Wally Taylor, legal chair for the Iowa Sierra Club, the largest environmental nonprofit in the state, has lived in Cedar Rapids since 1979.
Taylor has grown increasingly concerned in recent months after a new wave of technology found its way into his community — the artificial intelligence, or AI, industry. A pair of data centers are under construction in Cedar Rapids, and while proponents of the projects express their excitement, community members and environmental advocates aren’t so sure the project is in the community’s best interest.
Data centers are used to house and process data. The centers are also used to store, compute, and AI…