LINN COUNTY, Iowa — The rapid expansion of data centers is reshaping the landscape in Iowa, particularly in Linn County. Google has teamed up with NextEra to restart a nuclear power plant near Palo as it hopes to construct another data center in the area. Iowa is now second in the Midwest for the number of data centers, with 104, according to tracking site DataCenterMap.com . Only Illinois has more with 235 data centers.

Charlie Nichols, the Director of Linn County Planning & Development, noted the growing interest in building data center campuses in the county. "I expect that to continue," Nichols said. "I expect for us to get more interest than just one data center campus."

The increasing demand for data centers is driven by the popularity of cloud storage and artificial intelligence

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