The first cost on the missing label is the one you can drive to.

Less than an hour south of my house, across the Tennessee line, there is a town called Bridgeport, Alabama. For most of a century its skyline included a coal plant called Widows Creek, one of the TVA smokestacks that powered the valley and fouled its air in equal measure. The plant died in 2015. And then something strange happened. A trillion-dollar company bought the corpse.

On the same ground, wired to the same river and the same transmission lines, it built a data center. The coal plant came back to life to answer questions. Prompts if you will. Far too many of those prompts are mine.

I live upriver in Chattanooga, on TVA power, which means I’m already wired into this whether I think about it or not. When I ask an agent to plan my week or read a stretch of unfamiliar code, the electricity runs through the same grid, and some of that compute may well come from the reborn plant down in Bridgeport. On my end, the prompt feels weightless. On their end, it is not weightless at all.

Start with the scale, because it’s genuinely hard to hold in your head. The International Energy Agency estimates that data centers burned about 460 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2022, roughly two percent of the world’s demand, and projects that figure could pass 1,000 terawatt-hours by 2026, about what the entire country of Japan uses in a year. That growth has to land somewhere physical, and it tends to land on the people least equipped to push back. Roughly two-thirds of the data centers built in the United States since 2022 have gone up in regions already under water stress, according to a Bloomberg analysis. And when the grid needs new wires and substations to feed them, the public often pays for it. The Union of Concerned Scientists found that ratepayers across seven states in a single regional grid were put on the hook for 4.3 billion dollars of infrastructure in one year, just to connect data centers they will never own.

Now bring it back to Bridgeport. The company has poured more than 2 billion dollars into that campus, and in the summer of 2026 it announced another 1.5 billion to expand. For all of that money, the plant employs somewhere between 75 and 100 people. Alabama landed the project with the tax tools it has leaned on since 2012, abatements that can run as long as 30 years. And the water, the resource the site was chosen for, the reason a river mattered in the first place, is a number the company does not publish. The one figure that would tell Bridgeport what it actually traded away is not printed anywhere. There is no label.

I want to be fair to this company, because by the standards of its industry it is one of the careful ones. It reclaimed a dead coal site instead of bulldozing a green field. In its latest expansion it committed to pay for all of its own electricity rather than shove the cost onto everyone else’s power bill. It put a little money toward local energy assistance and schools. If you are going to build one of these things, this is closer to the right way than the wrong way.

And it still isn’t good. A third of Bridgeport lives below the poverty line, and the median household there earns about 34,000 dollars a year. The company will earn more in a quarter than that town will see in a generation, and it will book the money a thousand miles from the river it cools in. A hundred jobs and a repaved road do not move that arithmetic. The polite version of this deal is still a deal where the value is generated in Alabama and kept somewhere else. Careful extraction is still extraction.

If that is the careful end of the range, here is the other one. A few hours west, in South Memphis, a rival company built a supercomputer to run its own chatbot, and it was in a hurry. The company quietly trucked in dozens of gas turbines to power it all, and ran them alongside a historically Black neighborhood called Boxtown. It held a permit for 15 of those turbines. Investigators counted far more, and at a second site the company ran 27 of them with no air permit at all. The turbines throw off nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde into an area already ringed by a refinery, a steel mill, and a gas plant, where the cancer risk runs about four times the national average. By the plaintiffs’ estimate, that one site could become the single largest industrial source of nitrogen oxides in the entire metro. In the spring of 2026, the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center sued to shut the turbines down.

Put those two stories side by side and the lesson is not simply that one company behaved well and the other behaved terribly, though that much is true. The lesson is what they share. One was careful and one was reckless, and both dropped the machine in exactly the same kind of place: a poor town, a Black neighborhood, somewhere the people who would breathe the air and drink the water had the least power to refuse it. The behavior ranged from polite to brutal. The choice of who pays did not move an inch.

I am not writing this from outside the transaction. I pay for the most expensive plan one of these companies sells, and I use it hard, every single day. I am burning tokens to research, edit, and redraft the very article you’re reading right now. I am the demand these buildings are built to serve. The racks in Bridgeport exist because people like me keep asking, and I am not going to stand on the riverbank and point at someone else.

It gets more complicated than that, in a way I can’t tidy up for you. One of the people I mentored took a job at that data center in Alabama. A real job, good money, the kind of career step our whole program was built to create. I am proud of them. I love them. We’re still connected, and our families are too. And the same technology humming inside that building, the work those servers are racked and cooled to do, is a large part of why that program is now winding down. The machine that hired one of my people is the reason it’s getting harder to train the next one. I don’t have a clean answer for that, and I’ve grown suspicious of anyone who says it’s simple.

So this is the first line I would write on the missing label. Before a token ever reaches your screen, it passes through a town that took the noise, the water draw, and a tax break that was supposed to pay for a school. Sometimes that town is handled with a little care. Sometimes with none at all. Either way, the bill stays there, and the profit goes home.

Thinking back to Groxio’s own AI policy (see “Pay Your Own Way”), if I squint hard enough I can see the human flourishing here. But I can see the suffering too. We have to do better.

Next in this series, the second cost: the people whose life’s work was poured into these models to make them worth paying for, and what they are owed.

If you have watched one of these deals arrive in your own town, I would genuinely like to know how it went. Come find me. Groxio is at grox.io.

Sources

• Data center electricity use (about 460 TWh in 2022, roughly 2% of global demand, projected to approach 1,000 TWh by 2026): IEA, Electricity 2024
• Roughly two-thirds of US data centers built since 2022 sited in water-stressed regions (Bloomberg analysis): Tom’s Hardware
• Ratepayers across seven states in the PJM grid on the hook for $4.3 billion in a single year to connect data centers (Union of Concerned Scientists): Stateline
• Alabama data center on the retired Widows Creek coal plant site near Bridgeport, more than $2 billion invested, $1.5 billion expansion announced June 2026, powered by TVA, 75–100 jobs: DatacenterDynamics · company announcement · Times Free Press
• Alabama tax abatements for data centers (2012 Data Processing Economic Incentive Act, up to 30 years; recent reform and self-power commitment): Alabama Daily News
• Bridgeport / Jackson County income and poverty (Bridgeport median household income ~$34,500, poverty ~33%): Census Reporter, Jackson County AL · World Population Review, Bridgeport
• Memphis supercomputer gas turbines, permit gap, Boxtown pollution and ~4x cancer risk, NAACP and SELC lawsuit (April 2026): CNBC · Time · Earthjustice · NAACP

— Bruce