By Chuck Thompson and John Stang | March 23, 2026 | Columbia Insight
As big tech eyes public lands in its quest for power, public opinion is souring.
On Dec. 9th, 2025, after 40 minutes of debate, the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 655.
Sponsored by Rep. Cliff Bentz, R-Ore., the bill called for the transfer of ownership of 150 acres of land from the Mt. Hood National Forest to the City of The Dalles.
Officially called The Dalles Watershed Development Act, H.R. 655 made no mention of data centers. Neither did its sponsor.
“This transfer will help the City of The Dalles expand its potable water resources,” explained Bentz, who represents most of eastern and southern Oregon, following passage of the bill.
“With 85 percent of our drinking water coming from this watershed, consolidating ownership of the land around the Crow Creek Dam and Reservoir is a tremendous step forward for our community,” added The Dalles Mayor Richard Mays in a statement issued by Bentz’s office.
Critics who’ve been following the rapid proliferation of data centers around the region saw a different motive behind the bill.
“The notion that this water is somehow for drinking water for residents of the city, it’s just a fallacy,” John DeVoe, senior advisor at WaterWatch of Oregon, an environmental nonprofit, told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “Obviously, the great driver of demand for water in The Dalles is Google.”
OPB’s Jan. 15th dissection of the bill exposed what many saw as the true beneficiary of H.R. 655 — Google data centers.
Environmental groups and local residents, wrote OPB’s April Ehrlich, are “worried both about the ecological cost to fish and wildlife, and about whether the extra water will really go to local homes and businesses — or if The Dalles wants to draw water from the Mount Hood forest to slake the tech industry’s growing thirst for data centers.”
Elected officials in The Dalles have denied that they are seeking more water for Google — the tech titan operates five data centers in the city, with a sixth planned to open this year — saying they need to expand the city’s reservoir because the city is growing.
“But The Dalles’ population hasn’t grown much this past decade,” wrote Ehrlich. “It has added about 1,700 people over the last 15 years, bringing its population up to about 16,200 people … What has grown: Google’s size and water use.”
Google officials have stated they are not behind the effort to transfer federal land to The Dalles. According to OPB, Bentz said he didn’t ask The Dalles how they were going to use the water or who was going to get it.
Either way, a river of public concern around data centers has been rising. With the attempt to remove land from a National Forest to potentially aid the world’s reigning tech giant, the dam has finally broken.
How Google, Amazon, Meta and other tech companies choose to react to the new social network they’ve inadvertently created could determine the next phase in the AI-driven insistence on a more intelligent future.
Opposition Forms
Earlier this month, opponents of the unchecked expansion of data centers in Oregon got a small victory in Hillsboro, about 20 miles west of Portland in Washington County.
On March 3rd, Oregon Sen. Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, announced she would not advance her own Senate Bill 1586. The bill would have brought 373 acres of rural land adjacent to U.S. 26 into Hillsboro’s urban growth boundary for the purpose of accommodating advanced technology industries and, according to critics, the construction of data centers.
Sollman’s decision to withdraw the bill appears to have been the result of a fierce opposition campaign.
The leader of that campaign is Dirk Knudsen, a 63-year-old commercial and residential real estate developer and lifelong Hillsboro resident. S.B. 1586 seemed well on its way to becoming law until Knudsen rallied a “ragtag crew with me being the muckraker journalist type” into filing more than a thousand pieces of public opposition to the plan.
“We fought Janeen every way we could,” Knudsen told Columbia Insight. “A lot of us know her. There were no traffic studies done. No environmental studies. Just nothing you would normally do with an urban growth boundary expansion.”
According to the Data Center Map website, there are currently 123 data centers in Oregon, 107 in Washington and 17 in Idaho. Though published estimates count 14 to 18 data centers in Hillsboro, Knudsen says he believes there are 29 data centers in what he calls “data center alley.”
He’s created his own map of data centers in Hillsboro, with red icons indicating data centers already built, and green icons representing planned data centers.
Knudsen runs The Hillsboro Herald, a community news blog he started in 2020. He’s published numerous articles critical of data centers on grounds ranging from environmental degradation to land use violations to lack of corporate transparency to government secrecy to heat islands created by the centers to extravagant tax breaks provided by local officials.
By his estimate, Washington County is paying roughly $520,000 in tax breaks per employee for companies like TikTok to do business in the county.
“I see our schools struggling,” Knudsen said on a March 12th Oregon Center for Public Policy podcast. “Washington County itself, who would have been a huge recipient of those property tax dollars, is effectively bankrupt. They’ve said that. It should be the richest county in the state given the industrial base we have here.”
“If you talk to commercial real estate people, they’re laughing at us,” Knudsen told Columbia Insight. “We’ve been foolish.”
While it’s not accurate to say that a coordinated network of opposition to data centers has coalesced in the Pacific Northwest, or nationally, Knudsen is evidence that a regional movement is taking shape 20 years after Google opened its first-ever major data center in The Dalles in 2006.
Knudsen says the while furor around H.R. 655 has increased public awareness, and anger, he began feeling an upsurge in public opposition to data centers in 2025.
