The Data Center in Alternate Realities

Two reporting teams went to New Carlisle, Indiana, to document the same Amazon data center. Both reports concerned Project Rainier, the massive Amazon Web Services campus built to supply computing power to Anthropic, the company behind Claude. Both showed the same buildings, the same construction project and the same rural Indiana landscape.

But not the same reality.

CNBC went inside the gates.

More Perfect Union stopped at the farm next door.

CNBC opened with an electric-company executive marveling at how quickly Amazon had built the place. An Anthropic executive recalled what the land had looked like before construction began.

“It was all just dirt fields and nothing really there.”

More Perfect Union opened on Joy VanLoue.

“I don’t cry anymore,” she said. “I’m just exhausted.”

CNBC documented an industrial triumph. Amazon had turned farmland into one of the world’s largest AI-computing clusters in little more than a year.

More Perfect Union documented a corporate invasion. Homes had been demolished. Neighbors had moved. A local pond had receded. The VanLoues’ drinking water had begun tasting strange.

The reports were so different that I initially failed to recognize they were about the same place.

That failure of recognition is the story.

Inside the Gates

CNBC received what it described as the first on-camera tour of Project Rainier.

Its reporters entered Amazon’s buildings and stood beside the racks containing its custom Trainium chips. They interviewed Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman, Amazon infrastructure executives, an executive from the local electric utility and leaders from Anthropic.

Amazon and Anthropic supplied the access. They also supplied much of the story’s vocabulary.

Speed. Scale. Performance. Efficiency. Capacity. Innovation.

Amazon had already installed approximately half a million chips and expected to double that number. Seven buildings had begun operating. Eventually, the campus could contain thirty. At full buildout, it was expected to consume 2.2 gigawatts of electricity—roughly as much power as 1.5 million homes.

The governing question was clear: How had Amazon built something this enormous so quickly?

That question turned Amazon into the protagonist. Everything else became context.

The land was context.

The town was context.

The public subsidies were context.

The water was context.

The people already living there were context.

This is what made the statement about “dirt fields and nothing really there” so revealing. It wasn’t necessarily a lie. The executive was describing farmland without industrial buildings.

But the sentence disclosed the frame.

Nothing was there because nothing Amazon valued was there.

No data centers. No computer racks. No proprietary chips. No corporate customer paying to train an artificial-intelligence model.

From inside the gates, the story began when Amazon arrived.

Outside the Gates

The VanLoues occupied a different reality.

Joy and Gene VanLoue lived on a 200-acre farm that had been in their family for five generations. What Amazon and Anthropic saw as empty land was part of a settled human landscape.

The VanLoues watched nearby homes fall to bulldozers. People they had known moved away. Massive, windowless buildings rose beyond their property.

Then the water changed.

Joy said their drinking water tasted “tainted.” Gene showed More Perfect Union two large pipes pumping groundwater from Amazon’s construction site. He said the pipes were each twenty-four inches wide.

Amazon was dewatering the site—removing groundwater so construction crews could pour foundations below the water table.

Gene also showed the reporter a local pond. He pointed to exposed gravel and grass where the water had previously reached. A sandbar had appeared in the middle.

Asked whether he thought he could prevail against Amazon, Gene said the company could afford better lawyers.

“We’re a little fish in a big pond.”

More Perfect Union’s narrator supplied the conclusion: a little fish in a pond sucked dry by Amazon.

It was a memorable line. It was also an example of the reporter moving faster than the available evidence.

Amazon unquestionably pumped groundwater from beside the VanLoues’ farm. Residents reported dry wells. The pond receded during the construction period. The circumstantial case that dewatering affected local water levels was strong.

But More Perfect Union blurred construction dewatering with the water the completed data center might later use for cooling. It also moved from Joy’s report of strange-tasting water toward an implied finding that Amazon had contaminated it.

No publicly available test identified what made the VanLoues’ water taste different. My research found no evidence that anyone with regulatory authority tested it.

Advocacy journalism doesn’t become more reliable simply because its sympathies lie with people who possess less power.

But its excesses don’t make the VanLoues disappear.

They reported what they experienced. Those experiences demanded an investigation. The troubling fact is that no institution produced a public answer capable of settling the most important questions.

The Facts CNBC Included

CNBC didn’t completely ignore the other side of the property line.

Its report disclosed billions of dollars in state and local tax exemptions. It distinguished thousands of temporary construction jobs from Amazon’s promises of long-term employment. It interviewed residents concerned about farmland, dangerous traffic, electricity prices and water.

