Company representatives for a proposed data center left a city council meeting in Oregon after they discovered protestors had brought a guillotine and displayed it outside during the municipal session.
The company reps departed the late July meeting in Salem prematurely, citing “safety concerns,” Yahoo News reported.
The guillotine, which severs a victim’s head with a falling blade, became the iconic symbol of the French revolution, which started out as a movement for democracy but ended up as a tyrannical bloodbath where even France’s King Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette were decapitated by the efficient device in front of cheering crowds.
A raucous, vocal crowd also gathered outside of Salem’s Loucks Auditorium to protest a proposed multi-billion-dollar AI data center, according to news reports.
According to Yahoo News:
The proposed facility — roughly $5.1 billion according to civic discussions, though that figure hasn’t surfaced in official city documents — would bring hyperscale AI and cloud infrastructure to Oregon’s capital. The developer remains unnamed in public sources. Residents arrived at Loucks Auditorium ready to fight it, delivering hours of testimony about:
*energy consumption
* water use
* the slow industrialization of their neighborhoods.
Protestors objected to the city becoming an “AI energy hub.”
The city council responded by unanimously voting to direct staff to formulate a temporary moratorium on development of data centers.
However, several days later, the company, identified as Verrus, beat the adoption of the ban by applying for a city review of the first phase of the project — two buildings of about 600,000 square feet on 100 acres of land southeast of the city — according to coverage by the Salem Reporter.
City Attorney Dan Atchison outlined the process to put a moratorium in place.
“The timing of any proposed moratorium or land use regulation amendments is an important consideration because applications submitted before the effective date of those actions may continue to be reviewed under existing regulations,” Atchison said in a staff report.
JP Newmann, Verrus spokesman, told news outlets that the company filed its site plan in response to community reaction to its plans.
“We wanted to come out early to at least give something to the community to react to,” he said, adding that the company remained “committed” to the project and wants to work to address community members’ questions.
“We hear those concerns. They are incredibly valid,” he said. “They deserve substantive answers.”
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.