Michigan Landowners: How AI Data Centers Impact You

Welcome to March Madness, Michigan!

Why I Care About Michigan Land As A Homeless Guy With Intensity Issues

If you want to skip my life story and get straight into the details, Be My Guest.

Disclaimer before we get started: I am team unqualified. I have no degree. I am not always the smartest guy in the room. I am just a guy who has lived in Michigan for most of his life, except for a few years here, and a few years there - not by my choosing. My choice has always been Michigan and its people.

I used AI to generate an outline for this piece, though much of the content presented within represents knowledge that I already had, whether gained intuitively through life experiences, or trained and learned over the course of my life.

I use the free time that buys me to generate human content like this up-front section and to reach out to people who my skills may be of service to.

If I'm so smart, why do I need AI? Because I am one guy who (allegedly - please don't come for me, student loan debt collectors) started his life out $15k in the hole on a promise from a trusted authority figure. Many of the people who want to put AI data centers down around us do not come from that kind of background. But many of you - the hard-working people of Michigan - do. I want to get a lot of stuff done to make up for mine and my family's past mistakes and to help the people around me stay ahead of the curve.

I don't want to see any of you good people get taken advantage of. And I want it to be clear to any outsiders coming in who we are. We are welcoming and hospitable, and we are not pushovers.

If you weren't standing outside Comerica on that crisp night in October with your dad and two brothers, craning your neck to see what the crowd was going wild over when Magglio Ordoñez sent the Tigers to the World Series, you don't know what you missed out on.

Oh-ee-oh...

We are '04 Pistons fans around here.

We might not all run, but most of us watched Rip Hamilton run around all game when the guys were winning. Mr. Big Shot's low ego, despite the nickname, captured the sporting essence of what it meant to be a quietly competent blue collar worker. We respected Ben Wallace for his grit and his willingness to do the dirty work for the sake of the team, often playing the underdog to much bigger guys.

We have watched the Red Wings protect the Stanley Cup from China 11 times (or 4 times within our lifetimes, for many of my readers). I am admittedly not a hockey guy - I did like to see my high school Geometry teacher connect with his students over Red Wings trivia at the beginning of class.

It hasn't all been electrifying. We have also watched the Lions do what the Lions do, decade in and decade out.

We have watched titans build themselves from granite, grit, and steel, and we have watched them fall into deep depressions.

Worse, we have watched them build our hopes up, only to leave us behind in their dust bowl.

What It's Like To Watch Something You Love Erode

Man, if you felt even a tinge of that growing up in Michigan, especially in Flint, especially in the '90s and '00s, you know what a time that was to be alive.

When I was, uhh, "taken on extended vacation to Colorado by my affluent parents" from 2014-2018, I was forced to learn and to change a great deal.

I missed coneys so bad I spent days researching and working to nail a duplicate of the recipe for Flint style sauce (I can't remember if the source wound up being Angelo's or Gillie's - either way, there is no tomato sauce in the recipe; just lard, onions, meat, and straightforward seasoning). I missed the Tigers - even though most wouldn't know me as a baseball fan; I used to watch games with my family back in the Tiger Stadium days, when anyone could afford to get in.

Get ya peanuts!

Let's go, Bobby (Higginson)!

I grew up watching the Tigers play in Tiger Stadium. I have played probably 800 games of pickup basketball against This Guy. Talk about history. Granted, the events from that article describe something which happened more recently, at Comerica Park. When I would visit its predecessor, Tiger Stadium, as a kid, I would always make note of its crumbling. Every piece of rubble in the walkway represented - to my young mind - a spot where a bygone slugger had put a ball.

Even as a kid, I knew things had to change. Looking back on it now: man, oh, man, do I wish we had found a way to prevent its getting steamrolled into oblivion.

I care about the land in Michigan because I am a lifelong Michigander. Do I need any reason beyond that?

Begin AI-aided Content

How I used AI here: I generated a lot of this as boilerplate text following several evenings dedicated to researching on my own - stacked on top of knowledge gained from a bunch of adjacent fieldwork I began during Spring 2025, before my exile.

AI Works Against You

Before we get started, let us answer the question: "What is an AI data center?"

According to IBM, an AI data center is "a facility that houses the specific IT infrastructure needed to train, deploy, and deliver AI applications and services."

Recently, a wave of proposals for AI data centers has swept across Michigan. They're trying to drop them in anywhere, in mass. Does that remind you of anything we've seen before?

By my definition, an AI data center in 2026 is a short term cash grab from people who already have too much money, and who don't care about your health as much as they claim that they do.

If you are anything like me, you feel something like the same way.

From rural-suburban township to farmland edges, to our peaceful forests, big tech is looking to suffocate the little guy and stomp flat local culture.

Make no mistake: AI is here to stay, and data centers likely will come to Michigan. We may not be able to control everything - we can control our efforts.

While the technology may be here to stay, AI will never replace you, and big tech can never replace your favorite mitten. Especially if you do anything at all other than lie down.

If we, as a state, face an outside threat worth worrying about, it is less about immigrants - we are built on those, from Hamtramck to the Mighty Mac - and more about a different kind of outsider. It is coastal elites and would-be legacy developers, from both sides, pushing lung cancer center developments near you on the promise of quick cash. They will come wearing smiles, expecting you to hand over what's yours.

My counter-proposal is this: instead of all my hard working friends breaking their backs like slaves every day while some lifelong nerd on a laptop sits on his ass and stacks wealth built from your health, you make him put his cancer-spreading money printers right where he lives. Then make him pay you for your water, and your produce.

Does that sound too good to be true?

It's not.

How to Fight Back Against Big Tech Extraction When You Feel Small (But Are Actually A Sleeping Giant)

Or a groggy bear just waking from hibernation and wondering what on earth is going on in your forest.

