Ohio county learned of Google's $1 billion data center after the deal was done

A deal settled before the neighbors knew

Episode 3 of Power Play, a six-part Quartz investigation into AI and the US power grid, starts in Scioto County, Ohio. As qz.com reported, residents there learned about a new $1 billion Google data center only after the deal was already done. A data center is a large building full of computers that run AI and other online services.

The county also gave up 75 percent of the property tax on the project for 15 years. That is a big cut in the money a local government would normally collect from a facility of this size.

Reporter Catherine Baab says this pattern is familiar. After reading county filings in Ohio and Virginia, she found the pitch is always jobs and tax revenue. The terms are usually settled before anyone in town hears about it.

A pledge signed in a loaded room

On March 4 of this year, the administration held an AI energy roundtable with tech CEOs at the White House. The CEOs signed what the podcast calls a ratepayer protection pledge. A ratepayer is anyone who pays an electricity bill, and the pledge claims AI won't raise anyone's bill.

The meeting took place in the Indian Treaty Room. The hosts point out the irony: it is a space tied to a history in which the federal government made resource agreements with Native tribes and then broke them. Baab sent the detail to historian John Reeves, calling it an accidental metaphor.

The podcast does not claim the pledge will fail. Its point is that promises made in a ceremony are different from terms written into county paperwork.

"Underused" land, then and now

Reeves wrote Grant's Betrayal, a book about the taking of the Black Hills from the Lakota. He says one argument for the seizure was that the Lakota weren't using the land. In fact they were using it, just not in a way the gold-seekers recognized.

Baab sees an echo in how rural farmland gets described today: as underused space simply because it sits near a high-voltage power line. When a project is framed as inevitable, she argues, protest looks pointless before it starts.

Reeves adds that disagreement then was often treated as rebellion rather than as a real opinion. He also notes that rural towns can face a boom-and-bust pattern, with higher electricity prices and strained infrastructure, and no guarantee the builder stays.

Who gets the gains, who pays the bills

Reeves points to the last big build-out. After the depression of 1873, the push into the Black Hills was partly meant to give struggling workers a chance. But he says the Homestake Mining Company took the lion's share of the wealth and bought up small settlers' claims. Taxpayers, meanwhile, helped fund the railways and other infrastructure that let large companies grow.

Baab applies the same test to data centers: follow the gains and see where they end up. She is open about being a fan of markets, but says tech firms should not be treated as public infrastructure when the profits stay with shareholders.

Her example is Loudoun County, Virginia, where Google has a data center. She says the county collected $900 million in data center property tax revenue in fiscal year 2025. Yet the tax incentives offered to the company there are worth about $1.6 billion a year. Her verdict on the numbers: "The math doesn't lie to you." She says the community does not obviously come out ahead.

What a reader can take from it

The episode is partly history lesson and partly a call to read the paperwork. Baab stresses that this information is public, so any resident can look at it and decide what a project really contributes locally.

The reporting is by Jackie Snow, Catherine Baab and Joseph Zeballos-Roig, with Marco Pimentel hosting. The transcript we worked from cuts off partway through a story about Scioto, Ohio in the 1790s, so we leave that part out.