By RUSS BYNUM

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — Georgia’s highest court waded Wednesday into a fight between Black landowners and local officials who have weakened long-standing protections for one of the South’s last Gullah-Geechee communities founded by freed slaves.

Residents of largely unspoiled Sapelo Island have been trying to roll back zoning changes imposed by McIntosh County officials that doubled the size of homes allowed in a tiny enclave called Hogg Hummock. Homeowners fear the change will bring unaffordable tax increases, threatening one of America’s most historically and culturally unique Black communities.

The Georgia Supreme Court heard legal arguments Wednesday on whether residents can attempt to repeal the 2023 zoning amendments by forcing a special election.

Hogg Hummock residents and their supporters last year gathered more than 2,300 petition signatures from registered voters seeking a referendum in the coastal county 60 miles (96 kilometers) south of Savannah.

McIntosh County commissioners sued to stop the referendum. A lower court judge canceled voting less than a week before the election, ruling it was illegal after hundreds had already cast ballots early.

Philip Thompson, an attorney for the Hogg Hummock residents, urged the state Supreme Court to declare that they have a “constitutional right to a referendum” on the zoning changes so that they can defend a place that’s “a cultural and historical treasure.”

McIntosh County’s attorney, Ken Jarrard, argued that zoning powers “are absolutely different” from others granted to county governments by Georgia’s constitution, and therefore aren’t subject to being challenged by referendum.

Roughly 30 to 50 Black residents live in Hogg Hummock, also known as Hog Hammock, a community of dirt roads and modest homes founded by their enslaved ancestors who worked the cotton plantation of Thomas Spalding.

It’s among a dwindling number of small communities started by emancipated island slaves — known collectively as Gullah, or Geechee in Georgia — scattered along the coast from North Carolina to Florida. Scholars say their separation from the mainland caused these communities to retain much of their African heritage, from their unique dialect to skills and crafts such as cast-net fishing and weaving baskets.

Hogg Hummock earned a place in 1996 on the National Register of Historic Places, the official list of treasured U.S. historic sites. But for protections to preserve the community, residents depend on the local government in McIntosh County, where 65% of the 11,100 residents are white.

Hogg Hummock landowners said they were blindsided in the fall of 2023 when county commissioners voted to relax zoning restrictions enacted decades earlier to help shield the community’s Black residents from pressure to sell land held by their families for generations.

Attorneys for McIntosh County say the residents’ concerns are overblown, arguing in one court filing that allowing larger homes in their community is so “unremarkable” that it “borders on banal.”

The issues before the Georgia Supreme Court have nothing to do with whether Hogg Hummock deserves special protections. Instead, the justices are being asked to deal with technicalities over whether local zoning laws can be challenged by referendum and whether McIntosh County commissioners had a right to sue to stop the October vote.

The case follows a 2023 ruling by the Georgia justices that upheld a referendum that blocked coastal Camden County from building a launchpad for commercial rockets. The court ruled that a rarely used provision of Georgia’s constitution empowers citizens to veto county government decisions at the ballot box.

That decision emboldened Hogg Hummock residents to pursue their own referendum to overturn McIntosh County’s zoning changes.

But attorneys for the county commissioners have argued the constitutional provision allowing citizen referendums doesn’t apply to local zoning decisions, because zoning powers are addressed in a separate section of the state constitution. They also say the trial court judge was wrong to put the zoning changes on hold pending a ruling by state Supreme Court, which could take six months.

Lawyers for the Hogg Hummock residents say the referendum shouldn’t have been interrupted and that county commissioners had no legal standing to sue to stop it, citing the high court’s ruling in the spaceport case.

The Supreme Court is weighing the Sapelo Island case as residents recover from an unrelated tragedy.

Hundreds of tourists were visiting the island on Oct. 19 when a walkway collapsed at the state-operated ferry dock, killing seven people. It happened as Hogg Hummock was celebrating its annual Cultural Day festival, a day intended to be a joyful respite from worries about the community’s uncertain future.

By Paige Gross, Stateline.org

The next time you’re on a Zoom meeting or asking ChatGPT a question, picture this: The information zips instantaneously through a room of hot, humming servers, traveling hundreds, possibly thousands of miles, before it makes its way back to you in just a second or two.

