Big Tech in our backyard.

We hear a lot about what Artificial Intelligence (AI) can do. Read a scan faster than a radiologist. Cut years off drug discovery. Write your emails for you. We hear a lot less about where any of that actually happens.

It happens in buildings the size of a shopping mall, drawing power like a small city, going up a few miles from somebody’s front door. Usually somebody else’s front door. Until it’s yours.

Data centers are going up fast across the country, and Florida is very much on the list. These aren’t warehouses with a few servers humming in the back.

One large facility can draw as much electricity as a small city, and keeping it cool takes water — in a state where we already fight over both every August. The grid strains. The aquifer isn’t infinite. Dropping an industrial customer that size into a neighborhood is not a small decision, and it shouldn’t be made quietly.

Right now, too often, it is. Projects show up on the county agenda under a code name. The company’s real name doesn’t appear until the deal is done. Water and power usage get treated as trade secrets. By the time residents find out what’s being built down the road, the only thing left to argue about is the landscaping.

I’m a biomedical engineer, and this process is roughly the opposite of how I was trained to think.

You don’t design a device, confirm it works, and call it finished. You ask what it does to the person on the other end of it — and you answer that before it ships, not after. That isn’t being anti-technology. That’s just doing the engineering honestly.

So here’s what I think Florida families are owed:

• A federal standard that puts households first. No data center should be able to outbid your family for the power and water you count on. Local stability comes before corporate convenience.

• Reporting that’s actually public. Every facility discloses what it uses — electricity and water, on a schedule anyone can look up. If a company won’t say what it’s consuming, our planners can’t protect anything.

• A real review before ground breaks. Real notice, real hearings, real time for residents to weigh in on what this means for their bills, their roads, their water. Not a rubber stamp at the end of a process nobody knew was happening.

And until those guardrails exist, I’d rather we pause new construction than keep building ahead of the protections. That’s not hostility toward innovation. It’s the ordinary expectation that a company moving into your town has to answer to the people already there.

That’s the standard I intend to fight for.

Subscribe now