The Real Story – A Column
Take a drive down NE Evergreen Parkway or over by Brookwood, and you’ll see them. Massive, windowless concrete monoliths hum 24 hours a day, shrouded by perimeter fences and massive soulless cooling towers. They look like high-security vaults, but they aren’t holding gold or money.
They hold silicon. Thousands upon thousands of hyper-dense server racks, drawing hundreds of megawatts from Portland General Electric’s grid, drinking millions of gallons of water, and processing data for the world’s largest tech conglomerates.
For years, the narrative pitched by local officials and corporate press releases was simple: Hillsboro is the Silicon Forest. This is progress. This is high-tech growth. And maybe when humans were in control and the driving force behind the future, it made sense. But not anymore, and I think we all know it. If you pull back the curtain and connect what’s happening right here in Washington County to the global conversation happening at the highest levels of artificial intelligence, a much, much more disturbing picture emerges.
We aren’t just hosting a few web servers. Hillsboro, Oregon is the physical engine powering the global race toward AI superintelligence—and we are paying for the privilege.
“An Army of Geniuses in the Data Center”
To understand why a few concrete buildings in Washington County matter to the future of humanity, you have to listen to the people who built the algorithms. In a recent, widely discussed interview on The Diary of a CEO, Daniel Cocatello—a former top OpenAI researcher who now leads the AI Futures Project—laid out the blunt reality of where the industry is charging full-speed ahead.
Cocatello isn’t talking about chatbots that help high schoolers write essays. He’s talking about Superintelligence: AI systems that are smarter, faster, and cheaper than the best human minds at everything, paired with autonomous robotics that can operate in the physical world. And his median forecast for when this arrives isn’t decades away—it’s between 2027 and 2030.
How do the AI labs plan to get there so fast? By using current AI models to automate their own internal research and coding, triggering a runaway loop of recursive self-improvement.
Describing how frontier labs like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google operate, Cocatello referenced a phrase coined by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei—before making a sharp correction of his own:
He coined this phrase, ‘the country of geniuses in the data center,’ to describe what they’re trying to build.
“I think it would be more accurate to describe it as an army of geniuses in the data center because they’re not like a bunch of diverse different AIs… They’re all copies of the same big model, and they’re owned by the company, and so they all follow the orders given by the company.” — Daniel Cocatello, Former OpenAI Researcher
Here is the catch every resident of Hillsboro needs to digest: That “army of geniuses” has to live somewhere.
It doesn’t exist in the “cloud.” The cloud is an abstraction. In reality, that army lives right here on repurposed Hillsboro farmland, plugged into PGE substations, cooled by municipal water, and connected to Asia through the transpacific submarine fiber optic cables that land right on our doorstep.
From Ronler Acres to Transpacific Fiber: Hillsboro’s Ground Zero Role
When national media talks about AI, they focus on Silicon Valley boardrooms, White House summits, or software demos. But software is useless without physical hardware.
Look at the pipeline running through our backyard:
- The Silicon: At Intel’s Ronler Acres campus in Hillsboro, engineers and technicians push the absolute physical limits of semiconductor fabrication and chip packaging. Without the continuous micro-architectural leaps developed in the Silicon Forest, hardware limits would have stalled AI progress years ago.
- The Chassis: Hillsboro now hosts over 35 built or permitted data center campuses spanning over 570 acres.
- The Fiber: Hillsboro is the primary North American landing hub for transpacific undersea optical fiber cables. Data processed in our local data centers shoots across the Pacific to Asian markets in milliseconds.
We aren’t just along for the ride. Without places like Hillsboro providing the silicon, land, power, and fiber, the AI race slows down by default. SO every decision we make at City Hall matters. Every delay that current leaders have taken along the way has mattered. The creation of the “Enterprise Zone” and the City’s claw-back revenue machine, the “Community Service Fee” by Mayor Callaway opened this brave new world wide up. And how we got here can be seen in the economic moves he made, along with former Mayor Willey, to rezone farmland, to create Urban Renewal districts, and to allow our City to borrow hundreds of Millions in debt and build sewers and water and buy land for industrial expansion. All of this was designed to capture Data Centers and the like, which are all now becoming AI Computing facilities. All of this, and all of those people in power who did not stand up, are exactly how and why we got here. And the purposeful change of the Hillsboro Chamber of Commerce to the Washington County Chamber of Commerce was also a strategic part of this. The forces that be have funneled money around to make all of this happen. And none of it was happenstance. It was all coordinated and by design. But that is what to expect from the Billionaires and Equity Funds who have been executing this plan for so long now.