It can be hard to wrap your mind around, said Vijay Gadepally, a senior scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory, but large data centers are where nearly all artificial intelligence systems and computing happens today.

“Each one of these AI models has to sit on a server somewhere, and they tend to be very, very big,” he said. “So if your millions or billions of users are talking to the system simultaneously, the computing systems have to really grow and grow and grow.”

As the United States works to be a global AI superpower, it’s become a home to hundreds of data centers — buildings that store and maintain the physical equipment needed to compute information.

For users of the new and increasingly popular AI tools, it might seem like the changes have been all online, without a physical footprint. But the rise of AI has tangible effects — data centers and the physical infrastructure needed to run them use large amounts of energy, water and other resources, experts say.

“We definitely try to think about the climate side of it with a critical eye,” said Jennifer Brandon, a science and sustainability consultant. “All of a sudden, it’s adding so much strain on the grid to some of these places.”

The rise of data centers

As society traded large, desktop computers for sleek laptops, and internet infrastructure began supporting AI models and other software tools, the U.S. has built the physical infrastructure to support growing computing power.

Large language models (LLMs) and machine learning (ML) technologies — the foundation of most modern AI tools — have been used by technologists for decades, but only in the last five to seven years have they become commercialized and used by the general public, said David Acosta, cofounder and chief artificial intelligence officer of ARBOai.

To train and process information, these fast-learning AI models require graphic processing units (GPUs), servers, storage, cabling and other networking equipment, all housed in data centers across the country. Computers have been storing and processing data off-site in dedicated centers for decades, but the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s and the move to cloud storage demanded much more storage capacity over the last decade.

As more things moved online, and computing hardware and chip technology supported faster processing, AI models became attainable to the general public, Acosta said. Current AI models use thousands of GPUs to operate, and training a single chatbot like ChatGPT uses about the same amount of energy as 100 homes over the course of a year.

“And then you multiply that times the thousands of models that are being trained,” Acosta said. “It’s pretty intense.”

The United States is currently home to more than 3,600 data centers, but about 80% of them are concentrated in 15 states, Data Center Map shows. The market has doubled since 2020, Forbes reported, with 21% year over year growth. For many years, nearly all of the country’s data centers were housed in Virginia, and the state is considered a global hub with nearly 70% of the world’s internet traffic flowing through its nearly 600 centers. Texas and California follow Virginia, with 336 and 307 centers, respectively.

Tech companies that require large amounts of computing power, the private equity firms and banks that invest in them and other real estate or specialized firms are the primary funders of data centers. In September, BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, Microsoft and AI investment fund MGX invested $30 billion into new and expanded data centers primarily in the U.S, and said they will seek $100 billion in total investment, including debt financing.

Investment in American data center infrastructure is encouraging considering the global “AI arms race,” we’re in, Acosta said.

“If you own the data, you have the power,” Acosta said. “I just think we just make sure we do it ethically and as preemptive as possible.”

Energy and environmental impact

Current estimates say data centers are responsible for about 2% of the U.S.’ energy demand, but Anthony DeOrsey, a research manager at sustainable energy research firm Cleantech group, projects data centers will be about 10% of demand by 2027.

As data centers are developed in new communities across the country, residents and their state legislators see a mix of financial benefits with energy and environmental challenges.

The development of data centers brings some infrastructure jobs to an area, and in busy data center communities, like Virginia’s Loudoun and Prince William counties, centers can generate millions in tax revenue, the Virginia Mercury reported.

Local governments can be eager to strike deals with the tech companies or private equity firms seeking to build, but the availability and cost of power is a primary concern. New large data centers require the electricity equivalent of about 750,000 homes, a February report from sustainability consultancy firm BSI and real estate services firm CBRE.

Under many state’s utilities structures, local residents can be subjected to electric price increases to meet big electric needs of data centers. Some legislators, like Georgia State Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, have sought to protect residential and commercial customers from getting hit with higher utility bills.

