THEY ALWAYS PROMISE 200 JOBS.
THEY ALWAYS PROMISE 200 JOBS.
Ohio Select Committee on Data Centers. June 1, 2026.
Carl Setzer. Interested party. Used to be a penetration tester. His job was walking into eBay and PayPal colo sites — what we now call data centers — and figuring out how to break them. Physical security. Theoretical security. Cooling. Wastewater. IT. Private equity.
He told the room we are in a speculative bubble.
The rush to pour halls across Ohio is a race to be early in the IPO before retail America notices there is no there there. LLMs branded as “AI” before it is truly generative. Private equity backs the developer. The building gets flipped to Meta, Alphabet, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI.
He called it selling the children’s birthright. Baby and bathwater. No guarantee the company is even here in ten years.
Sixteen centers or six. Always two hundred jobs. Enough to look like a blessing. Not enough to break the school system. Marketing to clear the hurdle: tax abatements, zoning, environmental.
Then the trucks hit the pad and the closed-loop cooling is “too expensive.” Make it open loop. You can’t stop it. They already broke ground.
By the time you count the jobs and the taxes after the abatement dies, the corporation that signed the paper does not exist. Founders and Series A already cashed out. Ohio keeps the blight.
His ask was not “no business.” It was a statewide registered capital bond. You promised two hundred salaries? Put ten years of that payroll in a bond on day one. If the bubble shrinks the way every bubble shrinks, the town has something left to fix what you leave.
Anxiety in the room is not Ohio blocking progress. It is people afraid of losing the little they have left to something they never asked for.
Genesis 25:33 — Esau sold his birthright for one meal.
Proverbs 22:28 — remove not the ancient landmark.
Proverbs 11:1 — a false balance is abomination to the Lord.
Put the money on the table before you pour the slab.
Source: Carl Setzer, Ohio Select Committee on Data Centers, June 1, 2026.
— Fallen Exposure
The light was always there.