The new Signal & Noise ‘data center debate’ episode with Dawson Kluesner is now live. Listen (or watch): Wyoming’s Data Center Boom: Economic Opportunity, Public Backlash, and the Infrastructure Behind AI.

Dawson Kluesner is Director of External Affairs at the Wyoming Association of Municipalities and Coordinator for the Wyoming Economic Development Association. He works with the towns evaluating major infrastructure projects and with the economic-development community courting investment, which puts him at the center of the data center debate.

Tired of the politicized noise surrounding the data center debate? So are we. Dawson joins Brett House and Rio Longacre on the new Signal & Noise episode to get to the truth of the matter, without the AI fear mongering and misinformation.

Most importantly, a data center project lives or dies on whether residents were brought in early and kept informed, whatever the technology or the deal.

Water and electricity drive most of the community pushback, and Dawson explains how newer closed-loop cooling is changing the water math. One new project uses roughly 600,000 gallons a year, about what five or six homes use. On the electricity side, Wyoming’s large load tariff makes the data center, not residential ratepayers, pay for grid infrastructure.

By Rio Longacre

In a 2025 study, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human participant 73 percent of the time, and yet the world still looks remarkably like it did before ChatGPT arrived. We passed the Turing Test, opened ChatGPT the next morning, and went back to work.

Rio argues that AI is advancing at machine speed while society moves at human speed, just as it did with electricity, computers, and the internet. The jobs apocalypse hasn’t arrived either: in one Census Bureau study, only 2 percent of firms using AI reported job cuts tied to it. Maybe 2026 is AI’s version of 1998.