Where ‘A River Runs Through It’: Inside the hunt for data center sites

At the Bonner Mill Industrial Park along Highway 200 in Montana, a manufacturing space is being eyed for a different kind of work than the trim-board production it once housed. Idaho-based KRAMBU, Inc. has applied to install an artificial intelligence data center inside the cavernous structure at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers — the same Blackfoot whose blue-ribbon trout water inspired Norman Maclean’s novel “A River Runs Through It” and the 1992 film adaptation starring Brad Pitt. The Bonner proposal is the latest test of a question now being asked in rural states like Wyoming and Montana: What does a community get — and give up — when a data center moves in?

Gary Matson, a volunteer director with Friends of Two Rivers, has watched the site cycle through its various industrial lives. Before sitting empty, it housed United Forest Products’ Edge trim-board operation, which closed last fall. Before that, the same footprint hosted a cryptocurrency mining operation that, in Matson’s telling, “was very, very noisy and it just drove people nuts.” The backlash pushed Missoula County to require every data center and cryptocurrency operation in the county to offset its energy use with new renewable generation. The crypto operator left town shortly after. Local response to KRAMBU’s pitch, Matson said, is “generally negative,” shaped in part by that earlier experience. At a recent Q&A session that drew more than 100 residents, questions about water dominated.

Tracey Hyatt Bosman, managing director at BLS & Co., a boutique location advisory consultancy, has spent two decades helping companies decide where to put facilities like the one proposed in Bonner. “Ten years ago, you could walk into any community and say, ‘I’ve got a data center project for you,’ and they’d roll out the red carpet,” Bosman told Cowboy State Daily. Property tax revenue arrived without the school-system demands that come with housing developments, and utilities welcomed the steady electrical load. “Now, you’re not really sure what you’re going to get,” she added.

Wyoming was an early embrace, Bosman said. Cheyenne in particular built a reputation on strong fiber connectivity along the national backbone and federal facilities that demonstrated the region’s capabilities. “Wyoming has generally been welcoming of data centers,” she said. Sites in Wyoming also tend to pencil out. “It’s been a cost-effective place to have a data center,” Bosman said, pointing to real estate and utility expenses.

Bosman warned against treating “data center” as a single industry category. The siting playbook itself has been rewritten by tight supply and heavy demand. Where firms once started with a national map and whittled down to optimal locations, the process now often runs in reverse: identify a candidate site with seemingly favorable conditions, then push it through due diligence. Community sentiment has moved to the front of that screening, alongside electric capacity, parcel size and floodplain checks.

Bosman uses the term “NIMBYism” to describe some local pushback, but said the bigger concern for her clients is what she half-jokingly called “moratoriumism” — the prospect of legal barriers at the state level. New York has proposed a three-year moratorium on permits for data centers of 20 megawatts or larger, and similar proposals have surfaced in Georgia, Virginia and Illinois. Beyond water and electricity, Bosman said the recurring local objections involve construction noise, generator testing, low-frequency vibration and the visual impact of large industrial buildings. Some concerns are well founded, she said; some reflect mistrust or misinformation.

Annika Cobb, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, is studying how communities perceive and experience rapid changes in energy development. Data centers, she said, sit at an awkward intersection for anyone who has spent time working on climate and decarbonization policy. “Now there’s this challenge of having an energy transition while data centers are adding massive amounts of energy consumption to what’s already growing energy consumption,” Cobb said. “You’re starting to see this resistance of communities against data centers.”

Back in Bonner, Matson was asked about the artist’s rendering KRAMBU circulated with its announcement. The image, apparently generated by AI, shows a sleek facility nestled below snowcapped peaks with a river and trees in the foreground. Matson laughed. “That was an artist’s conception, and it would be nothing like that.” The community knows the actual building KRAMBU is proposing to occupy doesn’t resemble the image. For Matson, the polished image captures a broader problem with the way data centers arrive in places like Bonner — they can look too good to be true. “We’re just a little bit cynical,” he said. “If what they say is true, then there would be almost no impact on the Blackfoot. But we’re still a little bit cynical, because of the reputation that data centers have of giving one kind of information and actually doing something else.”