WARRENTON, Mo. – In the basement of Änna Farrar’s home, children fell asleep on little blue mats, the only light coming from a dim television playing “Despicable Me.” For the kids, it's naptime. For Farrar, it's the start of a two-hour work block. Between bites of sausage pizza, she opens her laptop and begins plugging away at work — her other work, that's taking up an increasing amount of her time.
During these daily sessions, Farrar emails city clerks, landowners and lawyers. She files requests with government agencies for public records. And she searches the Internet for government policies and community response.
Since discovering a data center proposed two miles from her parents’ Warrenton home, Farrar has worked to find and share all the information she can about data centers across Missouri. She now publishes her own newsletter, manages several Facebook groups and is working on a book, “The Data Center Next Door.”
She’s part of a brigade of residents battling the secrecy and speed with which mega-sized data centers have spread across the country, fueled by the growth of cloud computing and generative artificial intelligence.
According to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index report, the United States hosts 5,457 data centers, ten times more than any other country, with hundreds more on the way. More than two-thirds of planned data centers are in rural areas, according to the Pew Research Center, with most of the planned construction focused in the Midwest and South.
KBIA identified at least 14 data centers in the approval process or being built in Missouri.
Discovering the data centers
Farrar didn’t start by looking into data centers. Her family lives “a quarter mile, as the crow flies” from an electrical substation in Warren County, and Farrar says she was researching the possible construction of power lines nearby in the summer of 2025. She worried about how sounds and vibrations might affect her sister, who has autism.
In her search, Farrar eventually discovered something bigger: The substation might be connected to a proposed data center nearby. According to city documents, the project would include two 800,000-square-foot buildings. Farrar was now not worried just about power lines but an entire data center near her parents’ home.
She said learning about the data center through clicking links on the internet made her feel “frustrated, confused, crazy.”
Farrar said a news report in the Warren County Record emboldened her to ask Warrenton city officials about the development during August’s public meeting.
She remembers the room being stuffy and awkward. After passing her questions around, aldermen told her they didn’t know about the proposed data center and referred her to Warren County government officials. One said nothing like a site plan had been brought to them.
“That’s my concern,” Farrar told the aldermen. “My concern is it’s all being behind closed doors until it has to be connected, and by the time it gets connected, the public will have no say in it because it’s already a done deal.”
Around the same time, 20 miles away in Montgomery County, Brenda Buechele grew concerned after attending a county commission meeting. She had gone to the assembly because she heard something was happening to Buechele Road, the public road near her home named after her father Robert.
Montgomery County Commissioners described the matter as a road closure and told Buechele that they signed non-disclosure agreements to protect landowners, she said. What county officials didn’t tell her was that two of the biggest tech companies in the world, Amazon and Google, wanted to move in nearby. Her suspicions were further raised when she heard in September that Montgomery and Warren County commissioners visited a data center site in Iowa.
In October, Buechele came across one of Farrar’s posts on the Warren County Citizens for Responsible Development Facebook page and sent her a direct message. A few days later, they talked on the phone for the first time, and it wasn’t until then that Buechele said she fully grasped the scale of the data centers coming to Montgomery County.
“I'm not gonna lie, I cried when she told me, because she explained it in a way that I could understand,” Buechele said. “I was devastated.”
New neighbors: Google and Amazon
In November, roughly three months after publicly raising the data center issue, Farrar first published a newsletter titled “The AI Factory Next Door” on self-publishing site Substack. She wanted to tell community members what was happening and said the newsletter was a way to get her thoughts out and “find people who also care and find people who were affected.”
A Dec. 10 post featured Project Spade, later revealed to be the Google facility going in near Buechele’s farm.
Details eventually came out: Google’s $15 billion Project Spade spans nearly a thousand acres between rural Montgomery County and the city of New Florence.
Just across Interstate 70, an $8.5 billion data center is being built for Amazon. Seeking information on both sites, Buechele began filing requests for public records from the government.
So far, she has spent more than $2,000 obtaining documents, trying to make sense of the situation and helping bridge an information gap in her community.
Stacks of thick binders stay by Buechele’s side throughout most of the week. They’re filled with hundreds of documents that show how Montgomery County officials quietly advanced plans with commercial real-estate company Northpoint Development and the Missouri Department of Economic Development for the past several years to bring data centers to the county.
She shares what she learns to inform community members, encouraging them to be civically engaged and ask questions.
“If people start attending commissioners meetings and planning and zoning meetings and port authority meetings, and start holding them accountable for what they're doing, if there’s eyes and warm bodies sitting there looking at them, listening to what they're doing in that meeting, they're less likely to repeat what they did,” Buechele said.