Granville Martin, an Eastern Shore, Connecticut-based lawyer with expertise in finance and environmental regulation, said the same problem has come up in his own community.

“The argument was, the locals didn’t want this data center coming in there and sucking up a bunch of the available power because their view — rightly or wrongly, and I think rightly — was well, that’s just going to raise our rates,” Martin said.

Some states are exploring alternative energy sources. In Pennsylvania, Constellation Energy made a deal to restart its nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island to provide carbon-free electricity to offset Microsoft’s power usage at its nearby data centers.

But climate experts have concerns about data centers outside of their power demand.

“The general public is largely unaware that cooling industrial facilities, whatever they might be, is actually a really, really important aspect of their function,” Martin said.

The equipment in data centers, many of which run 24/7, generate a lot of heat. To regulate temperature, most pump water through tubing surrounding the IT equipment, and use air conditioning systems to keep those structures cool. About 40% of data center’s energy consumption is used for cooling, the Cleantech group found.

Some have a closed-loop system, recycling grey water through the same system, but many use fresh drinking water. The amount of water and energy used in cooling is enormous, Brandon, the sustainability consultant. said.

“The current amount of AI data centers we have takes six times the amount of water as the country of Denmark,” she said. “And then we are using the same amount of energy as Japan, which is the fifth largest energy user in the world, for data centers right now.”

Is there a sustainable future for data centers?

Energy is now a material issue to running an AI company, DeOrsey said, and unrestrained, quickly evolving AI models are very expensive to train and operate. DeOrsey pointed to Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which released its attempt at a cost-conscious, energy efficient large language model, R1, in January.

The company claims it trained the model on 2,000 chips, much fewer than competitors like Open AI, ChatGPT’s parent company, and Google, which use about 16,000 chips. It’s not yet clear if the model lives up to its claims of energy efficiency in use, but it’s a sign that companies are feeling the pressure to be more efficient, DeOrsey said.

“I think companies like DeepSeek are an example of companies doing constrained optimization,” he said. “They’re assuming they won’t just get all the power they need, they won’t be able to get all of the chips they need, and just make do with what they have.”

For Gadepally, who is also chief tech officer of AI company Radium Cloud, this selective optimization is a tool he hopes more companies begin using. His recent work at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center focused on the lab’s own data center consumption. When they realized how hot their equipment was getting, they did an audit.

Gadepally said simple switches like using cheaper, less-robust AI models cut down on their energy use. Using AI models at off-peak times saved money, as did “power capping” or limiting the amount of power feeding their computer processors. The difference was nominal — you may wait a second or two more to get an answer back from a chatbot, for example.

With Northeastern University, MIT built software called Clover that watches carbon intensity for peak periods and makes adjustments, like automatically using a lower-quality AI model with less computing power when energy demand is high.

“We’ve been kind of pushing back on people for a long time saying, is it really worth it?” Gadepally said. “You might get a better, you know, knock-knock joke from this chatbot. But that’s now using 10 times the power than it was doing before. Is that worth it?”

Gadepally and Acosta both spoke about localizing AI tools as another energy and cost saving strategy for companies and data centers. In practice, that means building tools to do exactly what you need them to do, and nothing more, and hosting them on local servers that don’t need to send their computing out potentially hundreds of miles away to the nearest data center.

Health care and agricultural settings are a great example, Acosta said, where tools can be built to serve these specialized settings rather than processing their data at “bloated, over-fluffed” large data centers.

Neither AI developer sees any slowdown in the demand for AI and processing capabilities of data centers. But Gadepally said environmental and energy concerns will come to a head for tech companies when they realize they could save money by saving energy, too. Whether DeepSeek finds the same success as some of its American competitors is yet to be seen, Gadepally said, but it will probably make them question their practices.

“It will at least make people question before someone says, ‘I need a billion dollars to buy new infrastructure,’ or ‘I need to spend a billion dollars on computing next month,” Gadepally said. “Now they may say, ‘did you try to optimize it?’”

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By KATE PAYNE and DAVID FISCHER

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — A shooting Thursday on the Florida State University campus sent an unknown number of people to a nearby hospital, a medical center spokesperson said.

