Louisiana congressional candidate Stephen Wagley says residents’ worries over AI data center development in the state are “very valid,” and that elected officials owe voters transparency about the deals bringing such facilities into their communities.
Wagley made the comments during an appearance on Breitbart News Saturday with host Matthew Boyle, drawing a line between recent complaints over Amazon drone deliveries in Baton Rouge and broader unease about data centers.
Wagley said Baton Rouge has hosted a large Amazon facility for several years, and that residents were initially pleased with faster deliveries. But he said the company’s recent experiment with drone deliveries in the area has generated complaints.
“But now it’s turning out that those drones are coming out just way more frequently than anyone expected, they’re much louder than anyone thought they would have been, and there’s a few dangers. One actually crashed the other day, I think they weigh about 85 pounds, they’re much bigger than you would expect,” Wagley said.
He said residents living near the flight paths are now asking whether the drone deliveries should be curtailed or limited, and that both the public and local officials are still working out who has jurisdiction over the issue.
“Everyone, including the officials, are learning as they go, and this is a good segue into the data centers,” Wagley said. “Because, a lot of people are very pro-economic development, growth, and if these data centers are going to be great, well then, they’re going to be great. But the problem we have is we’ve learned from the Amazon situation and other situations. We need to know what questions to ask, and we need to get answers from them. We need transparency and accountability, but it comes back to our elected officials signing these NDA’s bringing in these data centers.”
Wagley said residents have raised specific questions about proposed data center projects, including how much water the facilities will consume, whether they will bring in outside workers rather than employ locals, and whether any jobs created would be long-term.
“Most of the citizens that I’m talking to, I think that their concerns are very valid, because they can’t even get answers to these questions because there is no transparency. There is no accountability, and I think that’s pretty simple, and I think we at least owe them that,” Wagley said.
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