The proposal to build a massive data center adjacent to the Nashville Zoo raises a simple question: Have we completely lost our sense of priorities?
Nashville’s zoo exists to provide education, conservation, recreation, and a rare connection between people and animals. Families bring children to experience living animals, open space, and a respite from the relentless industrialization that increasingly consumes American communities. Yet now residents are being told that one of the city’s most treasured public assets should coexist with an industrial-scale computing facility whose primary purpose is to feed the endless demand for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and speculative digital services. This is insane and it is exactly backward.
The burden of proof should not fall on citizens to explain why they do not want a hyperscale data center next to a zoo. The burden should fall on developers to explain why a project requiring enormous quantities of electricity, water, backup generation, transmission infrastructure, truck traffic, and round-the-clock industrial operations and both light and noise pollution belongs there in the first place.
The economic promises attached to these projects are increasingly difficult to take seriously as has been demonstrated by a recent study of data center job impact in Texas. Across the country, data center developers routinely advertise billions of dollars in investment while generating surprisingly few permanent jobs. Independent research has repeatedly found that many large data centers produce limited long-term employment relative to their physical footprint, utility demands, and public subsidies. Communities are often left with the costs while investors and distant technology companies capture the benefits.
Meanwhile, the impacts are immediate and local.
Residents face years of construction activity, noise, traffic, and visual blight. Wildlife habitats are disrupted. Open space disappears. Transmission lines, substations, backup generators, and supporting infrastructure permanently alter the character of surrounding neighborhoods. Once built, these facilities are effectively impossible to remove. They become permanent industrial fixtures.
The Nashville Zoo should not become collateral damage in the AI arms race.
Even more troubling is the uncertainty surrounding the long-term economics of artificial intelligence itself. Technology companies are spending hundreds of billions of dollars based on forecasts that extend years into the future. Yet many of the underlying assumptions remain unproven. No one can say with confidence what demand for AI services will look like five, ten, or twenty years from now. If those forecasts prove wrong, communities could be left staring at the digital equivalent of abandoned factories—massive, energy-hungry facilities built for demand that never materialized.
The risk is not theoretical. Economists have a name for this phenomenon: stranded assets.
A zoo is a long-term civic investment. It creates educational, environmental, and cultural value that can endure for generations. A speculative AI data center is a bet on future demand forecasts generated in corporate boardrooms and venture-capital presentations.
When those two visions collide, the choice should not be difficult.
Nashville should protect its zoo, its surrounding communities, and its quality of life. There are countless locations better suited for industrial-scale computing infrastructure. A zoo is not one of them.
Some places should remain places for people, families, wildlife, and conservation. Not every acre of land needs to be sacrificed to the next technological gold rush.
The Nashville Zoo deserves better than becoming the neighbor of a machine. And believe me, if they’ll do it in Nashville they’ll do it anywhere. The Zoo has a Change.org petition you can sign if you agree.
The Trichordist 
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