Driving near the rural town of Lebanon, Indiana late on a summer night, far off in the distance we saw a huge horizon of bright light. Getting closer, we saw what it was: a huge, barren, land, devoid of grass and trees, with towering klieg lights and heavy trucks everywhere. It was a data center being built. What had been farmland was now wasteland. Like Port Washington, Wisconsin. Like Memphis, where constant loud noise brings stress and high blood pressure. Like northern Virginia, where people live in their basements to escape deafening, round-the-clock noise. Like all those places where data centers are.
Big Tech, and their aliases, such as “Monarch Energy”, are planning massive data centers along our waterways: in Rockford, Cherry Valley, Belvidere, and Beloit, Wisconsin.
In an October 2025 promotional video, Monarch Energy said the proposed data center would use about three million gallons of water per day. Rockford now uses 16.7 million gallons of water per day, meaning that this data center would pollute and deplete our water, increasing Rockford’s total water use by 17%…