This is an article from the 2026 Civitas Examiner (Volume 3, No. 2) and was written by one of our students, Benjamin. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue. To read more Civitas Examiner stories or to submit your own, click here.
Even though the exact date is still unclear, the deadline for the construction of the controversial Armory Innovation Data Center is looming.
The data center will be constructed next door to the National Guard Armory proper, a vast, historic building which has served many purposes after its original one as a headquarters for the National Guard. Famously, it was once a concert venue which hosted the Grateful Dead in 1968, and also an indoor tennis club frequented by Jimmy Connors, who stayed at the top of the ranks in men’s tennis for more than five years, and Arthur Ashe, the first Black man selected for the Davis Cup team. In its most recent reincarnation, the Armory was reimagined as a massive, multi-purpose entertainment venue. It has recently been closed to the public due to lack of funding and will now be renovated into a luxury office space which will benefit greatly from the massive supply of computing power next door.
The data center itself will be housed in a repurposed warehouse directly next to the Armory, previously owned by Goodwill, which encompasses 525,000 square feet. It will have an electrical grid consuming energy at a rate of 120 megajoules per second (megawatts)–enough to power upwards of 100,000 typical American homes. ChatGPT itself only requires 22 megawatts, meaning that the data center would be massively helpful for the tech companies using it for AI and large databases.
But what about the effect it will have on the St. Louis community? Data centers often impact air quality because they use non-renewable energy sources. While the data center will be powered by only 50% fossil fuels, it will still have a deleterious effect on St. Louis’ air quality. Another concern is that of water use, which is a common point cited in anti-AI and anti-data center circles. The data center will have a closed-loop cooling system, meaning that instead of using large amounts of water to cool the servers and then getting new water once it evaporates away, it will use the same water over and over, waiting for it to cool between uses.
A point often used by supporters of the data center is the large number of jobs it will create. They are right, but only to an extent. A data center will create jobs during its construction, but afterward requires only occasional maintenance. A useful comparison could be a stadium: it is also an extremely expensive and time-consuming project for a city to undertake, but requires many people to work to keep it operational, as well as being a source of pride and identity for the people in the city.
The final criticism of data centers is purely political. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is currently increasing its network of security cameras to collect footage of suspected persons and AI systems to process the footage into data on their movements. One activist was stopped by an ICE agent who called her by name and read off her home address in an attempt to intimidate her. This takes a vast amount of computing power (although the exact amount is unknown due to the secretive nature of ICE’s operations) that only data centers can provide in full. Therefore, many people who oppose ICE also oppose data centers, as ICE’s surveillance capabilities would be crippled if they had no access.
