A normal large business venture coming to town might look something like this: politicians lobby to bring in the new business, in full view of the public. They want the jobs and the economic growth, and their constituents probably do too. They might negotiate tax incentives, go through a permitting process, and be up and running in a few years.

This usually happens out in the open, and there’s buy-in from the public.

The rush to build data centers in New Mexico and across the country is fundamentally different. These are enormous facilities that require huge amounts of energy and water, they don’t produce many permanent jobs. But some of the most notable differences are the tactics these companies and their contractors have been using to speed through the permitting processes and get off the ground as quickly as possible.

Take the biggest data center project in New Mexico, Project Jupiter. It’s a hyperscale data center under construction next to Santa Teresa in Doña Ana County.

By the time many people heard about Project Jupiter, county civil servants had already negotiated with the company under a nondisclosure agreement that kept the whole enterprise a secret. County commissioners went into a closed meeting and then voted to pledge $165 billion worth of industrial revenue bonds for the data center.

Then residents start getting mailers urging them to support Project Jupiter, which turned out to be from a fake grassroots organization that was really a giant industry-backed lobbying campaign. State officials start getting fake public comments supporting the project’s permits from New Mexicans who said they never sent those comments.

There’s been a series of strange and possibly even illegal moves to try and win this data center public support, or at least to win support from the state regulators who are still reviewing their environmental permit applications.

Project Jupiter’s not the only one. There have been data center initiatives all over the state.

On this episode of "Searchlight New Mexico with Ed Williams," Las Cruces New Mexican/Searchlight NM reporter Julia Gentin and state Rep.Micaela Lara Cadena, D-Mesilla, lay out the secretive and sometimes deceptive tactics at play as these data centers try to get off the ground.

Later in the program we’re joined by Drew Hawkins, senior reporter at the Gulf States Newsroom, to talk about how the tactics we’re seeing in New Mexico are unfolding at an even greater scale in Louisiana. 

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