Whenever the Botetourt County supervisors meet, demonstrators gather outside the county offices to protest the Google data center that will soon start construction in the county’s business park.
Depending on the time of day, those anti-data center demonstrators pass by workers going to or from another business in the Greenfield Center complex. Those are the workers for Munters, a company that makes climate control systems — and whose exponential job growth in Botetourt has been fueled by the same data center industry that their neighbors are protesting.
That juxtaposition frames some of the complexities surrounding not only the Google debate in Botetourt, but also the larger data center debate across Virginia, and an even more far-reaching debate about the role of the artificial intelligence systems that many data centers power…