It reported that Amazon wouldn’t disclose how many millions of gallons of water the completed campus might consume.

It noted possible impacts on wetlands. It asked how Amazon’s growing appetite for electricity could be reconciled with its climate commitments. It reported that a nearby utility expected its peak demand to more than double by 2030.

CNBC had many of the inconvenient facts.

The problem wasn’t simply omission. It was subordination.

The report acknowledged each cost and then returned to the corporate story: the chips, the buildings, the competition with Nvidia, the partnership with Anthropic and Amazon’s extraordinary ability to build at scale.

Amazon’s environmental impact became a challenge its engineers were working to solve. Public subsidies became one reason Indiana had successfully attracted investment. Local opposition became friction surrounding an otherwise unstoppable technological transformation.

At the end, Amazon’s CEO said the company might never finish building because its customers would continue demanding more capacity.

That was the final picture: expansion as destiny.

The residents were allowed to worry about the future. Amazon was allowed to define it.

Who Controls the Picture?

I spent thirty-five years constructing believable images for Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

The work teaches you a simple lesson: the frame isn’t a neutral boundary.

The frame creates meaning.

It determines what becomes foreground and what becomes scenery. It assigns importance before the audience has time to form an independent judgment. What lies outside it doesn’t merely become less visible. Eventually, it can cease to exist in the viewer’s mental model.

The CNBC report began inside a campus Amazon wanted the public to see. The visual spectacle established the project’s meaning before the more troubling facts arrived.

The story didn’t need to conceal the subsidies or water concerns. By then, the audience already understood what Project Rainier was: a remarkable engineering achievement.

More Perfect Union reversed the process. It began with Joy’s exhaustion. Before viewers learned anything about Amazon’s computers, they understood the project as something being done to a vulnerable family.

That frame made every pipe incriminating and every government decision suspect. It also encouraged the report to collapse unresolved questions into a settled indictment.

The facts hadn’t changed.

Their function had.

In one story, thirty buildings demonstrated ambition. In the other, they represented domination.

In one story, rapid construction proved Amazon’s competence. In the other, it showed how quickly a project could become a done deal.

In one story, billions in incentives helped explain Indiana’s success in attracting investment. In the other, they showed government serving one of the richest corporations on Earth.

One site. Two realities.

The Missing Investigation

The central question isn’t which report deserves to be declared the winner.

CNBC showed something real. Amazon built a functioning AI-computing campus at remarkable speed. The scale matters. The technology matters. Project Rainier isn’t merely another speculative announcement.

More Perfect Union also showed something real. The people living beside that campus experienced a transformation they hadn’t requested and apparently possessed little power to influence.

The harder story begins where both reports become insufficient.

How much groundwater did Amazon remove during each construction phase?

How far did the effects extend?

Were the VanLoues’ water and well ever examined?

What caused the strange taste?

Why was Amazon allowed to disturb protected wetlands and streams before obtaining authorization?

What did officials know when they approved the incentives?

Why did Amazon’s public promise of at least a thousand jobs become a local contractual commitment for 400 full-time positions?

The answers were distributed across Amazon, its contractors, county offices and state regulators. Each institution possessed a fragment. Nobody assembled those fragments into a public account.

That vacuum gave every storyteller room to construct a different New Carlisle.

Amazon could present efficiency.

CNBC could present achievement.

More Perfect Union could present predation.

The VanLoues were left with the consequences.

What Was Really There

The data center industrial complex depends on a particular way of seeing land.

A farm becomes acreage. A community becomes a labor market. A river or aquifer becomes available capacity. A tax exemption becomes an incentive. A gas plant becomes reliable generation. A person becomes a stakeholder.

Once the language changes, so does the moral landscape.

“Dirt fields and nothing really there” wasn’t merely a casual description. It expressed the logic of the entire project.

The land remained nothing until capital gave it purpose.

But something had been there.

The VanLoues were there.

Their neighbors were there.

The farms, wetlands and groundwater were there.

A way of life was there.

CNBC’s cameras crossed Amazon’s gates and showed viewers a technological future under construction. More Perfect Union stood outside those gates and showed who might be required to absorb its costs.

The full story exists between those two camera positions.

That space isn’t an academic distinction. It’s where corporations gain public support, where governments justify private bargains and where uncertain claims harden into accepted reality.

It’s also where responsibility disappears.

Project Rainier exists in only one physical location.

But power gave it two public realities.

One celebrated what Amazon had built.

The other asked what Amazon had built it on top of.