* Politico…

Community benefit agreements are increasingly appearing in state strategies for handling the data center boom. In recent months, three Rust Belt governors — Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Illinois’ JB Pritzker and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer — have called on project developers to enter into legal agreements with communities that can cement pollution limits, hiring commitments and local investment promises. […]

The opposition has prompted a wave of local moratoriums and restrictions: Virginia has enacted a new energy consumption tax and New York has paused new data center construction for a year. In Illinois, lawmakers have proposed the POWER Act, which would require data center developers to enter into a CBA with a coalition of community-based organizations or a community advisory board formed by the municipal government. […]

Meagan Niebler, program director at the nonprofit law firm Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services, said more communities want to stop data centers entirely instead of reaching a deal. […]

Pennsylvania’s regulations and proposed laws in Illinois and Michigan would mandate that companies negotiate with communities until both sides agree. But nonmandatory CBAs depend heavily on a developer’s good faith effort.

It’s “very hard” to get large companies to a table for open dialogue with communities, and locals often need a lot of organizing and legal leverage to even get their foot in the door, Niebler said.

* WAND…

What was intended to be a data center presentation in Decatur quickly turned into a heated shouting match. […]

“You guys don’t even know what a data center is,” said committee Chairman Jerry Stocks.

The Citizens Voluntary Advisory Committee created a presentation packed with eight weeks of research about guidelines for a potential data center. […]

Some residents think with the right regulations, a data center could benefit Decatur.

“When done right, this is a blessing for this community, in my opinion. So I’m just here tonight to speak in favor of this,” said one resident.

Not everyone is for data centers coming to Macon County. Demonstrators protested outside the Decatur Civic Center to make their opposition known. As for the presentation, it focused on the research and what data centers could mean for Macon County.

* Champaign County is trying to write the rules before its one-year moratorium expires. IPM Newsroom…

In Champaign County, discussions about these large data centers have also gained traction as residents worry about water usage and environmental impacts.

In April, the county implemented a 1-year moratorium on large data center construction. The Champaign County Data Center Activities Task Force was formed to propose guardrails for large data centers after the ban is lifted. […]

“We do not have the legal authority to ban data centers; I want to make that really clear,” said Emily Rodriguez, vice chair of the Champaign County Board who also serves on the task force, at a public task force meeting Monday, Aug. 31. […]

The ordinance would require data centers to comply with certain regulations, including the most recent International Energy Conservation Code.

It would also limit the size and geographic location of new, large data centers; for example, to avoid or mitigate the impact on wildlife to “a sustainable level of mortality.” […]

“This language is pretty broad and vague, and it begs what information will be used to make this determination and what a sustainable level of mortality is,” [Amanda Pankau of the Prairie Rivers Network] said.

* NPR Illinois…

Yorkville has approved three data center projects, although only one, CyrusOne, is currently under construction, while the other two are tangled in community-driven litigation.

Yorkville City Administrator Bart Olson says none of them are getting local tax incentives, and the city reached an agreement with the developers to give its school district money above and beyond property taxes.

Yorkville, like DeKalb, needs new schools. The district has been trying to build two new schools and renovate their high school. Voters shot down a referendum to do that this spring. […]

NIU professor Chris Goodman says community benefit agreements can guarantee investment, but they can also feel like a way to try to win over increasingly skeptical residents.

“I very much hesitate to call them a bribe,” he said, “but it could almost feel like that, right? ‘Hey, we’ll front you the money to build this new school if you just let us do what we want.’ I mean, it accomplishes the goal from the school district’s perspective, but it really doesn’t feel very good.”

The CyrusOne development is in Yorkville but falls within neighboring Plano’s school district. Luke Baughman, Plano’s chief school business official, says, unlike Yorkville, they’re not expecting to receive a lump sum.

He says they’re projecting the data center will generate almost $11 million in annual property tax revenue. The district collected around $21.6 million last year.

