The cornfields outside Council Bluffs, Iowa, grow in neat rows until they don’t. Where the agricultural geometry breaks, a different kind of harvest begins: thousands of wind turbines across Iowa converting prairie wind into electricity that flows through buried cables to windowless buildings the size of shopping malls.
Google operates a massive campus here, Facebook has facilities in Altoona, Microsoft builds in West Des Moines. The buildings squat on former farmland like enormous beetles, their cooling systems exhaling heat that makes the adjacent fields shimmer even in winter. This is where your searches go to live, where your photos get processed, where the infrastructure of modern consciousness physically exists in buildings designed to be invisible.
The scale defies rural comprehension. Google’s Council Bluffs campus, begun in 2007, has grown through continuous expansion, with the company announcing $424 million in new investment in 2023.
They chose Iowa for the wind. MidAmerican Energy, the state’s largest utility, generates the majority of its Iowa electricity from wind, among the highest percentages in the nation. The farmers who lease land for turbines receive thousands of dollars per turbine annually, a more reliable income than corn or soybeans have provided in decades. They joke about their new crop rotation: corn, soybeans, and server farms.
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