Quid-Pro-NO!

How every level of government has failed Tennesseans and the steps elected leaders took to keep those failures secret

“He’s got scams you haven’t even dreamed of. Kickbacks on his kickbacks. There’s a river of dirty money running through this place.”
Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption

About a 30 minute drive north from Nashville there exists a single facility that has been quietly growing since its construction began in 2020.

Long before data centers became the latest hot button issue I watched while silently wondering why no one else was talking about or even seemed to care about what was happening all around us.

I’m referring to the artificial intelligence data center owned by Meta in Gallatin, TN. The single facility capable of drawing roughly 300 megawatts of power. The equivalent energy demands as every single home in Nashville combined.

In other words, this thing is absolutely massive!

And not just the scale of the facility itself, but also the everything else happening simultaneously around it. Happening both within the community of Gallatin specifically and the state of Tennessee as a whole.

From the TVA’s $1.1 billion dollar overhaul of the Gallatin Steam Plant to a a major water pipeline being buried running uphill to the University of Tennessee’s internal power struggle and everything in between that this investigation touches on, the scale and scope is, quite frankly, mind boggling.

Speaking of The Tennessee Valley Authority… The TVA did catch some heat through all of this. Of course, having a sudden appetite for the seizure of private property through eminent domain will do that. Country artist John Rich took up two fights recently, first in Cheatham County, where (according to news outlets such as Just the News) a 900 megawatt gas plant would have swallowed 6,000 acres of farmland and some 500 homes. Then in Gallatin, where a proposed transmission line would have cut straight across a farm the same family has worked since the Revolutionary War.

For the most part though all of this was happening everywhere all at once with little to no outside coverage. What coverage there was came out of the state’s own press release, and I mean that literally: the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, Tennessee Lookout and Business Facilities all ran the same paragraphs, word for word, unquoted and unattributed, within hours of each other.

Then more recently the larger public began taking notice during the whole DC Blox debacle. During which some of y’all got big mad when the outrage finally arrived. From my vantage point, however, that anger all seemed aimed in the wrong direction.

This wasn’t about noise complaints or saving the pandas. Not in my opinion that is anyway. I am a bit biased in where I rank the two stories, but the zoo angle just never sat quite right with me.

The whole thing felt manufactured and misplaced. Both sides of it.

I selected the Meta facility in Gallatin here for a few reasons:

It is local to me and was therefore a known subject.
It has been running long enough to have both trackable & verifiable data points.
Because it came in before the controversy it has flown mostly under the radar.
It’s a modern version to what the term “Data Center” has come to truly mean.

So I decided to do something that seemed simple. Discover the true community impact these facilities carry. Not by listening to either one side of the debate, but by checking the receipts.

Fully and thoroughly…