Episode Details

Communities across the U.S. are being asked to make increasingly consequential decisions about data centers at the same time that AI infrastructure development is moving faster than traditional municipal planning processes.

On this episode of the Data Center Frontier Show, DCF Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent speaks with Ilissa Miller, founder and CEO of iMiller Public Relations and a board member of the Open Infrastructure Exchange (OIX), about a new effort to help communities prepare before specific data center projects arrive.

At the center of the conversation is the OIX Digital Infrastructure Framework, designed to give municipal planners and elected officials a structured set of questions for evaluating data centers and other digital infrastructure.

Rather than prescribing what communities should approve, Miller says the framework is intended to help them determine where digital infrastructure fits within their own long-term land-use strategies.

Many municipalities, she notes, still do not explicitly recognize data centers as an acceptable land use — even on parcels already designated for industrial activity. That can send developers into conditional-use or zoning processes while residents and public officials are still trying to understand what exactly is being proposed.

Miller argues that comprehensive planning offers a better starting point.

Communities should be deciding in advance where different types of digital infrastructure might be appropriate, what information developers will need to provide, and how data centers fit alongside other economic-development priorities.

The need has become particularly acute as opposition to data centers increasingly overlaps with broader public anxiety about artificial intelligence.

“Most opposition is about more than the data center itself,” Miller says.

Concerns over AI governance, automation and societal impacts are legitimate topics for debate, she argues, but they are not necessarily the same questions local officials must answer when evaluating land use, power, water, noise, construction and community impacts.

For developers, Miller says earlier community engagement is equally important.

Engagement should begin before a conditional-use application and before a project design has effectively been finalized. Developers should hold listening sessions, understand local business and political dynamics and give communities a meaningful opportunity to influence project plans.

“The key to those engagements and those listening events is actually listening,” Miller says.

That means showing communities what was heard, explaining what changed as a result and tailoring community benefits to actual local priorities rather than arriving with a standardized package.

But Miller also emphasizes that communications cannot compensate for a poorly conceived project.

“Not all data center developments should be built,” she says.

Her firm will decline engagements involving certain attempts to rezone agricultural or otherwise inappropriate land for data center development. Miller argues that developers should look first toward properly zoned industrial locations, redevelopment opportunities and sites where intensive land use already exists.

That principle gets to the larger question of social license: community trust begins with project execution and site selection, not simply better messaging.

The conversation also explores perhaps the most difficult challenge facing