Tallahassee Memorial Healthcare was receiving and treating people affected by the shooting, said Sarah Cannon, a hospital spokesperson. She said the hospital cannot yet confirm the number of people in care, and said the details are still unfolding.

Ambulances, fire trucks and patrol vehicles from multiple law enforcement agencies raced toward the campus midday Thursday after the university issued an active shooter alert near the student union.

Hundreds of students streamed away from the direction of the student union. Students were glued to their phones, some visibly emotional.

Junior Joshua Sirmans, 20, was in the university’s main library when he said alarms began going off warning of an active shooter. Sirmans said law enforcement officers escorted him and other students out of the library with their hands over their heads.

FBI officials are on scene, a spokesperson said.

Students and faculty were instructed to seek shelter and await further instructions.

“Lock and stay away from all doors and windows and be prepared to take additional protective measures,” the alert said.

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By Alex Brown, Stateline.org

For the first time in decades, America needs to produce more electricity.

In many places, a sharp uptick in power demand has been driven by data centers, the industrial buildings that house huge banks of computer servers and support our increasingly digital society.

State lawmakers have long sought to attract such operations with generous tax breaks and incentives. But now, some are concerned that the infrastructure needed to add all those data centers to the electric grid will drive up residents’ utility bills. The growing use of artificial intelligence, which requires massive amounts of computing power, has added to that worry.

“We’re going to have tremendous stress from AI,” said New Jersey state Sen. Bob Smith, a Democrat who chairs the Environment and Energy Committee. “We have a crisis coming our way in electric rates. These outrageous increases are going to be put on the citizens. Why should they bear the rate increases?”

Smith has authored a bill that would require new AI data centers in New Jersey to arrange to supply their power from new, clean energy sources, if other states in the region enact similar measures.

The bill is among roughly a dozen proposals in state legislatures nationwide seeking to ensure that data centers don’t result in increased rates for other electric customers, according to the National Caucus of Environmental Legislators, a forum for state lawmakers. Smith and lawmakers in other states with clean energy targets also say the demand for AI could derail their climate goals.

Those goals are also under attack from President Donald Trump, who has directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to block enforcement of all state climate policies. Trump also issued orders seeking to boost coal production, in part to meet the energy demands from AI operations.

Tech companies note that their data centers are crucial for everything from credit card transactions to remote work to streaming Netflix. And the centers create tax revenue and jobs in the states that host them, the companies argue.

Data centers are just the first wave in a new era of increased electricity demand. Electric vehicles, a growing manufacturing sector and the electrification of household appliances are all expected to use more power in the years to come.

Industry leaders say it’s unfair to single out data centers, when more power will be needed for a variety of sectors.

“[Targeting data centers] risks creating unjustified distinctions amongst similar customers,” said Dan Diorio, senior director of state policy with the Data Center Coalition, a membership association for tech companies.

Ground zero: Virginia

Virginia hosts the world’s largest concentration of data centers, and is at the epicenter of debates over the industry’s future.

State lawmakers commissioned a study, published last year, to outline the industry’s impacts. Researchers found that data centers are currently paying their fair share for electricity. But the immense energy demands they’re forecasted to create in the coming years “will likely increase system costs for all customers, including non-data center customers,” the report concluded.

The study found that unconstrained demand largely from data centers would drive up Virginia’s energy usage 183% by 2040. With no new data centers, energy use would only grow 15%. In addition to the costs of building more power plants, the report said, utilities will also need to install more substations, transformers and distribution lines.

“They sounded an alarm that the steep increase — if this is unchecked — would quickly [raise consumers’ rates],” said state Del. Rip Sullivan, a Democrat who has been at the center of discussions over the industry’s future in Virginia.

Sullivan sponsored a bill that would have required data centers to meet energy efficiency standards to qualify for certain tax exemptions, but the measure did not advance this session. Virginia lawmakers passed a measure this session directing state regulators to determine whether utilities should create a special rate that certain customers such as data centers must pay.

Several other states are considering similar bills that aim to put data centers — or large electricity users more generally — in their own “rate class.” Proponents say that would prevent the costs of generating enough electricity for those centers from being spread to household customers.