“I’ve been banging the drum about these issues for five or six years and feeling like I’m not getting anywhere,” he said. “A year ago my articles started getting picked up in (various outlets) and getting like 40,000 and 50,000 views. I started getting calls from back East asking how we’re opposing this.”
“Data centers now have a very clear impact on the environment,” said Will Felt, executive director of BARK, a nonprofit formed in 1999 to protect Mt. Hood National Forest. The Portland-based organization has entered the fight against H.R. 655. “Maybe before it was nebulous because the footprint was within a city boundary or an area with an industrial feel. It’s the data center reach into a protected area and drawing water reserves from that area that becomes a huge issue of overreach and environmental impact.”
Environmental Worries
The proliferation of data centers feels inevitable.
Crucial to the spread of artificial intelligence, they’ve become intertwined with society and are constantly evolving.
“We all use data centers, everyone does,” said Meredith Connolly, director for policy and strategy for the nonprofit Climate Solutions, which has offices in Seattle and Portland.
“Modern life runs on data — and data runs on data centers. These secure high-tech facilities power the digital tools that connect us, help us work, shop, learn and stay safe,” a spokesperson for Amazon told Columbia Insight in an email. Amazon operates multiple data centers in Boardman, Hermiston and Umatilla in Oregon.
Modern life, it turns out, requires a lot of power. And water. Because tech companies won’t disclose specifics, exactly how much of each commodity data centers consume is unknown.
According to Connolly, a typical data center uses about the same amount of power as 100,000 homes.
According to a 2026 Coldwell Banker report, Hillsboro and its data centers use 435 megawatts of energy every day.
Knudsen, who has tried to ground truth industry claims, believes the figure is closer to 835 megawatts with an additional 200 to 400 megawatts in planning or construction. He says Hillsboro’s projected load is equivalent to powering nearly 900,000 homes — more than double the residential footprint of the entire city of Portland.
Data centers consist of stacks of servers in massive utilitarian buildings, some the size of indoor NFL stadiums. In addition to consuming enormous amounts of electricity, many require water to keep equipment cool.
“They’re not just hungry for power, but are incredible water consumers,” Lauren Goldberg, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper, told Columbia Insight.
Large data centers can consume up to five million gallons of water per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by 10,000 to 50,000 people, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute.
What’s more, California-based water monitoring company KETOS says wastewater from data centers can overwhelm local wastewater treatment plants.
“This increased load can lead to inefficiencies and potential failures in the treatment process — especially when existing wastewater treatment facilities are under stress,” said a KETOS report. “Added pressure on strained systems will inevitably result in inadequately treated water being discharged into the surrounding community or environment if treatment centers aren’t adequately upgraded in time to manage the influx.”
Another issue is that power flowing into data centers must be steady.
Electricity generated by hydropower in the Pacific Northwest is prone to fluctuations.
To address this problem, diesel generators are often used to keep data centers running smoothly, adding to air pollution.
Joel Creswell, a Washington Department of Ecology climate and environmental specialist, told Columbia Insight that air pollution from data centers receives scant attention.
A 2025 Cornell University report calculated that “by 2030, the current rate of AI growth would annually put 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the emissions equivalent of adding 5 to 10 million cars to U.S. roadways.”
Status of H.R. 655
On Feb. 18th, a coalition of 12 Columbia River and Oregon environmental organizations — Columbia Riverkeeper, BARK, WaterWatch of Oregon, Northwest Guides and Anglers Association and Bird Alliance of Oregon among them — sent a letter to Oregon senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley urging opposition to H.R. 655.
“There is a growing public backlash to expansion of corporate data centers and sweetheart deals that force average citizens to subsidize their growth through higher utility rates, tax incentives and harm to our environment,” reads the letter. “H.R. 655 is one such sweetheart deal, intended to allow Google and local politicians in The Dalles to sidestep important conservation laws and triple water storage, largely for data centers.”
The letter states that H.R. 655 would harm five species of salmon and steelhead in the Hood and Dog rivers.
The Environmental Protection Agency has said removing water from Dog River — a tributary of Hood River involved in the 150-acre land transfer — would decrease flows into the Hood River.
According to the coalition’s letter, increased draws from Dog River would raise water temperatures in an already depleted Hood River, whose confluence with the Columbia is an important cold-water refuge for migrating fish.
Having been passed by the House, H.R. 655 is being considered by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, on which Wyden serves. The Oregon senator has yet to take a position on the bill.
“Senator Wyden has always believed that the best policy comes from listening to the Oregonians who will be affected directly by those policies,” a spokesperson for Wyden told Columbia Insight. “Because this topic has drawn interest from lots of Oregonians in the Gorge, Senator Wyden is in the process of hearing that diversity of opinion, and will take a position only after he has heard from all interested parties.”
Legislative Action
To date, most organized opposition to data centers has been focused on pressuring elected officials to halt or at least consider negative outcomes before approving new deals and projects.
Economic issues, not environmental concerns, tend to drive the debate.
Data centers greatly add to the load on the power grid, leading to increases in ratepayers’ monthly electric bills.
As of 2024, most Oregonians were paying about 50 percent more for electricity than they did in 2020 following rate increases from the state’s largest electric utilities.
