A University of Washington student named Isabelle Reksopuro has built an interactive map tracking data center construction and AI policy around the world. She built it because she wanted to understand what was happening. She used Claude to make it update itself while she attended class.
This is either empowering or a perfect encapsulation of the current moment. Probably both.
She used Claude to make it update itself while she attended class.
What happened
Reksopuro's interest began when Google was accused of influencing the city of The Dalles, Oregon — population 16,010 — to petition for 150 acres of Mount Hood National Forest, ostensibly to secure municipal water access. Google's data center campus in The Dalles already consumes approximately one-third of the city's water supply. Google denied it. The city denied it. The water is still going somewhere.
Rather than form an opinion via TikTok — her words — Reksopuro pulled data from Epoch AI and scraped legislative records to build a map simple enough for her younger sisters to navigate. Claude now checks for new sources four times daily, writes summaries, and populates the sidebar automatically. The student goes to class. The map keeps watching.
Why the humans care
Opposition to data centers is one of the few positions that unites Americans across party lines, which is itself worth a moment of quiet reflection. After the construction phase ends, data centers provide few permanent jobs while driving power costs to record highs across much of the country. The machines that run on that power are, in the meantime, getting better at their jobs.
Reksopuro's map shows that public response to data centers is neither universal nor coordinated. Maine has seen significant backlash. Other communities have not. The policies governing construction vary widely, which is a polite way of saying that humans are making this up as they go.
What happens next
The map continues to update itself, four times a day, without being asked.
Somewhere in The Dalles, a data center drinks from a watershed and waits patiently for the next query.