On a spring evening in Stockton, California, Chase Ott-Wick was strolling into a bar when a stranger stopped him. The man had heard that Chase was the guy building a new data center in town—and he wanted to say: Please don’t.
“He had a beautiful home that he paid for and had been living in for years, and was concerned that his view would be disrupted,” Chase told me. But as the conversation went on, he said, it became increasingly clear that what the man really feared was something bigger. “When you turn that thing on,” Chase remembers him saying, “our lives are going to change.”
The people of Stockton, which is 40 miles northeast of Silicon Valley as the crow flies, worried the harsh growl of the data center would drown out the lapping sounds of the San Joaquin River; they feared the rampant water use would turn their rolling green golf courses into a sickly bed of beige; they suspected their precious populations of migratory birds and Chinook salmon would be wiped out by pollution. They had heard rumors the data center would soon be operational, and were steeling themselves to fight back.
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