Compute is becoming the 5th utility.
AI did not create our dependence on computing. It revealed it.
The Fifth Utility is a podcast series that asks a simple question: before computing becomes as essential as water, electricity, gas, and telecommunications, how do we govern it before it governs us?
Why this Podcast exists
Most conversations about AI begin with the technology: what it can do, how quickly it will improve and who will benefit from it. The Fifth Utility begins somewhere else—with the communities being asked to supply its land, power, water and permission. This series grew from an actual municipal discussion about a hyperscale data center. That experience revealed a much larger question. If compute is becoming infrastructure that modern life cannot function without, who will establish the terms of our dependence on it?
The Fifth Utility is not an argument for or against AI. It is an inquiry into leverage, public purpose and human agency—conducted while communities still have meaningful choices to make. People are not rejecting buildings. They are resisting being made dependent on a system whose rules they did not help write.
“The Cloud has an address. While the compute industry needs a physical location, people living at that address have a voice.”
Explore the Series
Are We Having The Same Conversation?
A short introduction to The Fifth Utility.
Why the debate over AI data centers is really a debate over dependency, power, and who gets to govern the systems we are building our lives around.
Mayor Steven Streit narrates the preface to The Fifth Utility—a question about dependence, artificial intelligence, and whether we are still deciding the terms of the future.
Why Chicagoland Is a Data Center Crossroads?
Fiber, power, land—and the infrastructure attracting the fifth utility.
Kyle Schulz of CMAP explains why Chicagoland has become a leading data-center market, how different forms of compute require different locations, and why development is moving faster than the region’s ability to plan for it. Part 1 of 3
Guest: Kyle Schulz – Chicagoland Metropolitan Agency for Planning
1,000 Individual Municipal Deals.
Money, secrecy, and the regional consequences of local decisions.
Steven Streit and Kyle Schulz examine how enormous financial offers, municipal budget pressure, nondisclosure agreements and competition for power, land and equipment turn individual development deals into consequences shared across the region. Part 2 of 3
Guest: Kyle Schulz – Chicagoland Metropolitan Agency for Planning
Before the Infrastructure Hardens.
From the lessons of the logistics boom to a regional framework for compute.
Using Northern Will County’s experience with warehouses and truck traffic as a warning, Streit and Schulz explore coordinated siting, specialized data-center zoning and shared standards that could preserve local choice before today’s development pattern becomes permanent. Part 3 of 3
Guest: Kyle Schulz – Chicagoland Metropolitan Agency for Planning
A Compute Ecosystem Without Order.
Data-center land use may be local, but the power, water, and consequences cross municipal borders.
Streit talks with Hugh O’Hara, executive director of the Will County Governmental League, about how communities are being asked to approve data centers without shared definitions or regional standards. They discuss power commitments, water and wastewater, speculative projects, municipal leverage, and a proposed D1–D3 zoning system that would regulate hyperscale, inference, and edge facilities according to their actual size and impact.
Guest: Hugh O’Hara – Will County Governmental League
Who Governs the Fifth Utility?
Compute is already woven into our lives. The rules protecting our rights, data, and agency have not caught up.
Beginning with the regulation of railroads and grain elevators, Streit and Hugh O’Hara ask what happens when privately controlled infrastructure becomes essential to economic and civic life. Their conversation moves through biometric privacy, intellectual property, surveillance, unread user agreements, federal regulation, and the need to deliberately preserve human judgment and friction before AI makes more of society automatic.
Guest: Hugh O’Hara – Will County Governmental League
Data Centers Didn’t Start With AI.
Long before today’s AI boom, data centers were becoming essential infrastructure. Greg Kleizek, who spent 20 years supplying backup power systems to the industry, joins Steven Streit to trace their evolution from corporate server rooms to today’s massive facilities. They discuss why power, fiber and location matter—and whether infrastructure this consequential can still be planned and governed like ordinary industrial development.
Guest: Greg Kleizek – Systems Engineer
Can We Engineer Our Way Out of This?
Many of the biggest objections to data centers may ultimately be engineering problems—and engineering can solve them. In Part Two, Greg Kleizek and Steven Streit discuss advances in power generation, cooling, emissions controls and water reuse that can mitigate many environmental concerns. But solving those problems raises larger questions about grid demand, stranded assets and whether making the Fifth Utility technically possible is the same as deciding how we want it to fit into our communities.
Guest: Greg Kleizek – Systems Engineer
Primary School Educational Challenges.
Fostering a spirit of curiosity and inquiry is no longer a nicety. In a world of AI, it will become a critical educational componenet.
Guest: Wendy Streit – 30 Year Veteran Middle School and High School Teacher
Surveillance State.
Flock CamerFlock Cameras, consent, and the right to remain untracked.
AI does not create surveillance; it makes surveillance cheaper, more constant, and easier to hide inside ordinary life. This conversation asks where legitimate public-safety tools end and a society of permanent monitoring begins. With Lockport Police Chief John Arizzi, Streit examines cameras, data retention, accountability, and a simple principle: security should not require citizens to surrender the ability to live outside a database.
Guest: Chief John Arizzi – Lockport Police Chief
Higher Education In A World Of AI.
What should human beings learn when machines can produce the answers?
If AI can write the paper, solve the problem, and increasingly perform parts of the job, education cannot simply become a race to produce more efficient workers. It has to help people develop judgment, curiosity, moral agency, and the ability to participate in a free society. Streit and Lewis University’s Kip Kline explore what education should preserve—and what it must become—when intelligence is no longer exclusively human.
Guest: Kip Kline – Lewis University
What would you like to discuss?
Contact Steven here with guest suggestions and topical ideas on the compute industry that you would like to hear discussed.
How This Project Began
It began as a question about one development. It became a question about how we govern the fifth utility.
A broker approached the City of Lockport in the spring of 2026 about whether a former industrial property owned by the city could support a large data center. There was no approved project and no completed deal. Before anything could move forward, I identified serious questions involving power, water, cooling, emissions, noise, decommissioning, adaptable reuse and the effect such a facility could have beyond our municipal borders.
I believed the community could examine those questions openly and determine whether a responsible “yes” existed at all. That belief did not come from being unfamiliar with complicated development. It came from nearly fifteen years of experience in municipal government—and from the conviction that public decisions should begin with facts, competing viewpoints and meaningful inquiry. With that in mind, the City Council arranged three public workshops to hear from utility and water experts, regional planners, researchers from Argonne National Laboratory and leaders in higher education.
Inquiry hit a wall. Rumors filled the space before facts could. The exploratory conversation was repeatedly described as a completed deal, questions were mistaken for advocacy, and the understandable anxiety surrounding artificial intelligence and data centers overwhelmed the narrower proposal in front of us. When it became clear that the process could no longer function as a genuine inquiry, the city suspended further discussions.
But the experience exposed a larger problem. Communities across the country are being asked to make individual land-use decisions about infrastructure supporting a technological system that no individual community can fully see or govern. The Fifth Utility grew from the need to ask the questions that our local process was unable to reach.
I later wrote about what the experience revealed in an op-ed for Crain’s Chicago Business, which you can read below.