Why Tulsa is hitting pause on data centers

And even talking about, you know, the kind of timing and coincidental timing, I mean, people are paying attention to some of the, even the AI companies, there has been a little, even in

the last two or three weeks, I mean, a lot of it

economic-based, you know, with the war with Iran has had an impact.

Some of these companies, Some of the investment is even slowing down.

Some of their forecasting is even slowing down.

And the landscape for what the market for data centers might be different in January 2027 than it is right now.

Is that, I mean, I don't know if that played any role.

Yeah, no, that's absolutely-

That's absolutely a consideration as well.

I've definitely had folks express concern, are we going to be economically missing out? Which we've already missed the cream of the crop of AI, tech-wise.

I think data centers in some ways are like scraps.

I think we should, as a city, maybe have some more self-esteem for economic opportunity than settling for how some of these companies – Have been as neighbors in other communities.

Do we really want that in our city? But yeah, you know, there's all of that speculation on is AI a bubble? Will we're in the Middle East with its effects on different natural resources that are important for things like chips or supply chain sorts? energy resources through oil and gas will that affect this industry and its growth there's a lot of moving parts and pieces and um part of why there ended up even being a project anthem phase two which i i didn't know that when i first went to propose a moratorium that that would happen was that they had shifted their model of going we went from doing one to now we only do multiples um And so things are shifting rapidly.

This does also help us see if there's more information about the future of the industry by then, you know, since they're not job creators.

And, you know, our city, I look back and I wish I knew more at the time, but, you know, we voted to basically give an incentive package for the phase one.

There are communities that have policies that they've had for a number of years against giving data centers tax incentives.

You have some research that shows this can also in the long run with that, you could lose money.

And so I'm hoping it just also helps us be mindful about if we are.

accepting these into our community, and we are pursuing a certain economic benefit from them, that we're really maximizing that because these are the richest companies in the world.

And I think they should be pouring more into our communities than what they've offered so far.