Deep sigh…duality says both are true. So yeah, there are many concerns, including health ones, when the town decision makers just say yes to building these things without concern for the actual citizens who presumably voted them into that position. Complaints abound about the noise of the cooling fans and backup generators, the exhaust from those diesel generators cycling on and off en masse to be sure they’re working, the eyesore of them being in close proximity to neighborhoods, not to mention the light pollution generated.
I’ll say more about the fear of them down at the end.
Happily, not every town is populated with greedy and short-sighted leadership. There are a handful of lawsuits around centers already in operation, but almost everything else in court right now is zoning/permitting fights on proposals, or patent/commercial cases that have nothing to do with neighbors.
There’s a lot in play here. AI is an unavoidable fact of life on Earth right now. Hopefully, everything we’ve learned over the centuries, including our evolving consciousness, will bring us to be mindful about the development and use of the technology, and the placement of same. It’s already proven to be a tool for collective self-improvement in the areas of medicine and care, biology and drugs, access and language, Earth, weather, disasters, and everyday collective infrastructure.
The “boon” case is straightforward: more reliable compute can raise productivity, speed science, and make services cheaper. That’s not hypothetical; it’s why demand is this high.
Electricity usage
Trump’s position on Data Centers is to build them, and build them fast. See Executive Order 14318. They’re framed as essential to beating China on AI, as job and tax “cash cows,” and as something communities are “making a mistake” to reject. He’s pushed companies to put up their own power plants so they’re not just pulling from the existing grid.
That’s called the Ratepayer Protection Pledge, initially taken in March 2026, and expanded in July. Hyperscalers are the handful of companies that run computing at planetary scale: enormous fleets of servers, networks, and data centers they design and operate themselves. Those are the first to sign on:
Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI came on board, then utilities, developers, co-ops, and 23 Republican governors*. Their commitments are to build/bring/buy new generation for their load, pay for delivery upgrades, pay negotiated rates even if they don’t use all the power, local hiring, and some grid-backup cooperation.
What it isn’t:
- The Pledge is not a law.
- There’s no federal enforcement office or fine.
- Electricity rates are still set by state regulators and utility tariffs.
- It does not by itself cover water, but water replenishment showed up in some company pledges.
On power, the policy is: accelerate the build, shift the cost onto the companies (at least on paper), and favor dedicated gas (and other) plants rather than waiting on the old grid. Many current data centers were built near existing power infrastructure. A voluntary pledge papers over that contradiction: companies keep the upside, Washington claims it protected households, towns still decide whether the campus gets built.
What about water?
Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta are committing to the company sustainability goal of being water positive by 2030. How could they possibly produce more water is what I wonder. Who can be knowing? Maybe AI can find efficient ways to discover and draw from deep underground lakes that nobody knows about yet.
Oracle, OpenAI, and xAI showed up more as using less water on site via closed-loop / non-evaporative cooling than as signatories to a single public compact like Microsoft’s January package. Those methods are already being successfully implemented.
The downside of breaking this pledge would be the public embarrassment that would be rained down upon their heads by the President…not an insignificant thing.
Joshua Reid on X Lays Out What is Actually Being Built
September 1,2026, x.com/realjoshuareid
https://tinyurl.com/7mmv3ba5
These are not giant computers constructed for one predetermined application.
Hyperscale datacenters are the industrial infrastructure of the intelligence economy.
This is the equivalent of power plants, railroads, telecommunications networks, and semiconductor labs during earlier technological revolutions.
What will they be used for? Everything…
- Scientific discovery;
- Drug development;
- Advanced manufacturing;
- Robotics;
- Autonomous transportation;
- Cybersecurity;
- Logistics;
- Energy-grid optimization;
- Weather prediction;
- Space exploration;
- Financial systems;
- National defense;
- Intelligence analysis;
- Consumer AI; and
- Thousands of applications that have not been invented yet.
Asking for every future use case before building the computational foundation is like demanding that America identify every future electrical appliance before constructing the power grid.
The AI race with China is not merely about who develops the smartest AI. It is about who controls the compute, chips, energy, models, robotics, standards, and technological ecosystem upon which the next global economy and military architecture will operate.
America’s stated strategy explicitly includes exporting the entire American AI stack:
- Hardware;
- Models;
- Software;
- Applications;
- Standards.
This is to our allies worldwide.
That is geopolitical infrastructure, not simply “more data centers.”
Now, should communities demand transparency, water protections, noise limits, grid planning, and guarantees that hyperscale datacenters and not ordinary ratepayers, fund the required power infrastructure?
Absolutely.
Should Americans demand constitutional protections against warrantless surveillance, social scoring, and automated government abuse?
Without question.
I’ve been a large proponent of the Digital Bill of Rights. Yet no one else seems to care to discuss it.
But those are governance questions that need to be asked and demanded of our politicians, and voted upon in elections.
They are not arguments for surrendering the foundational infrastructure of the next industrial revolution to China.
The surveillance risk comes from government authority, data access, system design, and the absence of legal safeguards, not from the mere existence of computational capacity.
The United States does not know precisely how much compute it will need, because demand is still being created.
That is the nature of a general purpose technology. What we do know is that countries without sufficient energy, chips, data centers, and AI infrastructure will become technologically dependent upon countries that possess them.
This is the big key understanding. Right now there are only two countries that can compete in this emerging dynamic.
The U.S. and China. Russia is a far distant third.
By 2028, data centers could consume roughly 6.7%–12% of American electricity.
