Responses to the Data Center NIMBYs
I get a lot of letters. I certainly did this morning regarding our piece on Chinese dark money stirring opposition to U.S. data centers. Here's my response.
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by Rod D. Martin
August 11, 2026
I get a lot of letters. I certainly did this morning regarding our piece on Chinese dark money stirring opposition to U.S. data centers. The following is a representative sample of my response, one which I think more Americans need to take to heart.
Dear _______,
A few thoughts in response to your very detailed email.
You have been using data centers most of your life. You wrote your email using a data center. Your streaming of movies and TV shows comes from a data center. Your cloud storage is literally just a data center. And we’ve been building and using them for decades. They’re already all over the place, and the world has not come to an end. That’s likely instructive for what is to come.
Data centers are no different from steel mills. If America had not built steel mills, it would have remained an agrarian backwater down to the present day and be completely dominated by foreign powers. It likely would not exist as a single country.
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Contrary to your assertion, there’s nothing “scammy” about AI. I use it daily in my work and it has increased my productivity about fivefold. That means one of me can do what five would otherwise have to do, which means I get a lot of things done that would have gone undone. As a result, I have a better standard of living and am able to hire more people who are similarly up-powered by having better tools.
This is exactly like adding tractors to a rural economy previously dominated by slaves and sharecropping. Most people don’t know this, but we now produce many times as much food as we did in those days in just one-third of the total farmland worldwide. We’ve gone from constant famine in West Africa to childhood obesity issues there. Big difference for real people.
But it’s more than that, because we’re using AI for weaponry now. Which means in short order, the country that doesn’t use AI in that way will have the equivalent of wooden ships sailing against aircraft carriers.
So if we were to forego those advantages, a totalitarian Communist power would turn us into a de facto colony over the next 20 years. They would dominate the world, and an America-led world, and maybe America itself, would be a sad memory.
Does this mean every planned data center is a good idea? No. Does this mean the companies building them shouldn’t provide their own power and thus not burden the grid? Of course not: they absolutely should.
But a lot of the protest is of things that aren’t real, like the idea that these things take up some extraordinary amount of water. Water use is entirely a choice: we’ve been building data centers for 40 years that don’t use any water at all. But where there is plentiful water, it makes more sense to use a bit of it than burning electricity in chillers and fans.
China has deployed 158 data centers since January 1, and two new coal plants per week to power them. That is better? That’s a future without any safeguards or public input into how we determine what goes where and who pays for the energy. That seems like a bad plan.
Anyway, here’s what’s going to happen:
Unless we elect Kamala, America will build enough data centers to beat the Chinese.
Most likely, you will be successful in stopping any from being built where you are, as a result of which more high-paying jobs will go elsewhere, and the children of your community will continue to leave to find the opportunities your community will increasingly lack.
Communities that take a sensible regulatory approach to mitigate any harm they’re concerned about will gain high-paying jobs, lots of new power infrastructure, and watch their utility bills drop over time. Communities that don’t get that infrastructure will pay more for the same electricity, out of a shrinking economic base.
If every community goes full NIMBY, all of these things will be built in Earth orbit, meaning no one gets those jobs, power plants, investment, etc. Eventually, the factories will move offworld too, because the economics will make sense if every community fights everything new. So get ready for the Democrats to pass “Universal Basic Income” because they’ll have to, and we will be Venezuela.
That may sound crazy and impossible. 100 years ago everyone thought literally everything we have today was crazy and impossible, especially the exact things we were doing a mere 80 years ago (like destroying Battleship Row at Pearl Harbor from the air, or dropping the Atomic Bomb, or breaking the sound barrier, or making passenger rail obsolete). That was all “crazy talk” 100 years ago! Elon is rapidly reducing the cost per pound to orbit from about $10,000/lb. to about $100/lb. It will drop from there. That makes Luddites highly uneconomical.
The story is told in Jefferson, Texas, which 150 years ago was the most important river port in the state, of how Jay Gould came to town to speak with the city fathers about bringing the railroad to Jefferson. The city fathers told him in no uncertain terms that they did not need or want any of his newfangled technology.
So instead, Gould took his railroad to Dallas, a relative backwater that became one of the greatest cities on Earth. Jefferson no longer has any river traffic at all and actually lost about half of its population. It’s a (lovely) sleepy little town with a bed-and-breakfast. Most of its people have to work somewhere else.
Choose your future. You can participate in making the rules for advancing technology, or you can drive it away and let other people make those rules. What you can’t do is stop its advance.
Anyway, China has already chosen. And it’s doing everything in its considerable power to hold America back. People would do well to take note.
Thanks for spelling it out. I was alarmed about data centers and am glad to have learned more.
Interesting discussion. I spent 30 years in economic development. To say that the public often has no idea what they are talking about would be an understatement. To say that politicians are both ignorant and perfidious would also be an understatement. We continue to wrestle with the effects of both; too often exacerbated by appeal to celebrity.
It is also true that the data centers of last year and the AI compute centers of today are completely different species.