Humboldt County — so isolated, so parochial — seems like an unlikely place to construct a data center. Arcata, of course, already has one, a 10,000 square foot box that’s a waypoint for undersea fiber optic cables that run 10,000 miles from eastern Asia and emerge near Eureka, at the old pulp mill on the Samoa Peninsula. The cables connect U.S. customers to computer servers overseas, carrying data at the speed of light. By the dint of being one of the westernmost places on the Western Seaboard, Eureka’s got access to some extraordinarily high-tech equipment: the globalized, physical backbone of the internet. 

There could be another on the way. Data center company Oppidan Connect confirmed today that it’s interested in constructing a center similar to the one in Arcata somewhere in Humboldt County. Drew Johnson, Oppidan’s Data Center Lead, told the Outpost that the facility would serve as a “signal booster” for a different network, a yet-to-be-built undersea cable landing station north of California.

It’s not guaranteed. Arcata’s just one place on a list the company’s considering, Johnson said; wherever they end up building it would need to be in Northern California and have access to enough energy and water to power it. The data center would be around 30-50,000 square feet, at peak power usage would draw between 4-8 megawatts of electricity, and be served by around 20 full-time employees.

“Data center” is an inexact term. The recent explosion in the buildout of AI systems led to a proliferation of centers focused on providing computing power for the nascent industry, but any facility that houses computers, or related equipment, can be considered a data center. Johnson emphasized that they’re not looking to build an AI data center here, or one focused on storing data. He deemed it more similar to utility infrastructure construction than what many people consider to be a data center. “This is part of getting network to eyeballs and population,” he said. “This is just a telecommunications center.”

It’s early on in the process. Oppidan hasn’t filed any applications to develop the center, Johnson said, and it takes years to go through the zoning and permitting requirements and open one. Operations would intensity in phases as demand increases.

Arcata’s not a great place to build a data center, City Manager Merritt Perry told Oppidan when it reached out earlier this year. There’s not a lot of room left. And its elected officials are interested in slowing down (or maybe even stopping) data center development altogether, though Perry said businesses with heavy internet usages might appreciate being near the center. 

“I think the real question is: Where do you draw the line?” Perry asked the Outpost, “And what is beneficial to the community? Not detrimental. And I think what we’re seeing is a lot of pushback on AI right now, with the potential threat of AI, looking at the recent — I don’t know if you call it a whistleblower — Anthropic employees [saying] it has a 10 to 20% chance of destroying the world. It seems like what people are concerned about are AI data centers that have higher consumptive use, but that, generally, the connectivity and capacity for remote work and businesses is viewed as good. But I don’t know where our council will land on it.”

Several Oppidan projects have been blocked by moratoriums, Johnson said, and they’re willing to work with communities that have passed one.

“If a city is going about a moratorium in a smart way,” he said, “In that they want to adopt a specific code to tighten their standards so they know what to expect, and people who want to invest know what to expect — like, I think there’s more opportunity there than, you know, you being in this frenzy…where they adopt a moratorium out of fear, with no real intention or guidance to ever come out of it — which is every town’s land use choice, right?”