Information Gap
A dearth of information and a lack of transparency are common complaints in communities where data centers come knocking. In Festus, a town 35 miles south of St. Louis, residents voiced their discontent with city leadership from the moment a data center development project was made public.
One of these residents, Sherman Doyle, was enjoying his quiet life in Festus when he heard the city was considering regulations for a data center in October 2025. By March, the city had signed an agreement with developer CRG to build a 360-acre, $6 billion data center project less than 200 yards from his home. Doyle, along with 11 other households, will be offered a buyout under the agreement.
Doyle moved from the St. Louis area to Festus in 2021 to be closer to extended family and have better schools for his kids.
“All that security, the fear of just being wiped out and that carpet being pulled from under your feet, you know, how does that affect the family?” Doyle said. “How does it affect your kids?"
Festus residents have organized several Facebook groups to share information. They collected money to submit open records requests and discovered conversations between CRG and city officials began in August, before the project went public.
“If they say something, it's basically, 'we have to double check,'” Doyle said. “If they say the sun's gonna come up in the east and go down in the west, at this point, if it's coming out of city hall, I have to research it.”
Community organizing
Hundreds of residents streamed into Montgomery High School's gymnasium Jan. 29, taking the few remaining seats and sitting shoulder to shoulder on the bleachers. They were there for a town hall organized by a local opposition group named “Preserve Montgomery County.”
Farrar and Buechele were among those in attendance. They watched as an expert spoke about groundwater and the county's geology, and a lawyer touched on tax incentives being provided for construction. The mic was opened to the crowd afterward.
A trickle of residents spoke, then a flood: workers, parents, farmers, former teachers. Many shared uncertainty and a fear about data centers’ effects on their communities.
Preserve Montgomery County leaders filed a lawsuit in February to halt the construction of the Amazon data center, alleging Montgomery County officials violated several provisions of the Missouri Sunshine Law, designed to promote government transparency.
Montgomery County Commissioners continue to defend the data centers publicly, but none agreed to an interview.
The room was similarly overflowing into the lobby of Festus City Hall when four new councilmembers were sworn in on April 13. They stood at the front of the room with their right hands raised before taking their seats behind the dais. Each of them ran on anti-data center platforms, joining four incumbents who voted in favor.
Crosby Doyle, Sherman Doyle’s 12-year-old son, spoke at the city council meeting on behalf of his family and friends in his neighborhood.
“Every day, my friends and I play in the nice fresh air by walking around the neighborhood, playing games outside or even exploring the woods,” the boy said, “but you will destroy that peace by adding this nonsense.”
Mayor Sam Richards has consistently defended the data center plans, citing the benefits money and development will bring to the city.
“The City of Festus will receive significant, direct, community benefit payments totaling $45 million over 10 years,” Richards said in the statement. “Starting at $3 million in the first year, and also including a payment of up to $5 million for a new city firehouse.”
Like Preserve Montgomery County, the citizens group Wake Up JeffCo filed a lawsuit against CRG and the City of Festus on April 9 in hopes of invalidating the city’s decision to rezone land for the data center.
Despite legal action, data centers in both communities are moving forward. Construction on the Google site is well underway, with bulldozers visible to drivers cruising by on Interstate 70.
Much has happened for Farrar, too, since first discovering the data center in Warren County. While she lost her Warrenton alderman election April 7, she had promised, win or lose, “I am not stopping.”
She temporarily suspended her daycare business, once she made sure all of the children landed somewhere else, in order to devote more time to data centers, she said.
Farrar now works as a part-time nanny and for the Missouri Workers Center with their “No MO Dirty Data Centers” campaign, which has the aim of getting increased benefits for locals, added protections and more transparency in the construction process.
As for the Warrenton data center that started Farrar’s journey: The city approved the project’s site plan and a 75% personal property tax abatement.
Farrar still speaks at public meetings, but now, she feels confident and informed. She will look the mayor in the eye until he looks away. It’s a far cry from the person Farrar was last year, when she says she felt timid and confused at that first meeting.
“Before the data centers, I was very isolated in a box of my own self-being, and I was concerned about my family and my health and all of that. After the data centers, it has been a layer of self-awareness that I wasn't anticipating,” she said. “It has been transformative to the way I see almost every individual I interact with.”
Thanks to Farrar, Buechele and other engaged residents, many more people across Missouri are aware of data centers being proposed for their communities. Facebook groups are active. Town hall meetings are packed.
Farrar said her goal is to make sure new technologies benefit local communities. That’s especially the case for artificial intelligence.
“I think the argument is not whether or not AI should be here; it's who needs to be in control of AI,” Farrar said. “And the people need to be in control of AI.”
