One billionaire’s artificial intelligence empire is eyeing the city as a potential home for a data center that would consume electricity like a small city and draw millions of gallons of water from the Alabama River. Another billionaire owns the hospital that keeps central Alabama alive – and his company wants to close it.

These are not separate stories; they are the same story. What happens when the people who hold the fate of a community in their hands have no reason to care what that fate turns out to be? Montgomery is not unique in facing these pressures, but it is a vivid case study in how cities at the economic margins become testing grounds for decisions made elsewhere, by people who will not live with the consequences.

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Elon Musk’s xAI built a massive AI data center in a South Memphis neighborhood. The promises were significant: property tax revenue, infrastructure investment, jobs, and a signal to other companies that the region is open for business. The controversy that followed is equally instructive for any Southern city considering the same.

A large data center consumes electricity equivalent to a small city. In Memphis, xAI’s facility drew so much power that it required natural gas turbines to supplement the grid, turbines that weren’t fully permitted and drew pollution complaints from nearby residents. For Montgomery, the load would fall primarily on Alabama Power. The ripple effect:

• Ratepayers across the service territory, not just Montgomery, would help finance new transmission lines, substations, or generation capacity. Infrastructure costs are socialized; tax revenue is local.  
• Electric bills in the region have already been rising at roughly twice the rate of inflation nationally due in part to data center demand.
• If the data center eventually scales back or closes, ratepayers, not the company, absorb the stranded infrastructure costs.

Construction phases create substantial local employment for electricians, contractors, ironworkers, and concrete crews. Montgomery’s construction workforce would see a genuine short-term boost, but the operational reality is starker. A large data center typically runs on a skeleton crew of 30 to 200 full-time employees. Memphis neighbors were promised thousands of jobs; the permanent headcount is a fraction of that.

Data centers use enormous volumes of water for cooling – millions of gallons per day for large facilities. The Alabama River and Montgomery’s municipal water system would face new demand pressure, particularly during summer when both cooling needs and municipal consumption are highest. South Memphis residents, already in an environmentally burdened area, raised air quality concerns about backup diesel and gas generators. Montgomery neighborhoods near any such facility would face similar questions about noise, emissions, and truck traffic during construction and ongoing equipment delivery.

Memphis is a sharp lesson in where these facilities tend to land: lower-income, often majority-Black neighborhoods where land is cheap and political resistance is weaker. Residents in those areas bear the environmental costs while tax benefits flow city-wide and power cost increases spread across the region.

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Jackson Hospital is one of only three hospitals in Montgomery, but it carries a disproportionate load as the region’s primary safety-net provider. It serves not just city residents but patients from surrounding rural counties who have no other option within a reasonable distance. Closure would immediately:

• Overwhelm Baptist Health, which is already absorbing extra patients during the bankruptcy crisis. The city council explicitly warned against shifting Jackson’s entire burden onto Baptist.
• Strip emergency and trauma care from a large swath of central Alabama. For patients in outlying rural counties, the next closest facility could mean an extra 30 to 60 minutes of transport time in a medical emergency – a difference that costs lives.
• Eliminate specialized services including trauma, OB, and other departments that smaller regional hospitals cannot replicate.

Alabama is one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid, leaving roughly 300,000 Alabamians in a coverage gap; they are too poor for ACA marketplace subsidies, and not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. Jackson, as the safety-net hospital, is where most of those people go.

Without Jackson, those patients don’t disappear. They delay care until conditions become emergencies, show up at remaining ERs that are legally required to treat them regardless of payment, and drive Baptist’s uncompensated care costs upward, potentially destabilizing a second hospital over time.

Jackson Hospital is one of Montgomery’s larger employers. A closure would mean:

• Hundreds to thousands of healthcare jobs lost including nurses, physicians, technicians, administrative staff, and support workers.
• Downstream job losses in suppliers, medical equipment vendors, food service, and other contracted services.
• A blow to Montgomery’s ability to recruit businesses and workers; companies evaluating the city for investment look hard at the quality and availability of local healthcare.

Healthcare jobs also tend to be among the more stable, middle-income positions in a regional economy. Their loss hits the local tax base and consumer spending simultaneously.

U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures called Jackson “the single most important hospital in the state of Alabama because of the regional care it provides.” That’s not hyperbole – it functions as a regional referral hub for a wide arc of rural central Alabama counties where local hospitals are already fragile. More than half of Alabama’s 52 rural hospitals are already at risk of closure, and 74 percent operate with negative operating margins. If Jackson closes and rural patients lose their referral destination, some of those smaller hospitals lose the financial rationale for staying open too, affecting the entire region.

The breadth of the emergency response – city council resolution, Montgomery County funding, Governor Ivey’s $40 million state bond commitment, federal congressional attention – signals exactly how severe the consequences of closure are understood to be. If closure happens anyway, the political fallout would be significant: a state capital that couldn’t keep its safety-net hospital open, in a state that has resisted Medicaid expansion while its hospitals bleed out.

Jackson isn’t just a building, it’s load-bearing infrastructure for the entire central Alabama healthcare system. Closure wouldn’t create a gap; it would create a rupture.

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A large data center could mean hundreds of millions in taxable property, but the history of these deals suggests the money flows upward and outward to shareholders, to bond markets, and to corporate treasuries headquartered somewhere else entirely. The residents who absorb the noise, the emissions, and the strain on the power grid rarely see the windfall they were promised.

That is the thread connecting both halves of Montgomery’s billionaire problem. Mark Zuckerberg is not thinking about the Alabama River when he builds his data centers. Rick Jackson is not thinking about central Alabama’s uninsured when he pursues his next venture. He is, in fact, thinking about Georgia – where he is currently running for governor, spending millions on a campaign for the statehouse of a state that is not the one his company is hollowing out.

That is the nature of decisions made at scale by people without consequences: the costs are local, the benefits are portable, and the communities left holding the bill are the ones with the least leverage to negotiate otherwise.

Montgomery’s politicians will be asked to respond to both crises. They will need to find money for a bankrupt hospital, to negotiate terms with a data center developer, and to explain to constituents why the region’s healthcare safety net collapsed on their watch. What they will not be asked to do is explain any of it to the people who caused it. Those people will be somewhere else entirely, on to the next deal, the next campaign, the next city that needs what they are selling.