A Florida city used taxpayer money to buy an Instagram ad telling residents not to voice concerns about a secretive hyperscale AI data center. The fight over Project Swan is a preview of the fights over secrecy, water, and power coming to a town near you.
Project Swan is coming to Lakeland, if we don't stop it. What is Project Swan? It's a hyperscale datacenter. 600,000 square feet. A building the size of ten football fields, with support structures radiating out from it. Sixty and a half acres of development. A footprint unmatched in Lakeland. All of it for what will ultimately boil down to fewer than a dozen permanent jobs.
The city is going to rush it through behind closed doors, taking lobbyist money to carve out a zoning exception. We've seen this exact play run in towns across the United States. And the bitterest irony? A city with such a deep arts scene is being made a sacrificial lamb for tech-bro capitalist profits. It's the same system that is buying up and closing music venues in Ybor City. The same system clear-cutting the Everglades for build-and-flip suburban developments. A system that places profit above people, profit above art, profit above the natural world. Its ugliest example has landed right here in Lakeland: a massive hyperscale totem to capitalist exploitation, with the advertising for it paid for by our own tax dollars.
They're holding backdoor deals. We have seen how this works. We're a year and a half into the rapid expansion of data centers in the U.S. and we know exactly how the script reads. The data center developer, representing a company we will almost certainly never be able to name because of NDAs and licensing agreements, comes to town and says: "Look, this data center is going to create hundreds of jobs. It will put your city on the technological frontier. It's the next step in production, like bringing the factories back."
But people don't want them because people know all of that is a bunch of fucking baloney, a bucket of hogwash. The jobs these data centers create are almost entirely temporary construction jobs. Almost always jobs done by firms brought in from out of town. It won't be a Lakeland local firm building it. It'll be a firm from Jacksonville or a company from Tampa. Second, those jobs will be around for maybe six to eight months while the data center goes up. Six to eight months, they build these things quick. Not even a year. Not a full salary for any worker hired to help build it. Third, the jobs the data center actually brings afterward are less than a dozen. And of those dozen, the majority are worked remotely. Not by people who live in Lakeland, but by people living in Los Angeles, or Miami, or New York City, or San Francisco.
The reason they picked Lakeland should be pretty obvious. It's in our name. We have a lot of fresh water, and we want to keep having fresh water. This proposal comes at the height of a record breaking drought, we already know what it would look like to see our lakes drained. The water usage for these data centers is both underappreciated and underestimated. We've learned this because this isn't the first time they've pulled this magic trick. Every quote and estimate we're given will be deeply lowballed. Water usage. Power usage. Light pollution. Because the moment it comes online, knowing our grid cannot handle the amount of power required, they're going to be burning a dozen, maybe two dozen, always-on diesel fuel generators.
Brother, this is the land of the hurricane. We know what a diesel fuel generator sounds like. We know how loud even one small generator powering a home can be. Now imagine twenty-four industrial-sized diesel generators that never turn off. The noise. The smoke. The smog. The pollution of that. Never ending. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, waking up on Christmas morning to no water pressure and the endless rumbling drone of generators and 1000 GPUs whirling. I've worked in a datacenter, a standard, no-AI, non-hyperscale datacenter. You need ear protection to simply exist inside. The low drone is migraine inducing, and studies show how deeply damaging it can be. This datacenter will subject everyone within the west side of Lakeland to that neverending drone.
They're holding these meetings in secret. They're going to try to force this through. They say it's just a proposal, until it's approved and construction begins before we have inpuit. Here is the most egregious detail: the City of Lakeland took out an Instagram ad. An ad paid for with our tax dollars. An ad responding to our DSA chapter's call for people to speak. It told us not to show up to public meetings to voice our concern. It said that concern cannot be voiced for the hyperscale data center at this time. In order for us to have the right to even discuss this, we have to wait for the city's various departments to hold a private meeting about the proposal with the data center company. What will be discussed in those meetings? We do not know. When will they be held? We do not know. We do know that they took out an ad telling us not to voice our concerns. We, the people, can put two and two together and assume that the city council plans on forcing this through in secret, taking whatever money the company throws at them. They are going to sell out our community, our city, our lakes, and our water to do so. They will lie straight to our faces and say it brings jobs and progress and technology to our city. This exact scenario has played out countless times across the capitalist-captured United States.
Let's ask the questions they're desperate to avoid. What corporation is really behind this NDA-shrouded 'Project Swan'? What promises have already been made in private to the city council before a single public meeting has been called? Which council members are running defense for the data center, and why? The city's Instagram ad bought with our own tax dollars was a confession: they know this deal cannot withstand public scrutiny. If they stood with the people of this city, they would welcome our voice at every meeting, not silence it with a paid ad. Our DSA chapter is smallbut we are growing, and we are building the only organization in this fight that refuses to take corporate funds, period. Not a dime. That independence lets us ask the next question nobody in those backrooms wants spoken aloud: how much lobbyist money has already found its way into the hands of council members? Who’s been paid to look the other way while our water and our democracy are sold off? We deserve to know who wants to drain our lakes and fill our air with diesel smoke. We deserve to know what they offered our elected officials to make this happen. And we are going to demand those answers in public, on the record, until we get them.
Look at Project Swan. 60 acres. The entire night sky made bright white by light pollution. The water of the lakes drained. The endless forever-rumble of migraine inducing drone. No one in this city would approve of this. They know it.
The fact that they took out that advertisement telling us not to come tells me the project has already been approved in the minds of those with power. It really is up to us, the people they are supposed to represent, to make our voice loud and thunderous. Our entire government structure really only represents the developer, the capitalist, the exploiting class. We have to remind them that they represent us. We have to show up in mass and make our voices heard. They paid for advertisement said don't show up, don't make your voice heard, we will do the opposite. At every single county and city commission meeting they hold public comments at the end. You can speak up about anything, even if you only have thirty seconds. Show up in numbers to meetings that typically have only ten or fifteen people in them. Show up fifty strong. That sends a message without a word having to be spoken.
We read between the lines. We know what that advertisement means. It means they're scared of our opinion. Scared to represent the working class people that make up the majority of this city. Nothing is more obscene than the city using our own tax dollars to tell us to sit down and shut up while they carve out a backroom deal.
The system that sells our water and our voice has to be met by people who refuse to be silent.