Developers will tout a bump to your bottom line.

They will promise you fast cash.

They may even convince you that they'll deliver.

They do not mean one word.

You are a data point. You are a segment of a graph.

They allocate these data centers in alignment with a set of conditions: high local usage, lots of water nearby, and good airflow nearby. All of that impacts the graph they look at when they are plotting you as a data point.

Right now, that graph shows Michigan as one of the highest usage AI states (you're welcome - my dad taught me one thing: how to waste a telemarketer's time in such a way as eats at their bottom line).

That means they are listening. To you. They are watching you.

Following the water crisis, and the way the recession in '08 hit us especially hard, many are discounting our populace as aging, overwhelmed, and behind.

Some of that is true: we are getting older. With age comes wisdom.

We are feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelmed people sometimes stand up and shout "Enough!"

(Not a Michigander, but carries the spirit well enough.)

We damn sure ain't behind.

Michigan, for all its stubbornness, is a shockingly competent state. From Rosie the Riveter types like my late, great grandmother, to the young men and women just trying to get by in an ever-changing world, to our aging forebears who will need our patience and our help increasingly over the next decade - to the workers we lost to the construction of the Mighty Mac (some American heroes who fell to valorous bridge-building, if you ask me) - we are America's "Now hold up just a minute." Sign.

If you are a developer: you don't have to stop. We aren't dumb. We get how money works. We understand how to stabilize a midgame.

You just have to slow down, and put most of your cancer centers where your money's at, or find a better way to go about your business, and bring some of that back with you when you come to Michigan and inhale your big, beautiful center's totally clean air.

Guys like me are going to keep on extracting from big tech (or maybe we'll take a hiatus) while educating and working to serve our neighbors whose voices you won't hear.

Pros and Cons of AI Data Centers

Pros

Some politicians near you might get as much as $1b (which is a high end estimate skimmed from an aggregation of sources). Hopefully they use that money well.

They will not draw the tech elite or their bank accounts into your tax base. Quite the opposite, if I am qualified to make a projection on behalf of some hotshot tech jerk trying to step on a small town's way of life.

Don't let me tell you what to do - ask yourself whether your tiny slice of that $1b pie outweighs the following (many of the following will stick around forever unless some really persistent guy goes and cleans a lot of them for free).

Cons (A List of Chemicals Spewed Into Your Air and Drinking Water by AI)

I am not going to write anything here. I am just going to list the chemicals that AI Data Centers put in the air, and what they will do to you and your loved ones.

Environmental Gases

• Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) - even when they don't leech from the grid and drive your bills through the roof, these centers dump noxious NOx into the atmosphere via their generators; know any kids with asthma (like me when I was little)? They will love the new data centers.
• Formaldehyde - need I say more?
• VOCs - Volatile Organic Compounds - I just spent an autumn cooking these off from a local brush pile to make garden biochar; breathing them in made my thinking less clear and my fatigue levels much higher.
• Methane - A greenhouse gas; pretty bad for individual health in high concentrations, and not something we need more of.
• Carbon Dioxide - Another greenhouse gas; even if you are climate change agnostic - CO2 in high concentrations is bad for breathing and cognition, and many suspect its involvement in accelerating extreme weather events
• Sulfur Dioxide - Causes wheezing and gasping when breathed in; contributes to acid rain which will erode your land and other investments

PFAS

Don't you just love PFAS?

I love PFAS so much, I spent last spring cleaning them up for free in anticipation of times like these - and was nearly killed for doing so instead of making money. Oops.

According to Gizmodo, the EPA (not to point any fingers, but particularly the EPA under a particular president) does not require data center developers to disclose what PFAs their center would dump into your environment. Beyond being alarming due to a lack of transparency, this should raise all kinds of red flags.

Heavy Metals and Others

According to this article from ketos.co, AI Data Centers are likely to pollute our waterways with all manner of heavy metals and total dissolved solids (TDS) - from cadmium to mercury; zinc to lead.

What Does All This Mean For You?

It means that if you are a small business owner, landowner, blue collar worker, or random person on the street in Michigan, you have the megaphone. You have power, and you have influence. Tell them where you want them to stick their data centers (even if you disagree with my take that they should build most of them in and around northern California, where they are at).

Use your voice. Threaten to fight back if they threaten to exercise eminent domain to wrestle your home from you . Let 'em know you've got a handful of hidden heathens breathing down their necks on your behalf.

If you want to dig in and show them what Michigan grit is all about, anyway.

If not, and you're ready to cut and run, that's fine, too. Nobody would blame you. Many of us are going to stick around and keep fighting the good fight, come what may.

I know I will. And that I'll clean up as many PFAs swamps as I am able to clean for free during my lifetime to make up for the damage caused by my high usage.

I don't need AI.

I deleted all of the text it generated halfway through writing this.

One day, AI may earn the place it currently occupies in our minds. That day has not yet come.

And it for sure hasn't earned the right to drink up or stink up our phenomenal lakes and waterways.

This diverged from my initial intent - it is something I have wanted to clarify for some time, though, and I am glad to have gotten it out. I may do another article later, which focuses on numbers, data, property values. You know - all the things people love to read about day in and day out. Thank you for reading.

When you see those posts about AI data centers coming near you, don't be afraid to weigh in, whatever your thinking. Those spaces are for experts. You are the expert on your own home. Nobody trumps you in that domain.

Seeing all those unknown towns pass their moratoriums on data centers encourages me. I like seeing the underdog stand up to the bully. If you're tired of seeing Raditz step on Goku (or you), speak up, and (metaphorically) punch back.

Many of you are built more like Goku than you think (if you haven't seen Dragon Ball - Goku sacrifices a lot, but he comes all the way back from this type of moment, dozens of times over).