Councilor Pam Duquette brought forward the idea of a preemptive data center ban, saying, “I think people got the idea that we might be pushing data centers, and that is the farthest thing from my mind.” Duquette said that the Industrial portion of Sandpoint Zoning Code specifically allows data centers in the Industrial Park District, which describes properties that are “suitable for technology production and development, such as data centers, medical imaging processing, business incubators, biotechnology, software development, engineering and similar technology-related industry.” Asked by Councilor Joshua Torrez if she meant “all data centers or specifically AI data centers,” Duquette responded that “data centers, to me, are the AI [facilities], and I suppose they’re a big boom in Idaho at this point. While that legislation is meant to make large data centers less demanding of surrounding resources, the effects of the growth in AI data centers is already being felt by Idaho schools. When you take a picture on your iPhone and it’s backed up to the cloud — data center.