GREAT FALLS — GREAT FALLS — Data centers generate significant tax money, but critics fear their detrimental impact on energy and water resources.
Vision Net, a statewide fiber optic network provider headquartered in Great Falls, operates a half dozen data centers in Montana. The company shares a vision that could lessen the effects of large-scale hyperscale data centers.
"We've been in the data center business a little over 20 years now," company president and CEO Rob Worden said.
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The company serves the carrier needs of large mobile providers and provides internet and managed services for large businesses, state government, school districts, colleges, and universities.
"With all the advances in A.I. and the technologies that are there coming to the foreground, we're evolving those centers to support those needs here in Montana," Worden said.
Collectively, Vision Net operates in 24 states. In Montana, they operate "edge" data centers in Great Falls, Helena, Billings, and Missoula.
"When we say edge, we mean data center facilities that are smaller in footprint that can serve the customer needs more directly because they're closer to the customer," Worden said.
Worden said this proximity addresses latency. Large centers send artificial intelligence queries elsewhere, causing a delay that takes longer when trying to generate images or videos.
"Our network capacities, meaning our 800-gigabit network, that's going to reduce the latency dramatically. So that experience is better," Worden said.
Vision Net offers the first 800-gigabit per second network in the Mountain West Region.
"So most carriers active today are evolving from 100 gig network up to 400 gig networks. We decided to take the next leap and get to 800 gig because we're seeing the roadmap here," Worden said.
Worden said edge centers and hyperscale data centers do not work in competition but complement each other. While big centers rely on huge power loads that are not always available, Vision Net can help ease that burden.
"We're in the position with our distributed assets to increase our AI capabilities in there. And the impact on the electrical grid is incremental, but it's not going to be any need for huge spikes or new capital upgrades," Worden said.
Recently, the Great Falls Development Alliance created a Data Center Task Force to discuss the industry.
"We really focused on what our community concerns and what is an opportunity that we can see, to do this right. Like, what would we if if we saw a data center do it right. What does that look like?" Jolene Schalper said.
Schalper is the executive vice president of the Great Falls Development Alliance. She said about 70 people attended the first meeting and offered excellent insight.
"We also gathered some really great, thoughtful analysis from community members on what they would like to see integration with schools, integration with neighbors, you know, centers that, that aren't mega but that are that midsize and that, that look good, feel good, integrate with the community and provide great tax base," Schalper said.
The next Data Center Task Force meeting takes place Monday, March 30 at 5:00 p.m. at the Marriott Spring Hill Suites in Great Falls. The event is free and the public is encouraged to attend, but an RSVP on the Great Falls Development Alliance website is recommended.
Worden will speak at the meeting about Vision Net and the future of data centers, which he said could include even more precise technology.
"Meaning dropping A.I. pods, essentially containerized data centers that could sit on a sit on a college campus. And there we go, one step further to reducing the latency," Worden said.
