Krambu's plan for a 29MW data center in Bonner, Montana is dead. Data Center Dynamics reports that Mike Heisey, general manager of the Bonner Mill Industrial Park, withdrew his signature from the special exception application. He did it after hearing from the public. The site sat inside a former sawmill building at 9314 Bonner Mill Road, east of Missoula.
Krambu's application called for 7MW in the first phase, scaling toward 29MW at full build-out. Cooling ran on a mix of dry and evaporative towers, 15 to 17 feet tall. Each tower handled 4MW to 5MW of server load. Ten towers, some held in reserve, would have covered the full 29MW. The developer had already tried to solve the water problem. Each tower needed only about 500 gallons on initial fill, refreshed three to four times a year, drawn from the site's existing fire suppression system.
Missoula County counted about 117,922 residents in the 2020 census. A Change.org petition against the data center passed 48,000 signatures, edging toward half the county's population. Residents cited water draws near the Blackfoot River, noise from the mechanical yard, and pollution risk. Heisey said he withdrew "after hearing from the public and understanding what the concerns are." The withdrawal landed while county commissioners were weighing a one-year moratorium on new and expanding data centers. Planners said the moratorium partly grew out of problems staff found while reviewing Krambu's own application. It would not have covered this project anyway, since the paperwork predated it. The pattern is familiar. $64 billion in data center projects have been blocked or delayed by the people next door nationwide. Moratorium fights like this one keep surfacing in small counties weighing the same tradeoffs.
Krambu did not propose a naive design. A hybrid of dry and evaporative towers, refilled a few times a year, uses a fraction of what an all-water chiller plant would pull. None of that mattered once Heisey pulled his name. Montana has no statewide restriction like North Carolina's proposed ban on evaporative towers. Bonner shows the same fight starting one signature at a time. A low water number only works if it reaches the public before the application does. A 29MW plant in a county of under 120,000 people needs a cooling design that can survive a town hall meeting. That argues for air-cooled or closed-loop dry systems over evaporative towers wherever local water politics are already hostile. The tradeoff is a few points of PUE for a permit that survives contact with the public.