programs that teach one the experience and skills needed to be qualified for data center work. A negative flywheel is how he refers to it. Additionally, a couple based in Boardman and Hermiston described rent increases, outsourced laborers flooding construction sites, and the looming sense that their small town was changing on someone else’s terms. A former Google employee explained that after his 2023 layoff left him economically stranded, every employer in the area had Google contracts or relations, and that he was unable to find work due to his termination with Google. A library employee described an instruction given recently by the city to not discuss the water and Google situation publicly.
The question of water is where the tension is the sharpest. John DeVoe of WaterWatch Oregon explained to us that virtually every basin in the state is already over-allocated for surface water, and that due to the mining of old, unused municipal water rights by data centers, they are disrupting settled expectations that users have built up for decades. The stretch of the Dog River (a tributary within the larger Columbia River watershed) that supplies The Dalles, which therein supplies Google, has shown signs of strain as diversions of its stream approach the limit of the city’s senior water right, with downstream in-stream rights being unsatisfied. Additionally, conservation groups like BARK have raised alarms about legislation that would hand water access to 150 acres of Mount Hood National Forest land to the city of The Dalles, with no compensation, to expand a reservoir not driven by population growth, but by the future expectations of Google’s consumption numbers.
The question that lingers, as we drove down long flat roads through Morrow County, revolves around proportion. The benefits of data centers and what they bring along with them, being AI services, cloud computing, and infrastructure for a digital economy, grow globally (to the corporations that build them) as the costs grow locally. Whether these costs, such as water being drawn from over-allocated basins, housing stressors, labor markets distorted, and small-town character being altered, are worth the large-scale benefits of data centers around the world is entirely dependent on which side you stand on while reviewing the situation.
This article is a precursor to a more in-depth research project under development provided by the IF Lab .
Photos by Arya Krishnagiri
Evan Thompson is a senior at the University of Oregon and a researcher at the IF Lab. Arya Krishnagiri is the IF Lab manager.
Additional research: Building at What Cost? Unpacking the Infrastructure Ambitions of America’s AI Action Plan
Originally published on Medium
Read on MediumMore from IF Lab