That is massive, and it’s a legitimate infrastructure challenge requiring a massive expansion of generation, not proof that the infrastructure itself is unnecessary.
- Scrutinize the buildout.
- Protect the communities.
- Make the corporations pay their share.
- Build enforceable safeguards.
But understand the stakes:
America is not racing China to build a machine.
We are racing to determine who builds, and therefore shapes, the foundation of civilization’s next great evolution.
*Republican Governor’s Signed onto the Ratepayer Protection Pledge
- Alabama’s Kay Ivey
- Alaska’s Mike Dunleavy
- Arkansas’ Sarah Huckabee Sanders
- Georgia’s Brian Kemp
- Idaho’s Brad Little
- Indiana’s Mike Braun
- Iowa’s Kim Reynolds
- Louisiana’s Jeff Landry
- Mississippi’s Tate Reeves
- Missouri’s Mike Kehoe
- Montana’s Greg Gianforte
- Nebraska’s Jim Pillen
- Nevada’s Joe Lombardo
- North Dakota’s Kelly Armstrong
- Ohio’s Mike DeWine
- Oklahoma’s Kevin Stitt
- South Carolina’s Henry McMaster
- South Dakota’s Larry Rhoden
- Tennessee’s Bill Lee
- Texas’ Greg Abbott
- Utah’s Spencer Cox
- West Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey
- Wyoming’s Mark Gordon
No Democratic governors signed. Three Republican governors did not: Ron DeSantis (Florida), Kelly Ayotte (New Hampshire), and Phil Scott (Vermont). Florida had already passed its own statute aimed at keeping data-center power costs off residential and small-business customers.
X’s safety / Global Government Affairs account posted this:
https://tinyurl.com/y6zbpdz7
“The X Safety team conducted an investigation into suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts involved in influence operations:
We identified a bot farm of approximately 200,000 accounts. Within this farm, we found 200 accounts posting in a manner that could manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI and energy policy.
These posts contained claims that AI data centers are driving up household electricity prices and straining the grid. Others included AI-generated cartoons that depicted data-center operators enriching themselves at the public’s expense.
We remain committed to maintaining an open and authentic platform where people debate topics of public interest. We take seriously any attempts to undermine the integrity of the global town square, and suspend accounts that violate our Authenticity policy.”
The Loudoun County cluster of data centers in Virginia dates to the late 1990s, but the period of rapid expansion and the large tax-revenue numbers cited below is more recent, mainly the last 10–15 years.
I asked Grok what the greatest fear that people have about data centers is, and the answer gave me pause. What follows really isn’t what any of us want for our future, having a handful of mega-entities basically control everything needed to sustain life on Earth. I’m personally going with the Pollyanna idea that our ascension makes all of this moot.
There’s another possibility here, too, maybe beyond the outer limits of reasoning. What if Trump having all these big deal tech giants at the White House included things we may never know the truth of? I’ll step into my conspiracy theorist shoes for a moment, and speculate that all those guys have been processed for crimes against humanity already, and their respective brands and the power they wield are and will continue to be under White Hat control.
Hey, it could happen!
That greatly anticipated event and my wishful thinking aside for the moment, this scenario could be troubling for sure. I’d like to think that these companies will be closely regulated so that anyone outside the campus can inspect or refuse the systems that matter. The buildings will go up. What they’ll share is access to products — chat, APIs, apps — on terms they set, at prices they set, under policies they can change. The open question is whether they can handle that power or they can’t.
Trump did not gift these tech giants power they lacked. He declined to attach new public strings to power they were going to gather anyway, because the race, as he defined it, was with Beijing, not with Mountain View (Google’s HQ).
Grok: Strip out water, rates, noise, land, heat, and “they’re watching us,” and what is left is not really a fear of the building. It is a fear of what the building makes possible, at a scale no voter gets to pause.
The object is the compute.
People look at a windowless campus and read it as a factory for a future they did not order: models that write, see, drive, hire, diagnose, target, and bargain better than the institutions that used to mediate those things. The hall is the only part of that stack you can photograph. So it inherits the dread that belongs to the software.
That dread splits into a few more precise fears, even when the local impacts are assumed away:
- No off switch. Once the capacity is built and paid for, the incentive is to use it. You can fight a rezoning. You cannot vote a trained model back into the lab.
- Concentration. A handful of firms and states will own most of the frontier machines. That is a political fact dressed as real estate.
- Labor and status. Not “robots take every job tomorrow,” but the sense that bargaining power moves from people who can withhold work to people who can rent GPUs.
- Illegibility. The product is probabilistic and private. Harm, when it happens, is hard to attribute and harder to reverse. A steel mill at least makes a visible ingot.
- Permanence. These campuses are 30-year bets on more of the same. Hosting one feels like signing the town up for a civilization-scale project with a press release for a mandate.
That is why the fear survives the engineering answers. Closed-loop cooling and a paid-for substation can make the plant a good neighbor and still leave the question: good neighbor to whom, for what? The honest reply is that the greatest fear is not the warehouse. It is living next to an engine whose output is power — cognitive, economic, military — and discovering that the only public lever was the site plan.
So: they are not building these halls as a public utility, and they are not building them as a panopticon with a ribbon-cutting. They are building engines they intend to own. Those engines will help a lot of people do things they could not do. They will also make it harder to live outside the firms that own the engines. Both can be true at once. The “plan” is that second sentence, not a manifesto.
Observing the surface drama…