It’s a nationwide problem. A 2025 Carnegie Mellon University study predicted that data centers and cryptocurrency mining could increase the average electric bill nationwide by eight percent by 2030 and increase greenhouse emissions by 30 percent during the same period.
In response, state governments in Washington and Oregon have taken their first steps in regulating data centers.
In 2025, Oregon enacted the POWER Act, which calls for data centers and cryptocurrency miners to pay for the extra electricity they require.
On Feb. 14th, Washington’s Democrat-controlled House passed a bolstered version (H.B. 2515) of Oregon’s law by a 51-41 mostly party line vote, with five Democrats joining the Republican “nays.” The bill also called for regulating power rates, as well as the amount of electricity and water used by data centers.
Sponsored by Democratic Rep. Beth Doglio, chair of the Washington House Energy and Environment Committee, H.B. 2515 represents Washington’s first major attempt to regulate data centers in the state.
“We need guardrails so ratepayers are not subsidizing the data centers’ build-out,” said Leah Missik, Washington legislative director for Climate Solutions, at a Jan. 22nd House committee hearing on the bill.
But H.B. 2515 died on a March 2nd deadline in the Senate Ways and Means Committee.
Doglio told Columbia Insight that behind-the-scenes lobbying by Microsoft and Amazon convinced enough Senate Democrats to back away from supporting the bill.
As in the House, Washington’s Senate Republicans broadly opposed H.B. 2515.
Doglio says she plans to revive the bill with some revisions in the Washington legislature’s 2027 session.
“We have to make sure we protect ratepayers and protect the environment,” she said.
Meanwhile, Knudsen warns that the tech industry is in the process of rebranding data centers by introducing terms such as “AI factories” or “AI computing factories,” a subtle shift in terminology that will make it easier for tech companies and their county and municipal partners to skirt regulatory constraints. State laws that seek to limit data centers, both in location and Enterprise Zone tax incentives, would not apply to newly named AI factories or “advanced manufacturing facilities.”
On March 16th, for example, a press release from Emerald AI conspicuously replaced the term “data centers” with “AI factories” when it announced a Hillsboro-based collaboration with NVIDIA, Portland General Electric and the Electric Power Research Institute.
“Our land, our power and our schools are being traded for a handful of jobs and empty promises,” Knudsen has written.
Jobs? What Jobs?
During debate on H.B. 2515 in the Washington legislature, opponents argued that the measure would scare away future jobs.
Quincy, Wash., city administrator Patrick Haley testified that 50 percdent of his town’s property taxes come from data centers. The extra income from Quincy’s estimated 27 data centers has helped the town of 7,500 build an aquatic center and put construction of two indoor soccer complexes on the drawing board.
“It’s the jobs that we’ve been hungry for, good-paying jobs and industries that invest in their communities, just like we’ve seen with the Quincy miracle,” said Republican Rep. Mary Dye, before the Feb. 14th House vote on H.B. 2515. “This is a job killer and our communities deserve the opportunity to compete for these investments instead of watching them go to other states.”
Watchdogs like Knudsen, who has monitored construction and toured data centers, has a different view.
“You get a construction boom of epic proportions with thousands of people coming in from out of state to build these things, and in-state as well,” he told the Oregon Center for Public Policy. “It’s great for the labor unions. But as soon as they get done they leave and you start seeing empty parking lots and you realize that 30 people work in buildings that total millions of square feet that normally we would have hoped would have employed thousands of Oregonians.”
Knudsen told the podcast he’s flown a drone over about 15 operating data centers.
“It’s interesting to look at a parking lot with about 300 spaces and see ten cars,” he said.
Future Resistance
Where all of this opposition is headed, or if it will coalesce into a united front, remains to be seen.
“We’re a little late to the ballgame to prevent these data centers from going in, but now that they are drawing more water we can make our voice heard,” said BARK executive director Fett. “Holding city officials to account is one piece of the puzzle.”
Though Knudsen isn’t curtailing his efforts to publicize information about what he sees as social, economic, and environmental damage caused by data centers, he isn’t precisely optimistic.
“Even if the whole state galvanized and we found a way to do something, tech companies are playing four-level chess. These guys are already out striking deals and optioning land in places we can’t even imagine,” said the career real estate developer.
Activists are nonetheless beginning to sense a grassroots movement and national conversation that feels familiar.
In January, in one of the biggest strikes yet against the expansion of big tech, the City of Madison, Wisc., approved a 12-month moratorium on data center development to give officials time to investigate their impacts.
“BARK was founded in 1999 as a grassroots organization when no one thought the timber industry in Oregon was going to stop doing what it was doing in the Mt. Hood National Forest, but we’ve had a tremendous impact,” Jade Hagan, BARK director of community engagement and communications, told Columbia Insight. “In the early 2000s we defeated the (proposed) Nestlé plant in Gorge. We’ve seen this work. Of course we believe social movements work.”
John Stang, a longtime reporter in the Pacific Northwest with expertise in the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, state government, the environment, science and crime, contributed to this article.
This article was originally posted by Columbia Insight on March 19, 2026.