Data Centers Are Not Anathema and Deserve Support

As much as Americans love fighting over the culture wars, it’s important to keep something in mind: We need our elected officials to focus on what’s really important — running our government, keeping us safe, protecting our Constitutionally guaranteed liberties, and creating access to upward mobility in American society. These are the ideals that create a free and prosperous society.

It's also important to reiterate that we need to ensure that people can succeed financially in America, because that opportunity is the bedrock of what this nation is about. After all, millions of people left other places to emigrate here to embrace the American Dream. These individuals came here because they were previously denied the ability to accrue wealth and improve their families' access to education, wealth, health, and comfortable lives. Really, the business of America is business.

Which brings me to an issue that is about business and hard to miss in the media these days, the concern over the expansion of data centers across the nation. We hear that these facilities are driving up the price of electricity, endangering our drinking water, and bullying local communities into letting them build their massive facilities.

Let me be clear: I’m not buying any of it. It’s all just part of the media’s efforts to catastrophize every piece of news and spin everyone up over anything that’s different or changing. It’s no different than all of the press 30 years ago about the dangers of the Internet and the Y2K disaster that never materialized.

So yes, data centers are going to use a lot of electricity, they will need water to cool their facilities, and their footprint will grow across the nation. That’s called progress. Yes, sometimes progress has risks, but those risks are mitigated as industries mature. I see no reason why the data center industry is any different – or why we should hold them to a higher standard than any other industry.

In the meantime, these data centers are going to drive the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that is going to push our economy forward for at least the next decade. AI is going to make our lives better, too. It is going to help accelerate medicine to make us healthier. For example, AI is going to let doctors quickly diagnose people with terrible conditions. Ever known someone who takes years to get a correct diagnosis and treatment for an illness? It’s an awful existence, and we should all be looking forward to when AI can reduce the number of people suffering from not knowing what is making them sick and what can be done to ease their discomfort.

I could go on and on about AI, but to be honest, it seems to me that we have no idea where AI is going to end up. So, to try to predict it is sort of impossible. But I do know this: we want to control AI and ensure American companies are at the cutting edge of this new technology. Because AI also can be used for nefarious purposes, so better that we control it than our geopolitical adversaries, who would almost certainly use it against us. I’m looking at you, China.

Lastly, it is critical to remember that these data centers are going to create hundreds of thousands of good-paying construction jobs. Once they are built, they are not going to increase traffic or have any impact on the communities that surround them, besides paying local taxes and helping to support municipalities that could also use those revenues for schools, firefighters, and law enforcement.

In other words, conservatives should ignore the hysterical media trying to scare us about data centers and urge our lawmakers to ensure that these facilities grow responsibly. After all, at the heart of conservatism is good government that understands its limits but doesn’t shy away from doing its job. If we manage the expansion of data centers correctly, it will propel our economy and help expand our free and prosperous society.

Editor's note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.

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