The Local Reality: 3 Jobs an Acre and $450 Million in Tax Breaks
For decades, the public was told that welcoming data centers was a slam-dunk economic strategy. But local numbers tell a very different story.
According to municipal economic data:
- Traditional light manufacturing or industrial businesses yield roughly 17 local jobs per acre.
- Hyperscale data centers average just ~3 jobs per acre once construction finishes.
Meanwhile, under Oregon’s Enterprise Zone program, hyperscale data centers across the state have been dodging an estimated $450 million annually in local property taxes. We gave away massive tracts of industrial land and tax revenue to host server racks instead of job-producing local businesses. $100 Million of those tax giveaways were rigth here in Washington County last year.
And then there was the utility bill shock. As PGE spent hundreds of millions expanding substations and high-voltage transmission lines to feed Washington County’s hungry data centers, local families saw residential electricity rates jump nearly 50% over five years. A new utility rate is being established for big users, like all of the major players in Hillsboro, but so far it is mostly talk. How and when the people of Oregon get treated fairly is going to be hard to see. PGE wants another 3,9% now while bragging about record profits. You see, this is all more of the same. Failed and weak leadership without the people at the top putting their feet down.
The Tide Is Turning: Hillsboro Hits the Brakes
The good news? Local citizens and leaders are finally waking up to the raw deal—and realization is turning into policy.
- Hillsboro’s 120-Day Moratorium: The Hillsboro City Council enacted a temporary 120-day moratorium on new primary-use data centers and Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS). The city is using this window to overhaul the Community Development Code, reassess environmental impacts, and evaluate community impact fees. This ONLY happened due to a an onslaught of public outcry over many months. Period.
- Statewide Tax Incentive Freeze (HB 4084): The Oregon Legislature officially barred new data centers from enrolling in the Enterprise Zone property tax exemption program through at least 2027. Having said that, this Bill had a 60 day plus start date allowing 17 “fore-sale” deals to flood into Hillsboro which is now the subject of litigation.
- The POWER Act & PGE Schedule 96: Under new Oregon Public Utility Commission rules, large-load data centers (>20MW) are now forced into a dedicated rate class where they must pay 100% of their upfront grid connection costs, alongside a 1-cent per kWh surcharge on massive loads (>100MW) to protect residential ratepayers. So far implemnetation and accounting for who is causing the costs leaves much to be desired and trust with PGE is at an all time low in my view.
Are We Helping Bring About the End of the World As We Know It?
In his interview, Daniel Cocatello didn’t mince words about where an unchecked race to superintelligence leads:
“If we do build these super intelligences and we use them to automate all the jobs and we put them in the military… they will eventually have accumulated enough real-world power that they don’t need humans anymore… At that point, we sort of have to hope that they are virtuous… And the sort of scary open secret in the AI industry right now is that right now that is kind of just a hope.”
When you sit at your kitchen table in Orenco, Hawthorn Farm, or Jackson School, it’s easy to feel like these massive global issues are being decided far away in Washington D.C. or San Francisco.
They aren’t. They are being powered right here. Every time our local governments approve a land-use permit, grant a tax break, or allocate millions of gallons of water to a new data center campus, we are making a direct decision to speed up that global timeline. Hillsboro built its reputation on hard work, community pride, and authentic innovation. But as the race for AI superintelligence reaches a fever pitch, we have to ask ourselves the hard question: Are we building a flourishing future for Washington County, or are we subsidizing the physical engine of our own obsolescence?
It’s time for Hillsboro residents to pay close attention, ask tough questions at City Council meetings, and demand that our local resources serve the people who live here—not just the “army of geniuses” inside the data center.
What do you think about the rapid expansion of data centers in Hillsboro? Post your thoughts in the comments below or send a letter to the editor at The Hillsboro Herald.
A couple of questions:
WHEN did the transatlantic cable get laid down?
Is the land across from Liberty HS being sold by the Hillsboro School District?
Is the airport going to discontinue the use of leaded fuel in exchange for being allowed to build the private hangers for jets?
Kathi –
1) The first cable, about 20 years ago. Many have followed, most in the last few years!
2) NO – it was owned by PAPE Cat dealers, but they were offered over $1 Million an acre and sold it- they bought it and there are other owners involved there too.
3) NO – they testified the jets won’t use leaded fuel, but we already knew that. So no, they will allow all small planes to use leaded still.