Editor’s Note: Carl Setzer is seen here in a Facebook post delivering this address. Here’s a link. Carl ran for Congress in the 14th Congressional District in Ohio. Carl supported expanding Medicare to anyone who pays into it, to include their family members. He highlighted how private equity ownership of hospitals contributes to driving profit-first decision-making, among other issues.
Testimony before the Ohio House Select Committee on Data Centers, Ohio Statehouse, Columbus, June 1, 2026, by Carl Setzer
I have dealt with private equity. I’ve dealt with cooling systems. I’ve dealt with wastewater management, and I’ve dealt with IT.
We are in a speculative bubble right now. The reason why we need to build so many data centers yesterday is because there is a race to be early in the IPO before these companies, and before the retail investors in America, realize that there’s no there there. And we are ahead of our skis on calling large language models and machine learning AI before it is truly generative AI. So when we look at how private equity firms are backing property developers to build data centers to then sell to Meta, Alphabet, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI. — what we’re doing is selling our children’s birthright. And we’re giving away the baby with the bathwater, instead of demanding guarantees that these companies will even be here in 10 years.
I was in Shalersville. I’m in Perry twice a week. I see the anxiety in the communities, and when we see the narratives from the investment companies, it’s always the same. Whether they’re building 16 data centers or six, there’s always 200 jobs. Why? Because it’s enough jobs to look beneficial, but not enough to break your school system.
These are marketing approaches to get over a hurdle, to get tax abatements, zoning, and environmental, so they can build it. And by the time there are trucks on site and raw materials in the flat, and trade unions have their contracts verified, they will say, “Hey, that closed loop system, yeah, that’s going to be too expensive. Now it needs to be open loop, but you can’t stop it because we’ve already broke ground.
By the time we see whether or not there are 200 jobs to even be had, and by the time we get to a point where we know whether or not there will be any taxes paid after the abatements expire, the people that sign the contracts won’t even exist anymore in terms of corporations, we don’t even know if this industry will exist. And so, what we need to do is figure out a way to do a registered capital bond that is required statewide. That’s a collaborative between the state, the county, and whatever municipality is hosting these. Where if you’re going to tell us there are 200 jobs, what are those salaries’ total times 10 for 10 years? That money goes in a bond on day one.
That way, if you collapse, at least the community and those municipalities have some form of capital to repair the blight that is left behind when this industry either collapses or shrinks the way all speculative bubbles do.
Carl ran for Congress in the 14th Congressional District in Ohio, but lost in the Democratic Primary. Carl supported expanding Medicare to anyone who pays into it, including their family members. He highlighted how private equity ownership of hospitals contributes to driving profit-first decision-making, among other issues.
