Hatred of Data Centers Is Irrational and Self-Defeating

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, April 29, 2026

 

I noticed a peculiar combination of sentences in a recent post by Jim Geraghty. In one, Jim related that “Maine’s Democratic Governor Janet Mills [had] vetoed legislation that would have placed a moratorium on the construction of new data centers in the state.” In the other, he concluded that this decision “may be seen as a de facto surrender to her rival in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary.” Got that? Mills has refused to completely reject a source of massive investment in the state she runs, and, as a result, she has accepted that she will lose ground electorally. How bizarre our politics can be.

 

Jim’s analysis is correct, of course. Over the last couple of years, data centers have become so unpopular in almost all parts of this country that to embrace them openly is now likely to damage one’s political fortunes. Thanks to a steady supply of propaganda and superstition, voters have come to regard the prospect of a local server farm in much the same way as they might an abattoir or a prison. The word is spat out — “data center” — as would be an expletive, the unspoken assumption being that everyone agrees that these facilities are an imposition, and that the only remaining question is how best to prevent their spread.

 

Well, you can count me out from all that guff. In its fervor, the sudden disdain toward “data centers” reminds me of nothing more than the recent freakout over 5G, which was inexplicable at the time and remains steadfastly so today. For those who are unfamiliar, 5G technology uses radio waves that sit within the non-ionizing portion of the electromagnetic spectrum — a fact that is also true of 4G and 3G and 2G and over-the-air television and the old wooden radio on your great-grandmother’s side table. Scientifically, there was nothing whatsoever about iteration number five that made it a better candidate for panic and for conspiracy theories than the other developments that had been deployed since the time of Guglielmo Marconi. And yet, for some reason, tens of millions of people have come to throw the term around as if it were meaningfully distinct from its predecessors. There’s an old Victor Borge bit from the 1980s, in which he describes his grandfather’s attempts to develop a popular drink. He started with “3-Up,” the joke goes, but that failed, so, undeterred, he tried 4-Up, 5-Up, and 6-Up, before finally giving up and dying. “Little did he know,” Borge says, “how close he came.” Why 7-Up? Good question. Why 5G?

 

And why “data centers”? Currently, there are around 5,000 data centers across the United States, with tens of millions of servers running inside of them, using hundreds of megawatts of power. And how could it be otherwise, when, as a society, we are so enthusiastic about the results? The introduction of AI is likely to lead to the production of around 1,300 new data centers — many of them at hyperscale. But this is an expansion of the status quo, not a shift. What, I wonder, do the newfound enemies of these projects believe that the current internet runs on? There is, as ought to be obvious, no such thing as “the cloud”; there are just computers, in racks, inside enormous buildings that were constructed for the purpose of holding computers in racks. You are reading this piece because of packets that were transmitted from a data center. Your email works the same way. So do Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, your bank, your kids’ school’s website, the text messages you send your brother, and your annual Fantasy Football league. We already live in a data center world. We have for at least 30 years.

 

Even stranger is the opposition to data centers from those who lament the “deindustrialization” of the United States, and the supposed lack of well-paying jobs. I am a conservative, and so, to some extent, I understand the pull of nostalgia. But, in 2026, this is what “building things” looks like. The federal government can impose as many tariffs and industrial policies as it wishes, but it will not be able to halt the passage of time. Alas, the textile mills and cereal factories are not coming back. But computers — the great technology of our era? That is a different story. This year, American companies are set to spend three quarters of a trillion dollars on new data centers, much of it in exactly the sort of areas that are constantly described as having been left behind. At present, the median salary for an electrician who works in data center construction is $120,000. For HVAC technicians, that number is $90,000; for mechanical engineers, it is $100,000; and for site engineers, it is $135,000. Personally, I do not understand why it is considered by some to be more noble to work in a cannery than in a data center, but, regardless, only one of those jobs is currently on offer. What is to be gained by railing against that fact?