The Anti-Data-Center Mob: America’s War on Data Centers Is National Suicide

 

Stop the data centers, lose the AI race. Then watch America beg foreign powers for the technology it was too scared to build. Put simply, the anti-data-center mob wants AI miracles without AI infrastructure. China is watching, building, and quietly taking the future.

I have watched this movie before. The frightened citizens gather under fluorescent lights. Somebody points at a map. Somebody else waves a printout. A local politician, sweating through a campaign shirt, announces that a data center is coming to drink the town dry, melt the electric grid, ruin the children, and probably teach the squirrels to code.

“Not in our backyard,” they roar.

Of course not. Nothing should ever be in anybody’s backyard, except higher home prices, better schools, reliable Wi-Fi, cheaper taxes, and the miracles that arrive by truck but must apparently be manufactured on the moon.

That is the dumb little contradiction at the heart of America’s moral panic over AI data centers. Everybody wants the digital life. Nobody wants the machinery that makes the digital life possible. They want ChatGPT to write their résumés, diagnose their weird rash, explain their mortgage, translate their aunt’s Nigerian voice note, and help their kid pass algebra. Then they discover that computers do not run on incense, good intentions, and recycled Twitter rage. Suddenly, the building that houses the machines becomes Satan’s warehouse.

The anti-data-center crowd has found a deliciously simple villain: the giant, windowless box. It sits there in a field, humming like a refrigerator with a defense contract. It does not smile. It does not hold town-hall meetings. It does not kiss babies. It looks like money, power, heat, and somebody else’s future. That makes it perfect for a panic.

“Those places guzzle water,” the activist says.

“Everything guzzles water,” I say.

The activist looks offended, as if I have cursed in church.

A shower uses water. A lawn uses water. Golf courses use water like they are trying to refill the Atlantic one sprinkler at a time. Brewing beer uses water. Producing jeans uses water. Generating electricity can use water. The cloud is not a magic cloud. It is somebody’s server sitting in a building, cooled by an engineered system, connected to wires that do not grow on trees.

That does not mean water use is irrelevant. It means adults should stop behaving like a single AI prompt personally sneaks into the kitchen at midnight and drains the family sink. Google reported in 2025 that its median Gemini text prompt used about 0.26 milliliters of water, roughly 5 drops, and 0.24 watt-hours of electricity. That is Google’s own measurement, not a holy scripture carved into stone. Other models, longer tasks, image generation, and the electricity supply behind computing can have larger footprints. Fine. Measure them honestly. Demand common reporting standards. Make companies disclose where their water comes from, whether it is recycled, and whether the region is dry enough to make a new facility foolish.

But spare me the circus arithmetic. A viral claim takes one estimate, stretches it across a billion hypothetical prompts, adds every indirect cost it can find, puts on a black cape, and screams that asking AI to draft a thank-you note murdered Lake Michigan. That is not environmentalism. That is performance art for people who think a spreadsheet is a séance.

The electricity issue is real, and it is where the panic merchants become most slippery. Data centers need enormous power. The International Energy Agency projects global data-center electricity consumption will rise from about 485 terawatt-hours in 2025 to 950 terawatt-hours in 2030. In the United States, the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimated that data centers used about 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and could use 6.7% to 12.0% by 2028.

Those are serious numbers. Anybody pretending otherwise is selling perfume in a sewer.

But serious numbers do not automatically produce the stupid conclusion that America should choke off construction. The right question is not, “Does this use electricity?” Everything useful uses electricity. The right question is, “Who pays for new generation, transmission, storage, substations, and grid upgrades—and who gets stuck with the bill?” If a data-center developer wants 1,000 megawatts, then the developer should carry a meaningful share of the cost of serving that load. Deposits should be real. Contracts should be real. Grid forecasts should distinguish real projects from fake applications submitted by speculators playing dress-up in a hard hat.

Texas has already exposed part of the scam. Reuters reported in September 2026 that electricity requests tied to data centers had climbed above 700 gigawatts, more than 10 times the estimated current power use of all U.S. data centers. That is not evidence that every data center is a monster. It is evidence that some developers and middlemen have learned how to reserve imaginary power like teenagers reserving tables at a nightclub they cannot enter.

Kill the ghost projects. Do not kill the industry.

That distinction matters because the anti-data-center coalition is full of people who have spent years complaining that America no longer builds anything. They mourn factories. They mourn industrial jobs. They mourn China’s rise. They complain that the United States outsourced manufacturing, surrendered supply chains, and now cannot produce enough of what it needs when the world gets ugly.

Then AI infrastructure arrives: construction crews, electricians, fiber networks, transformers, server equipment, utility investment, technical jobs, tax revenue, and a chance to keep advanced computing inside America.

And the same people yell, “Stop building!”

It is like watching a man complain that his house has no roof, then chase away the roofer because the truck is loud.

China will not pause because a county board in Virginia has developed a sudden spiritual bond with zoning paperwork. China will not say, “Comrades, America’s Facebook groups are upset about industrial cooling, so let us slow our national AI strategy.” Beijing will build. It will subsidize. It will route power. It will use coal where it pleases, renewables where it helps, and state power wherever it finds resistance. America can regulate intelligently, or it can conduct a moral protest while competitors build the infrastructure that defines the next economic and military contest.

And yes, I said military. AI is not merely a toy that makes cartoon portraits and bad college essays. It affects cybersecurity, intelligence analysis, logistics, materials science, medicine, finance, fraud detection, and military planning. A country that cannot support advanced computing is volunteering to become a customer in its own century.

Loudoun County, Virginia, is the part critics hate because it ruins the clean villain story. The county has more than 250 data centers. Loudoun County says data centers generate almost half of its property-tax revenue. County material released in 2026 states that data centers helped keep its real-property tax rates about 25% lower than those of nearby Northern Virginia jurisdictions. The money has helped fund schools, roads, libraries, parks, public safety, and the ordinary public services politicians promise when microphones are on.

That does not mean Loudoun is paradise. Rapid development brings ugly transmission lines, land-use fights, noise complaints, housing pressure, and residents who rightly ask why they must live beside an industrial operation. I would not tell a family to accept diesel-generator noise or a hulking facility 30 feet from its bedroom window just because some tech executive says “innovation” with a polished smile.

Put facilities away from homes. Enforce noise standards. Require closed-loop or recycled-water systems where conditions demand it. Require transparent power contracts. Make developers fund grid upgrades. Penalize companies that lie about capacity, hoard interconnection requests, or dump costs on households. Tax them properly. Make them earn their place.

That is regulation. A moratorium because somebody saw a scary TikTok is superstition wearing a zoning badge.

The real moral failure is not that data centers exist. It is that too many politicians would rather sell fear than manage trade-offs. Fear is cheap. It fits on a yard sign. “NO DATA CENTER” requires no engineering study, no pricing plan, no grid strategy, no painful decision about where new power will come from. It is the political version of covering your ears and shouting at the transformer.

I do not worship Big Tech. These companies are not saints. They are profit machines with better cafeterias. They should not get blank checks, secret deals, free infrastructure, or permission to turn a dry community into an experiment. But refusing to build the backbone of AI because the buildings look sinister is not courage. It is self-sabotage with a compostable sign.

America cannot livestream its way into the future. At some point, somebody has to build the damn thing.

 

Separate from today’s article, I recently published more titles in my Brief Book Series for readers interested in a deeper, standalone idea. You can read them here on Google Play, or in Barnes & Noble bookstore: Brief Book Series.