Technology
NewsOnScale Staff
October 16, 2026
Dixie County, Florida has an annual budget of approximately $29 million. It has one IT contractor handling its entire digital infrastructure. Its fire station is currently closed. Its dump runs two days a week.
It is also being asked to consider hosting data center infrastructure that would bring significant network connectivity, power demands, and security obligations into a county with almost no capacity to manage any of them.
This is not a Dixie County problem. It is a national problem playing out in rural counties across the United States.
What small counties actually have
Most small rural counties operate with a single IT person or a contracted IT company handling everything from email to servers to the county's public-facing websites. Their infrastructure typically includes basic Windows servers — often running outdated operating systems — Microsoft 365 for email, a firewall purchased years ago and infrequently updated, and antivirus software on county computers.
What they do not have: a dedicated cybersecurity team, regular penetration testing, incident response plans, multi-factor authentication across all systems, security audits, or meaningful employee training on phishing and social engineering.
Why small counties are targeted
Small counties hold extraordinarily valuable data. Property records. Tax records. Voter registration databases. Financial accounts. Court records. Law enforcement data. The combination of high-value data and minimal security makes them among the most targeted government entities in the country.
Ransomware attacks on small counties have become routine. In 2023 and 2024, hundreds of local governments across the United States paid ransoms or lost significant data to ransomware attacks on infrastructure that cost far less to attack than to defend. The attackers don't need sophisticated tools. They need an unpatched server and a county employee who clicked the wrong email.
What a data center changes
A large data center brings significant network infrastructure into a community. High-capacity fiber connections. Power substations. Network equipment connecting to regional and national infrastructure. All of it expands the attack surface — the number of potential entry points a bad actor could exploit to access county systems or use county infrastructure as a stepping stone to something larger.
A county with no meaningful cybersecurity capacity becomes more vulnerable, not less, when large-scale connected infrastructure arrives in its backyard.
The question nobody is asking
At a Dixie County Board of County Commissioners meeting on October 15, 2026, JJ Johnson — a declared 2028 presidential candidate, technology founder, and federal plaintiff against some of the largest technology companies in the world — asked the commissioners a direct question: what stops someone from deploying AI agents to attack their infrastructure?
The commissioners looked at their technology consultant. The chair said there is always someone better. Johnson agreed.
The room had no answer because the question has no comfortable answer at the county level. Small counties are not equipped to think about AI-enabled cyberattacks. They are barely equipped to think about the ransomware attacks that are already routine.
What should happen before any data center is approved
Any county considering data center infrastructure should require a full independent security assessment of its existing systems — paid for by the developer proposing the facility, not the taxpayers. That assessment should evaluate what the county's current security posture is, what the data center's presence would change about its attack surface, and what security obligations the county would take on by hosting the facility.
Most counties that have gone through this process have discovered they were not prepared for what they were being asked to manage.
The revenue from a data center tax incentive deal does not cover the cost of a ransomware attack on county systems. The jobs promised in a brochure do not include a cybersecurity team.
The question JJ Johnson asked in Dixie County last night deserves an answer before any commission votes yes.
NewsOnScale is owned by AMILLI AI, Corp., founded by JJ Johnson.