Illinois weighs impact of data center boom

SPRINGFIELD (The Daily Yonder) — In the early 2000s, Lori McKiernan worked in a data center outside Denver, Colorado, for a stint during her career with United Airlines. Two decades later, she’s leading an organized effort to pause data center development where she now lives in Sangamon County, Illinois. This new crop of data centers, which are springing up around rural America to power artificial intelligence, is different, McKiernan said. 

“I’m not against data centers. But I must say, the more I learn about them, the more concerned I am,” McKiernan told the Daily Yonder.

She is part of the Coalition for Springfield’s Utility Future, a group of volunteer activists from environmental justice organizations in Central Illinois. The coalition, McKiernan said, is “digging [its] heels in” to question the long-term effects that a proposed $500 million data center development on 280 acres of farmland would have on the region. 

Today, March 23, 2026, the Sangamon County Board is scheduled to vote on final approval for the project, which would be operated by Dallas, Texas-based CyrusOne, a digital infrastructure company. Over the past six months, the proposal has been met with a mix of local support and suspicion about what such a facility, slated to be the county’s first data center, would mean for the local environment and electricity prices. 

A prime location 

Sangamon County is particularly attractive to data centers, said Ryan McCrady, president and CEO of the Springfield Sangamon Growth Alliance, which is working with CyrusOne on the proposal.

That’s at least in part because the electric infrastructure needed to support data center development is already present in the county, McCrady said. In addition to a substation, a 345-kilovolt transmission line operated by Ameren, an electric services company, runs through the area. 

CyrusOne’s plan for Sangamon County

CyrusOne operates 60 data centers across the United States, Europe, and Japan. Two of its existing facilities are in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.

Officials made the Sangamon County proposal public in October 2025. It involves building four 250,000‑square‑foot facilities over several years.

Jobs and local hiring

Construction on the first building would begin in 2026. That’s expected to create about 500 temporary jobs, according to McCrady. In a statement to the Daily Yonder, a CyrusOne representative said that the company plans to host a job fair to recruit local talent following the project’s approval. 

After construction, the CyrusOne representative said there will be about 100 permanent employees affiliated with CyrusOne, including electricians, technicians, facilities managers, and security personnel. 

CyrusOne has signed a letter of intent with the local labor union, Laborers Local 477, to hire union workers for construction jobs, according to McCrady.

“That’s a tremendous boost to our local economy,” McCrady said. 

The Coalition for Springfield’s Utility Future has expressed concern that higher-paying jobs created once the facility is constructed will be remote or otherwise geared toward commuters living outside the county. 

McCrady said that the long-term positions will not be remote ones.

“Those [jobs] are people that have to be able to report physically to a location within a specified amount of time, and that’s because of the physical equipment that’s installed at the location,” McCrady said. 

Community pushback and hearings

When the Coalition for Springfield’s Utility Future first heard about the proposal in October 2025, they pressured the county board to hold a public hearing before voting to approve a conditional use permit to allow CyrusOne to build a data center on land zoned for agriculture. 

The board plans to hold that vote today, March 23.

The county held the hearing on December 3, 2025, and it drew representatives from CyrusOne and hundreds of community members. At the meeting, 18 people gave public comments and several more submitted written responses, which were later posted on the Sangamon County website. Four individuals expressed support for the CyrusOne development, seven expressed concern, and seven were cautious or unsure about the facility in their remarks. 

Gary Shultz is a local union member and one of the individuals who spoke at the December 3 meeting. Shultz lives a mile from the 280-acre site as the crow flies and said he’s worried about noise and air pollution from the proposed facility.

“All [the] effects are local, but profits go around the world,” he said during his public comment.

In October, the Coalition for Springfield’s Utility Future called for a moratorium on data centers in the county. In February, the Zoning and Land Use Commission voted it down.

Illinois lawmakers tackle data centers

The March 23 vote in Sangamon County comes as Illinois lawmakers are grappling with data center development and calls for regulation across the state. During his annual budget address in February, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker announced a two-year moratorium on tax incentives for data centers. 

