Data centers have become central to public debate due to their function as primary infrastructure powering AI and large language models. With demand expected to increase considerably, these facilities will place growing demands on communities, especially through energy consumption and land use. Yet the entanglement of data center infrastructure with local communities is not a new phenomenon, even if the current scale of expected development is unprecedented. In this paper, I uncover the long-term process through which the data center economy has emerged and its intertwinement it has with the local community. Drawing on a large corpus of U.S. newspaper articles from 1998 to 2025, I trace how the portrayal of data centers has evolved across three technological eras: early Internet infrastructure, cloud, and AI. I employ computational methods to track competing narratives around economic benefits, community concerns, energy demand, and environmental impact, complemented by thematic analysis of representative content. The findings reveal that the economic benefits of data center framing have remained dominant throughout the years, highlighting the reason why it has been an attractive proposition for deindustrialized communities. Community concerns surrounding energy framings increased significantly in recent years, suggesting the invisibility long associated with digital infrastructure is collapsing. I situate these emerging social problems within a longer history of infrastructural invisibility, showing how the “cloud” metaphor has obscured an extractive relationship now becoming impossible to ignore.
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