Last week I had the opportunity to attend Wrangell’s town hall meeting regarding the upcoming redevelopment plan. Seamlessly packaged within this improvement plan was a provision seeking millions of dollars to prepare the 6-Mile property for commercial users, including an AI micro data center.

I had to make sure I wasn’t daydreaming. It feels like I am presently overly concerned with the rapid advancement of AI almost all day, every day. Yet I know I am not alone with these obsessive concerns.

Sure enough, it was real. Our town, with a population of just about 2,000, is being seemingly conditioned toward the need for an AI micro data center attached to the port redesign.

Why, I kept asking myself, would a town with such a small population need an AI data center? But I already knew the answer to this question: We don’t.

The main selling point to the community for the more than $50 million price tag for developing the property and adding to the downtown waterfront and City Dock is the much-needed employment opportunities it will bring to the town. And not just construction jobs but lasting employment in modern shipbuilding with the addition of this new, “largest-of-its-kind” shipyard.

The presenters noted “it will be bigger than the existing facility” in nearby Ketchikan, without any reservations as to what effect that might have on Ketchikan, which already is reliant on the facility for its own employment needs.

I was hung up specifically on the AI data center though. All I could translate to myself was that installation of AI infrastructure today would be ready for the deployment of AI automation systems tomorrow. I can’t be the only one who understands how this process unfolds.

Suddenly, everywhere in America is grasping at how to deal with the encroachment of local AI data centers. Many don’t understand what they’re for and most don’t see a need at all.

Yet from the apparently non-important protected wetlands of the Everglades to now the middle of the Tongass National Forest, these power- and water-hungry facilities have become the new norm.

“For the betterment of the local communities’ lives” we are told, as if anything of late, government appropriated, is of benefit to any regular citizens.

The next day, and away from the public forum, I asked a Wrangell business owner if he feared that the proposed jobs would no longer be for human workers in as little time as just a few years. He sincerely hoped not.

“This is a blue-collar town,” he said, “and we want to keep it that way.”

Eric Freund