Now, state legislators are considering the Illinois POWER Act, which stands for Protecting Our Water, Energy, and Ratepayers, a bill that would put guardrails on data center development by requiring companies to bring their own clean energy generation to the grid and not pass on infrastructure costs to consumers. The state senate’s AI and social media committee is currently debating the bill. If passed, it will go onto the floor for a full vote, according to reporting by the Chicago Reader.

“This legislative session that’s currently underway is going to be the data center legislative session,” said Scott Allen, an energy policy specialist at the Citizens Utility Board of Illinois, the state’s utility watchdog and ratepayer advocate.

Allen works with ratepayers at the community level. He said there’s no part of the state where residents aren’t concerned about data centers.

“At the legislative level, we’re not going to get anything done until this data center thing is figured out,” he said.

How data centers affect rates

In Sangamon County, CyrusOne will get its electricity from the Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative (RECC), a local electric utility. CyrusOne and RECC say Sangamon County residents will not see their electric bills increase. On a community Frequently Asked Questions page, CyrusOne references Virginia, which has a higher concentration of data centers than any other state or country, saying the state “saw electricity prices decrease rather than increase.” 

Yet amidst data center development in Virginia, the state’s Dominion Energy utility raised its base rate on residential consumers for the first time in nearly three decades in 2026, citing rising infrastructure costs.

Who pays for power and water?

In Illinois, as in Virginia, data centers are responsible for paying for the electricity they use. But in both states, current regulations allow for hyperscale data centers, often a utility’s largest customers, to pass the costs of building grid infrastructure onto consumers.

Regulators in Virginia recently approved a new kind of rate class for data centers, set to take effect in 2027. It will require them to pay more and prevent costs from being passed onto other ratepayers. Currently, Illinois does not have a separate rate structure in place for hyperscale data centers, though the creation of one is proposed in the POWER Act.

Water, energy, and the POWER Act

During the December 3 public hearing in Sangamon County, several community members also expressed concerns over where the CyrusOne data center would get its water, how much it would use, and where water discharge would go. CyrusOne plans to use closed-loop cooling technology, rather than water-based evaporative cooling technology, in the proposed data center.

The company wrote in a statement to the Daily Yonder that the water use will be “comparable to a standard office building”. Some opponents are concerned that the company’s claims don’t represent the full picture of the facility’s footprint, given that closed-loop cooling requires more energy than water-intensive systems.

In 2024, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory found that indirect water consumption related to electricity use is up to 12 times greater than direct water use, or water used on-site for purposes like evaporative cooling.

The Daily Yonder asked CyrusOne about the development’s indirect water usage, but the company did not respond.

Water rules in the POWER Act

Questions about data center water use are ones that the POWER Act would make easier to answer. Andrew Rehn, Prairie Rivers Network’s director of climate policy, made that point. Rehn is working with lawmakers on the bill, which includes sections about water transparency and regulation.

Under the POWER Act, data center developers would have to apply for water impact permits. The permits would ask for details on how developers plan to source water and treat it after use. The bill also requires commitments from data centers to cover water infrastructure improvement costs.

If passed, the POWER Act will also require data center developers to create public websites. The sites must share quarterly updates on water use, carbon emissions, air quality monitoring, workforce disclosures, and community benefits. Developers would also have to participate in at least two public meetings a year to engage directly with local officials and community members.

After it was introduced to the General Assembly on February 6, the bill moved to committees in the House and the Senate in late February. Rehn said he expects the bill to remain a focus for the rest of the 2026 legislative session. Lawmakers are still weighing different approaches to data center regulation. 

“I would not be surprised to tell you that we passed this bill on May 31 at 2 a.m. I would be surprised if we passed this bill anytime before May 31,” he said.

This story was produced with support from the Lumpkin Family Foundation. The Lumpkin Family Foundation supports people working together to build healthy, sustainable communities in East Central Illinois and across the U.S.

Julia Tilton and Ilana Newman, The Daily Yonder

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