Cyrus the Great of Persia was a king who lived in the fifth century before Christ. An able general, Cyrus used both force and diplomacy to bring under his sway now-forgotten kingdoms such as the Median Empire, Lydia, even, eventually Babylonia.
The territory of southwest Sangamon County is seldom compared to ancient Babylonia, except maybe by disapproving Baptists. Nonetheless it is being besieged by a new Cyrus, a firm calling itself CyrusOne that was named by its founder after the Persian king. CyrusOne hopes to spend more than $500 million to build 26 football fields worth of data servers on 280 acres of Talkington Township. That project would be one of the firm’s bigger projects, but far from the first. CyrusOne is practically a kingdom unto itself. It operates in nine countries, has 55 data centers up and running and another 50 or so in the works; several are in Illinois, mostly around Chicago.
I don’t know if AI – sorry, large-language-model machine learning – will change the world. It seems likely to change Talkington Township, although this behemoth seems unlikely to compromise the neighborhood’s environment and rural character more than industrial grain farming does. Indeed – politics being about how to make someone else’s constituents pay for the mess your constituents make – this is a good deal for Sangamon County. Roughly two-thirds of the power that will be used by CyrusOne is produced by dirty fossil fuels in faraway places. County government’s economic development program – jobs! jobs! – thus would be subsidized by the whole rest of the planet, which is even better than a motel tax on tourists.
Alas, while the rest of the world might suffer the pollution caused by running CyrusOne’s battalions of chips, local residents might have to pay more to produce it. As has been reported by our Dean Olsen, the fully built-out facility in Talkington will suck more than 600 megawatts of electricity from the grid, nearly twice CWLP’s total maximum generating capacity of 354 megawatts. That power will come from Ameren Illinois and the Rural Electric Convenience Cooperative. The regional grid operator has concluded that the grid will be able to handle the load of CyrusOne’s center, an optimistic forecast. In Illinois as a whole electricity prices have been going up faster than the national average, and the pressure on supply will likely get worse; a joint report by the Illinois Power Agency, Illinois EPA and the Illinois Commerce Commission predicts shortfalls in the Ameren service area by 2031.
Every data center builder anywhere has insisted that its operations will not lead to higher prices for ordinary electricity users, although there is not a place where data centers operate that has not seen such increases. Much of the price rise may be coincidence – electricity prices are affected by practically everything under the sun, including the sun itself – but just to make sure, officials in Illinois’ second-largest city slapped a temporary moratorium on new data centers to study whether CyrusOne’s five facilities have contributed to rising utility costs in Aurora.
So maybe not such a good deal for li’l ol’ Sangamon after all. CyrusOne told Illinois Times, “Our investment provides the tax revenue and economic benefits the community needs.” We know – jobs! jobs! But what looks like a benefactor in 2025 might end up looking like a colonizer is 2028. A CyrusOne will never be dependent on rural Sangamon County, but Sangamon County can make itself fiscally dependent on data centers. That does not strike me as wise, seeing as backers of such projects always overpromise and underdeliver.
The county board is probably not the forum for a debate about the larger social effects of AI. (I will note only that the rallying cry of many of CyrusOne’s corporate customers will be, “No jobs! No jobs!”) Nor is a brief column the place to examine whether AI – sorry, LLM-based machine learning – is a boon or a bubble. (Psst! It’s a bubble, a column just isn’t long enough to explain why.) But while the county board can’t predict the future of AI, neither can CyrusOne. Imagine investing billions in umbrella factories in the middle of a good ol’ Midwestern storm. Sure, it’s possible that it will keep on raining forever, but sensible people will bet that the storm will have blown over long before those factories are ready to open.
I expect the county board to approve the project in March nevertheless. The county has bills to pay, its members have long regarded ugly things in cornfields as scenic and they have their own jobs on the board to think about. A politician in Sangamon County will never run, and if she runs will never be elected, if she votes against jobs, even jobs building things that ought not to be built here, at least not as proposed, and not now.
Mr. Krohe was born and partly raised in Beardstown but got out of town before he could embarrass anyone.
This article appears in January 08-14, 2026.
These hit pieces of negative journalism are getting old.
Data centers form the backbone of essential daily applications, supporting communication tools like email, video calls, and social media platforms, as well as financial services such as online banking, secure mobile payments, and real-time stock trading.
They deliver entertainment through streaming movies, music, and massive multiplayer games, while powering everyday utilities including GPS navigation, smart home management, and online grocery or food delivery. Integral to public infrastructure, they drive advancements like faster cancer detection through high-speed data processing.
Data centers also bolster emergency services with 911 dispatch systems and real-time ambulance routing, enhance healthcare through digital medical records, telemedicine, and complex diagnostics, advance education with remote learning platforms and centralized academic databases, and improve public safety through weather forecasting models and infrastructure monitoring.
Furthermore, their economic impact through real estate tax is significant, funding public schools, police, fire protection, roads, and water and sewer systems.
The creation of 100 permanent jobs can further multiply these benefits through home sales and new businesses, strengthening the tax Not to mention the shot in the arm of money from the temporary jobs that can mean the difference between someone putting food on the table, opening a business, or saving one.
The property tax from the new data center will amount to 41 dollars per person in sangamon county . This is less than 4dollars a month for each person . I guarantee the price hikes in electricity and water will be much more than this small increase in property taxes. So the real question is will the county board choose what is good for their budget or what is good for its people?
I have read that these data centers request reavaluations of their taxes in a few years . So do you raise electricity rates and cause brown outs and energy spikes or vote for your electors and there sleepy little towns that will be upset by noises and light pollution.