* Things are going a bit more smoothly in Grayslake. The Daily Herald…

Amid continuing pushback against data centers from communities across the country, Grayslake on Tuesday announced it has granted a building permit for the first component of a massive data center campus in the Cornerstone business park.

An 800,000-square-foot building will be the first to emerge for T5@Chicago IV, as part of a planned 472-acre project along Peterson Road west of Route 83.

The village highlights it as possibly the largest economic investment in Lake County history, even as unflagging opponents continue to question the amount of power and water the campus will consume, as well as other potential impacts on the area. […]

“Secured without local municipal tax incentives, tax exemptions or TIF (tax increment financing) subsidies, the development is projected to generate $1.4 billion in property tax revenue over 20 years across local taxing bodies,” the village said in an announcement of the permit Tuesday. […]

However, opponents have filed suit alleging, among other things, that the hearings were inadequate and Open Meetings Act rules were violated. The village has responded with a motion to dismiss the suit.

* More…

* CNBC | Trump says U.S. communities opposing AI data centers could end up ‘backwards and poor’: Trump’s post comes nearly a week after a memo issued by the National Republican Senatorial Committee warned, “If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly, the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.” The NRSC said that private polling in that state shows Republican Sen. Jon Husted in a “dead heat” with Democratic challenger Sherrod Brown in the special election to fill the remainder of the term for the seat vacated by Vice President JD Vance.

* Capitol News Illinois | PJM’s big new data center plan: Make the states figure it out: PJM Interconnection, the biggest grid operator in the U.S., has finally settled on a plan to prevent data centers from causing other customers’ utility bills to soar further in its 13-state territory. That plan relies heavily on states themselves, and the utilities they regulate, to force data centers to secure their own power supplies — or face the possibility of getting their power cut off during grid emergencies.

* Bloomberg | AI Data Center Spending to Reach $32 Trillion by 2050, PwC Says: Global data center spending is set to reach $31.6 trillion through 2050 to meet the world’s growing appetite for AI, an investment boom with no precedent in history, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. Dwarfing projects such as the railways, internet and electrification, spending on data centers could even hit $50 trillion over the next two and a half decades if AI adoption accelerates beyond PwC’s “central scenario” forecast, the firm said in a report Wednesday. For comparison: the US gross domestic product is roughly $30 trillion.

* Utah News Dispatch | Utah can’t say how much it’s losing from data center tax break: “The scale and rapid growth of data-center investment raise legitimate questions about whether our current framework, and the data available to evaluate it, remain adequate,” Rep. Jill Koford, R-Ogden, said in an email. Koford sponsored a bill passed by the Legislature earlier this year requiring transparency around data centers’ water usage. Utah isn’t alone in its opaque approach to sales and use tax exemptions for data centers. A report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit which focuses on corporate and government accountability, found that 14 of the 37 states with such exemptions don’t publish their official revenue losses in a timely manner. Those that do reported losing between $830,000 and $1.9 billion in 2025, with larger losses projected for this year and beyond.

* The Dallas Morning News | More than half of Texas data centers broke law by not responding to water use inquiry: Information requests from state power and water regulators received responses from fewer than half of the data centers identified by the two state agencies. The dearth of information underlined a lack of transparency from data center developers that has fed growing public mistrust. Data centers’ rapid emergence in Texas has become a potent issue in this year’s election cycle, especially in rural communities that tend to be Republican strongholds.

* Illinois Answers | Data Centers Near O’Hare Win Nearly $100M in Local Tax Breaks, Leaving Suburban Homeowners to Cover the Gap: The impact lands hardest on homeowners in suburbs where the tax base leans on a handful of big businesses. In northwest suburban Northlake, the average homeowner would save more than $2,000 on their annual tax bill — a difference of almost 30% — if local data centers did not receive valuation reductions and incentives, according to the analysis. At least 18 northwest suburban data centers won multimillion-dollar breaks in their taxable value from Cook County officials — in one case landing on a valuation far below what the business originally paid to buy its site.