Data center proponents have argued that regulators are best suited to set the rules, not lawmakers.

“The industry is committed to ensuring it continues to pay its full cost of service to ensure that other customers are protected from any unnecessary costs,” said Aaron Tinjum, vice president of energy for the Data Center Coalition.

Sullivan noted that data centers are critical to our digital society, and that the Virginia study found that the industry creates construction jobs and local tax revenue. But Virginia also aims to produce 100% of its electricity from sources without any carbon emissions by 2050 — a goal that will become more difficult if power demands skyrocket. The state urgently needs a comprehensive strategy to manage all those interests, Sullivan said.

‘You get good and bad’

For years, states have tried to lure data centers with tax incentives or exemptions. At least 36 states, both conservative and liberal, offer such incentives. But now, some of the states that have been most successful at attracting the industry are having second thoughts.

Georgia state Sen. Chuck Hufstetler, a Republican, noted that electric customers in the state have seen six rate increases in less than two years. Data centers, he said, use immense amounts of power and water, while creating few long-term jobs. On the other hand, he noted that they have proven to be a substantial source of property tax revenue.

“You get good and bad with the data centers, but I just want to make sure they pay their way,” he said.

Hufstetler authored a bill that would have barred regulators from raising rates because of the costs of serving data centers. While the bill did not pass this session, the Georgia Public Service Commission approved a new rule with similar protections, forcing data centers to cover those costs.

The move is a good start, Hufstetler said, but legislation is still needed because regulators can quickly roll back their own rules. Meanwhile, Georgia lawmakers passed a measure last year that would have paused the state’s sales tax exemption for data centers. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp vetoed the bill, arguing that an abrupt change would undermine companies’ planned investments in Georgia.

Consumer advocates say more states should rescind their incentives.

Many data centers don’t bring in enough tax revenue to cover their tax breaks, said Kasia Tarczynska, senior research analyst at Good Jobs First, a policy group that tracks government subsidies related to economic development.

“It’s not a winning program for state budgets,” she said.

Oregon has seen a rapid increase in data centers in the eastern part of the state, said state Rep. Pam Marsh, a Democrat.

“Data center growth is outstripping every other kind of conventional user category,” she said. “There’s lots of evidence that the demand of those data centers has already been shifted onto residential ratepayers.”

Marsh has sponsored a bill that would require data centers and other large energy users to be assigned to a separate rate class that accounts for the added costs of their power demands.

In a letter to Oregon lawmakers, Amazon Web Services — the computing subsidiary of the retail giant — said it has worked with utilities to ensure its costs aren’t being passed to other ratepayers. The company noted its commitments to purchase large amounts of renewable energy, and said major grid upgrades are needed to enable more clean power and the deployment of technologies like electric vehicles.

Amazon Web Services did not grant an interview request. Two other industry leaders, Google and OpenAI, did not respond to Stateline inquiries.

Utah enacted a law this year that allows “large load” customers such as data centers to craft separate contracts with utilities. It’s intended to ensure that household ratepayers don’t get hit with additional costs to power those facilities. Republican state Sen. Scott Sandall, who sponsored the bill, did not respond to a Stateline interview request.

“This new demand requires billions of dollars of capital investment,” said Tyson Slocum, energy program director at Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy nonprofit. “The normal model is you spread that investment cost across all consumers. That’s not reasonable here.”

Slocum said data center users have been shying away from previous commitments to use clean energy sources, at the same time Trump has pushed to increase fossil fuel production.

Some lawmakers have noted that many data centers are being built to meet forecasted demand from AI. They worry that overhyped projections could force utilities to build expensive infrastructure that never gets used.

Industry leaders say the build-out of data centers is driven by consumer demands and note that such facilities have made computing far more efficient.

They also argue that digital infrastructure is important for national security, ensuring that Americans’ data is not passing through overseas facilities with weak security. And they warn that companies may be wary of investing in states with legislation seen as disruptive.

“This is an industry that is trying to build out to meet unprecedented demand,” said Diorio, of the Data Center Coalition. “[State legislation] can send a market signal that there’s going to be friction in that market.”

©2025 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.