A Fertilizer Company Wants to Build One of Washington's Largest AI Data Centers... and We're Just Supposed to Roll With That?
⚠️ LANGUAGE WARNING ⚠️
This blog contains profanity.
If the word "fuck" offends you more than a five-building, 2.5-million-square-foot, 350-megawatt AI data center proposed in our backyard, you may want to stop reading now.
Everyone else...
Grab a beer.
Grab the public records.
Let's ruin someone's talking points.
Okay...
What the actual fuck?
A fertilizer company wants to build one of the largest proposed AI data center campuses in Washington.
Read that again.
A.
Fertilizer.
Company.
Not Microsoft.
Not Amazon.
Not Google.
Not Meta.
A company whose business is fertilizer suddenly wants to build a half-billion-dollar AI data center campus, and everyone is acting like that's the most normal shit they've ever heard.
Maybe they have decades of experience building hyperscale AI data centers.
If they do...
SHOW ME.
Seriously.
I'd love to be wrong.
Because I can't find it.
Here's what I can find.
Five freaking buildings.
About 2.5 MILLION square feet.
Roughly 275 acres.
A reported request for 350 megawatts of power.
Half a billion dollars.
This isn't somebody adding a server room behind an office building.
This is industrial-scale infrastructure.
Let's talk about 350 megawatts.
Because holy shit...
That number should make people stop scrolling.
If that reported number is accurate, we're talking about an electrical load on the order of hundreds of thousands of homes—roughly comparable to the number of households in a city about the size of Spokane.
A CITY.
One project.
One.
And people are acting like it's another Starbucks going in.
Then there's my favorite part.
It's going right here.
Horn Rapids.
Where people actually fucking live.
Not out in the middle of nowhere.
Not fifty miles from civilization.
Here.
Did anyone ask the residents?
Nope.
We elected City Council members.
We didn't vote on whether we wanted one of the largest proposed AI data center campuses in the state built in our backyard.
And before somebody types...
"Well that's representative government..."
Yeah.
No shit.
Representative government also means I have every damn right to ask questions before the concrete starts getting poured.
Then the City says...
"There are many steps before this project becomes official."
Awesome.
Then quit acting like those steps are classified.
Show us.
Every.
Single.
One.
Show me the permits.
Show me the environmental review.
Show me the engineering studies.
Show me the noise study.
Show me the lighting study.
Show me the water study.
Show me the traffic study.
Show me the damn documents.
Because if this project is so amazing...
Transparency shouldn't scare anybody.
Then we get to the stuff that really pisses me off.
Every time someone asks about:
✨Power.
✨Water.
✨Noise.
✨Light.
Somebody immediately acts like you're wearing a tinfoil hat.
Except...
The City itself acknowledges those are legitimate concerns.
So apparently I'm not the crazy one after all.
Cool.
Now...
✨ Where are the studies?
Not the marketing bullshit.
The studies.
And let's talk about the hum.
People living near some large data centers have reported concerns about constant equipment noise. Whether that happens here depends on the design, equipment, and mitigation.
You know what would answer that?
A fucking noise study.
Imagine that.
The glow.
People have also raised concerns about nighttime lighting around some large industrial campuses.
Again...
Maybe this project has a great lighting plan.
Awesome.
Then let's see it.
If you've got a plan that keeps light where it belongs, fantastic.
Publish it.
Then comes my favorite line of all...
"But it'll bring jobs!"
Yeah...
Construction jobs.
Absolutely.
Once it's built?
It's a data center.
These facilities generally employ far fewer permanent workers than a manufacturing plant because so much of the operation is automated.
So let's stop pretending this thing is going to employ half the Tri-Cities forever.
How many permanent jobs?
Doing what?
At what pay?
Let's see the numbers instead of another slogan.
Here's the part where people accuse me of hating technology.
I literally use AI every single day.
This post was polished with AI.
So spare me the "you're anti-technology" bullshit.
I'm anti-secrecy.
There's a difference.
Here's something I've learned after twenty-five years in law enforcement and another few years digging through public records:
The faster somebody tells me...
"Don't worry about it."
The faster I start worrying about it.
Not because I think everything is a conspiracy.
Because I've learned that the documents usually tell a much more interesting story than the press release.
So no...
I'm not going to clap because somebody says "economic development."
I'm going to read the contracts.
I'm going to read the environmental review.
I'm going to read the engineering reports.
I'm going to read the utility studies.
I'm going to file the public records requests. ✅
And if the documents prove me wrong...
I'll say so.
But until then...
Don't ask me to trade transparency for blind optimism.
I've seen way too much shit in my life to buy "just trust us."
Not happening.
P.S. If asking questions about a $500 million, 2.5-million-square-foot, five-building, 350-megawatt project makes me the asshole...
I'll wear that title just fine.
📄 Follow the documents. The bullshit usually gets lost somewhere around page 47.
Show me the fucking documents.
– Horn Rapids Lab Rat
Jessica
The Agro Plans
