As pushback against hyperscale AI data centers hardens into one of the most potent local political issues in Florida and nationally, a 21-year-old Palm Beach County resident has built one of the state’s most comprehensive resources for residents tracking proposed projects in their own backyards.
James Boger runs Florida Data Centers, a website that maps the status of data center proposals statewide as reported by users. The site also tracks moratoriums and bans enacted by counties and municipalities, counting down the days until each pause expires. It currently lists 19 Florida jurisdictions with a moratorium or ban on the books.
Boger has also assigned a risk score to all 67 counties, devising his own methodology that weights land, power and water availability, along with proximity to existing projects. By his math, Citrus County is the most susceptible, followed by Martin, Polk, St. Lucie and Okeechobee.
A separate tab lets users fill out a short form with their location and the data center issues that worry them most: water, noise, traffic, power and the like. Boger then pays a subcontractor to draft a personalized letter and send it to the user’s elected officials.
Boger says more than 1,800 people have paid for the service, which costs $9 per letter.
His background is not in politics, law or statistics. He is a self-employed web developer who mostly builds sites for small businesses.
As a kid, Boger says, his parents discouraged video games and screen time. At 15, he saved enough money to buy a computer and taught himself to trade stocks online.
“My parents were always on me about getting a job, so I’m like, ‘How do I make money with the stuff I have?’” Boger said.
After high school, Boger skipped college and started his own business with the skills he had taught himself. Setting his own hours left room for other pursuits, and when the data center debate started heating up, he saw an opening.
Inspired by the success of DeFlock, a crowdsourced map of automated license plate reader cameras, he launched a site dedicated to tracking data centers. Boger sees opposition to hyperscale data centers and opposition to Flock cameras, which he calls “dystopian,” as two sides of the same coin.
“The Flock camera website started doing amazing,” Boger said. “That’s one reason I made the site.”
Boger typically spends one to three days a week researching active proposals and updating the site with the latest news. He also sells T-shirts, caps and flags with slogans such as “You Can’t Drink Data,” though he insists the site is not a significant source of income and he isn’t running it for the money.
The site was already live when the fight over Project Tango roiled his home county, but Boger says the proposed 3.6 million-square-foot data center and warehouse expansion near Loxahatchee helped catapult its growth. Within about a month of launch, the site had drawn more than 1 million visits, and @JamesDataCenters, the Instagram account where Boger posts short reels, quickly grew to nearly 20,000 followers.
Boger also used to post data center commentary on Facebook, but he says his views and engagement dropped off overnight. He believes he was “shadowbanned,” and he has a theory as to why.
“Meta is a big player in all these data centers,” Boger said, speculating that Facebook’s parent company may have had a motive to curb his reach.
Boger says he has heard nothing from data center developers or the AI industry. Residents are another story.
“The amount of DMs that I’ve been getting from residents is insane. My DMs are just full of people talking about how it’s affecting them in their community and how scared they are for the proposals and everything like that,” Boger said.
Some of those messages urge him to run for office. At 21, Boger meets the minimum age to serve in the Florida House, but he says he isn’t interested at the moment, for a simple reason.
“I’m not gonna lie, the pay for it is not that good, so I don’t think I’d get much out of it,” he said.
Florida lawmakers earn a salary of $29,697 a year, unchanged since 2010.
For now, Boger is content to keep running the site, which celebrates five major data center proposals defeated after resident pushback. The projects he highlights, including Project Tango, which Palm Beach County Commissioners rejected in July after more than 12 hours of debate, represented billions of dollars in capital investment and several million square feet of new construction.