By: John Grady
JONESBURG, Mo. — Beneath a sky crowded with low clouds, a solid crowd of Montgomery County residents gathered Tuesday evening among grain bins and farm equipment at the Ridgley farm.
The crunch of tires on gravel announced the arrival of the AI Data Center Revolt Tour bus, and as it came into view, those gathered broke into applause.
The Ridgley farm became a stop on the tour after Humans First began looking into data center development underway in Montgomery County and contacted Sharon Ridgley, owner of Ridgley farm, and Sabrina Cope.
The tour started in Austin, Texas, arrived in Jonesburg from Nashville and will end in San Francisco after 35 official stops, according to Kelli Ferguson, the tour's communications director.
"They were reading about Montgomery County, Missouri, and they saw it as a home of a 5,000-acre mega site. And they said, my name came up," Ridgley said. Heart of America is the name for the 5,000-acre mega site in New Florence.
Ridgley said the stop came together quickly. She missed an organizing Zoom call two weeks ago, “while out in the barn taking care of a sick calf,” but the pieces fell into place anyway. She called the group "very satisfying."
Amazon is building a roughly 1,000-acre data center campus near New Florence, while Google is building a 934-acre campus in New Florence. 3,000-acres remain undeveloped.
Among those arriving on the bus was Amy Kremer, chairwoman of Humans First.
Kremer said she began paying attention to data centers in fall 2024 after seeing increasingly heated county commission meetings around the country.
She said the frustration reminded her of the early tea party town halls in 2009, when voters felt their representatives were not listening.
"What I saw going on with these county commission meetings and these data centers was that it's the same thing," Kremer said.
It was a friend, she said, who pulled her into the fight over AI.
"A friend of mine was in … the AI safety industry, and had come to me, and they were trying to get me on board," Kremer said. "I was like, I'm not a tech person. I'm just a mom, you know?"
What changed her mind, she said, was learning about children who died by suicide after interactions with AI chatbots. She now calls it the most important issue of her lifetime.
I asked Kremer about critics who write off data center protests as far-left and a bunch of liberals.
"You really want me to throw you a curve?" Kremer said. "I'm the RNC national committeewoman for Georgia."
She said Congress should have governed the technology, and Republicans and Democrats at the state level should be handling data centers.
"They're not. They have failed us at every level," Kremer said. "One of the reasons we're doing this bus tour is to put them on notice to say, this is no flash in the pan. We're not going away."
Harry Cope, the Republican candidate for Montgomery County presiding commissioner, and Stacy Bax, the Democratic candidate for House District 61, were in attendance. No elected officials or representatives from Google or Amazon attended.
"Politicians are gonna have to really more clearly pick a side," said Kelli Ferguson, the tour's communications director. "I feel like a lot of them have been kind of waiting it out, and they're gonna run out of time."
"If somebody agrees on this issue and they show up, I don't care what political party you're in, because these data centers don't care what political party you're in," Kremer said.
At one point, Kremer pointed toward the rear of the tour bus, where large lettering read, "Honk to tell big tech to flock off!"
"Regardless of how you feel about data centers, we all want to tell Big Tech to flock off," Kremer said, referring to Flock Safety's automated license plate reader network.
Kremer summed up what she sees as the broader issue behind the tour.
"Three things brought Americans together this year: the launch of Artemis, the World Cup and data centers," she said. "It is about preserving our way of life and what we hold dear."
There is one final irony worth confessing: AI helped clean up my grammar and atrocious spelling so the reader did not have a stroke by the second paragraph.