UPDATE: Is the Planning Commission Approving an AI Data Center?
l3wis UPDATE: If you watch the meeting from the other night you will see that a representative from the city of Brandon showed up in opposition of this item. Not sure what his role is, but I think he works in planning. He basically said the opposition comes from two directions, 1) They are not sure what kind of data center they plan to build and how large it will be, they said the company (foreign) has been very secretive about sharing any plans with the city of Brandon 2) Which was the most important part of the opposition, was that area is already zoned for FUTURE residential growth which is in Brandon’s long term growth plan and has been for years. Of course our boot licking planning commission approved the re-zone because they said this is just preliminary (they say this crap all the time) but it is NOT. It changes it now from a future growth of residential to industrial which means to change it back you would have to go thru the process all over again with a new land owner. Stupidity. Until this foreign company reveals EXACTLY what they plan to build, we should leave it AS is, Ag land with future use for residential. It was also revealed at the meeting that 300 people would be working at the site. Hogwash. These places pull this crap all the time. This is the amount of construction workers that would be on site while being built, that would most likely be shipped in from other parts of the country, but once finished it may have 20 full-time peeps who will work mostly in security and maintenance.
Unfortunately the way our planning approvals are setup, they must first ask for a re-zone of the property BEFORE they can announce what they plan to build there (Item #5A-Regular Agenda);
FLUA-021026-2025: Future Land Use Amendment to reclassify a Development Area identified in the Shape Sioux Falls 2040 Comprehensive Plan from Tier 3 to Tier 1 and amend the Future Land Use Map for the area from Residential to Future Light Industrial located east of Veterans Pkwy. and south of E. Rice St.
First off, I am NOT a fan of changing residential zoned property into light industrial especially with our housing needs in Sioux Falls. Secondly, it is pretty obvious they are changing the zoning to put in a data center but there is NO mention of a Data Center in the attached documentation on the agenda item. I wonder if the commission is smart enough to ask the question, and if the client have plans to power it? These data centers take massive amounts of electricity, how will this affect the grid in Sioux Falls? Also, the company I linked above is a registered FOREIGN LLC, and has only been registered for 6 months. I hope the commission sees thru this ruse, but if not, hopefully the city council will see this for what it is, an AI data center that will suck us dry on energy and probably drive up our energy costs. WE DO NOT WANT THIS IN SIOUX FALLS. Besides the property taxes, there is very little economic advantages of having a large data center like this in Sioux Falls. It won’t generate any sales tax revenue and it will mostly be full of servers and very few employees. We will see how this plays out, I see the planning department recommends approval (which is a way of making sure the commission rubber stamps this).