By Noah Rothman
Thursday, August 20, 2026
The United States still “holds the upper hand” in the “AI
arms race between America and China,” as Mathias Döpfner wrote in The Spectator. But, on the
present course, America’s advantage will erode.
“American platform operators report that China is
actively fueling AI-skeptical sentiment across Western social media,” he
observed. “Propaganda aimed at inducing anxiety and slowing down rivals is
taking its toll.”
That’s putting it lightly, as pollster Robinson Meyer’s
data indicate:
The staggering 60-point swing on the issue in just six
months more than justifies Meyer’s astonishment. It also warrants broader
bewilderment over why data centers are as politically radioactive as they have
become. Vast quantities of ink have been expended in the effort to address
Americans’ concerns about them, some of which are wholly unfounded. None of it
seems to matter.
Data centers’ critics say that they consume untold
quantities of water and put undue strain on the environment. But the minimally
curious should have encountered one of the dozens of fact-checks
showing data centers consume about as much water as a golf course or farm, many
of which are located in drought-prone or water-stressed areas but do not elicit
such passionate opposition. Nor do data centers abrogate the law of
conservation of matter or somehow arrest the water cycle. Those molecules will
reconvene in the atmosphere just as they always have. Nevertheless, the
objection persists.
We’ve heard that data centers have a deleterious impact
on local quality of life. They’re noisy. They’re eyesores. They “vibrate at a
low frequency that can bring up cortisol levels,” as one concerned
citizen told CNN. They provide the communities that host them with almost no worthwhile benefits.
The curious might review reporting on how these
facilities comply with municipal ordinances on decibel limits that data centers
and their proprietors must follow. Their loudest components, cooling systems
and backup generators, are engineered to meet those noise limits or run only
during outages and during testing periods. Ask West Virginians, who may soon pay nothing in state income taxes as a result of their data
center buildout, if these outfits offer no benefit to their local communities.
As for their unpleasing aesthetics, that’s a matter of taste. But a total
moratorium on their construction doesn’t seem like the most reasonable remedy.
Perhaps the most potent allegation against data centers
is that they are primarily responsible for America’s ballooning utility bills.
It’s certainly true that America’s demand for energy increasingly outstrips its available supplies. But in most
jurisdictions, “Data centers are required to pay the costs they create,
including interconnection, grid upgrades, and large‑load tariffs,” one energy analyst observed. “Regulators use cost‑causation
principles to prevent residential customers from subsidizing industrial load.”
In addition, modern data centers can coordinate “controls so data centers
behave more like predictable grid assets and less like unbounded loads.”
It’s easier for policymakers to blame the data centers
for America’s strained power grid than the policies that have complicated the
development of more on-demand power-generation facilities. But it’s not
clear if Americans want those either. As one recent
poll found, more Americans would rather live next to a nuclear reactor than
an AI-supporting data center.
As the public’s objections to data centers increase in
inverse proportion to the proliferation of attempts to bust the pernicious
myths around them, some have taken to offering metaphysical explanations for
voters’ anxieties.
Maybe data centers are symbolic, some posit. Perhaps
these behemoths strike average folks as the lumbering manifestation of their own
insignificance before the imperious tech sector. Maybe the public has taken
the AI industry’s most hubristic boosters at their word, and they fear a future in
which they and the skills they’ve spent a lifetime developing will be rendered redundant. “I think the data center backlash is at
a deeper cultural level the expression of people recognizing that the internet
is on net simply bad,” The Free Press’s Nick
Clairmont optimistically intuited.
These are insightful suppositions, but they are only
necessary because their postulators are struggling with the irrationality of it
all. We’ve all been trained in the age of populism to avoid accusing those who
subscribe to the conventional wisdom of acting out of ignorance or
self-interest. Objections to data centers must be nobler, a genuine response to
a legitimate grievance that American elites cannot or will not acknowledge. It
cannot be simple NIMBY-ism, the product of a thoughtless herd mentality, or —
heaven forbid — an outgrowth of a successful foreign influence operation.
The need to flatter the misinformed has led politicians
from both parties to make a hash of their own position.
Democratic politicians mouth anti-AI nostrums as they
announce a new moratorium on data center construction in their states. But no
one seems to look too hard at the fine print, which makes it clear that their edicts
are not moratoriums at all but, rather, a regulatory regime
with which data center construction can and will comply.
Republicans are in the same bind. The National Republican
Senatorial Committee warns that its candidate in Ohio, Senator Jon Husted, is
in trouble and that data centers are to blame. “If he loses and data centers
take the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will
not go near the next one,” the unusually threatening memo read. Michigan Representative Tom
Barrett is running ads lambasting “politicians” for “cozying up with Big
Tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities.” When Texas
Governor Greg Abbott prohibited “AI data centers” in rural areas, he
said it reflected his commitment to “fighting for East Texas values.”
Donald Trump has sought to neutralize the issue by
pushing Republican governors to sign a pledge outlining “a set of principles committing
data center developers to pay for their fair share of energy and water use,
along with electric grid improvements and maintenance.” But data centers
already pay standard commercial and industrial rates directly to state
utilities and generate massive tax revenues in the process.
The AI race has been disruptive. New technologies often
are. But the benefits of winning that race are already visible — or should be.
Accelerated medical discoveries like personalized cancer therapies are approaching maturity. The promise AI holds for cheaper,
cleaner power generation and longer-lasting batteries could have pronounced
effects on every sector of the economy. Revolutionary productivity gains mean
less expensive goods and services for everyone as the time and resources it
takes to produce or deliver them decline.
The nation that achieves AI dominance sets the rules of
the road and cements its dominance in a field that everyone on earth will want
a piece of. If China is the victor, not only does the U.S. lose that market, it
will find itself playing catch-up in the field of AI military applications —
faster real-time decision-making, refined targeting and coordination
capabilities, better autonomous systems, and such.
It’s hard to envy the political class. The need to
compete in and win the AI race seems self-evident. But the public just doesn’t
seem to care. And in our populist age, the people are always right.
No comments:
Post a Comment