The debate over data centers in Spokane County has heated up like an overloaded digital server rack buzzing — not with electricity, but with information and angst.
Activists have been frantically gathering and analyzing that information, but it’s a lot for the average person to handle at one time. Storylines around several data center proposals are developing on social media seemingly at the same rate as the very technology that uses the data centers, which process and store every command we send into the internet. During the last three decades, eight data centers appeared in the Spokane area: small facilities that rent server space to businesses to store their information.
But that small footprint might soon change. As officials in Spokane County and its municipalities are trying to figure out how they might regulate the energy-intensive facilities, some leaders are trying to attract data center developers here — and the proposals are orders of magnitude larger than the existing data centers. The largest existing facility in the county is a TierPoint data center in Liberty Lake that occupies 32,000 square feet, whereas the largest proposed new facility could be millions of square feet and consume as much energy as all of Spokane County…