America has gone crazy, and the only beneficiaries will be the Communists in Beijing, who are feeding the frenzy like an arsonist carefully feeds a fire to turn a tiny campfire into a raging wildfire.
The issue driving the unthinking hysteria on social media and roiling the midterm election is data centers. Someone, somewhere, somehow started a very effective disinformation campaign that paints data centers as evil polluters, water and power guzzlers, and deep-state data vaults. Proponents claim these massive physical footprints are dedicated to housing secret databases for global population tracking, facial recognition catalogs, and digital social credit systems.
While data centers undeniably consume large amounts of electricity and water for cooling, online narratives often exaggerate these facts into coordinated sabotage. Claims circulate that tech conglomerates build data centers with the deliberate intention of draining regional aquifers or crashing local energy grids to force communities onto controlled, rationed power schemes.
Even less sensational theories about data centers, such as that they use too much water and drive up electricity rates, have taken hold. A golf course uses 30 times more water than an average data center. And a Wall Street Journal editorial points out that the "average electric rates nationwide have increased roughly in line with inflation since 2016, with larger increases in the Northeast and California, largely because of climate policies such as net-metering that lets homes with solar panels free-load on the grid."
Most data center developers have agreed to cover the costs they add to the grid. "The Trump Administration was a leader here in bringing AI firms, utilities and political actors together, and most AI firms have cooperated," says the editorial.
This is not a typical NIMBY case. The future of the United States is at stake here. And politicians, even Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, are serious when they tell voters that the U.S. should halt data center construction until an "audit" can be performed to determine how much water and power are being used.
When Abbott halts construction of a golf course to "audit" potential water usage, we'll know how crazy the hysteria has made him.
"This growing war on data centers is tantamount to a declaration of technological surrender as a nation, which is why the @WSJ editorial board is right to couch it in terms of U.S. decline," writes FIRE senior fellow Adam Thierer. "The Chinese, who are already well ahead of America in embodied AI / general-purpose robotics, would then also easily catch up and take over on AI models, then becoming the world's dominant supplier of both."
New large-scale data centers are needed to train and run AI models, and more than chatbots. Businesses large and small use AI to boost productivity, which lets them pay workers more. Steel maker Cleveland-Cliffsrecently announced an upgrade to an Ohio plant that will incorporate AI to improve efficiency.
Utilities use AI to prepare for natural disasters and reduce power outages. AI models are helping diagnose cancer at earlier stages and develop cures. Data centers bring high-paying construction jobs, and skilled blue-collar workers are needed to run them.
If data centers disappeared from Loudoun County, Va.—known as Data Center Alley—homeowners would need to pay $5,800 more a year in property tax for the same government services, according to one analysis. Teachers in Louisiana’s Richland Parish this year received bonuses up to $50,000 thanks to tax revenue from Meta’s AI data center.
"The surge of opposition to data centers reflects misinformation and anxiety about the future more than it does reality," says the WSJ editorial board. "Both are driven in part by the same people who have sought to block shale fracking, liquefied natural gas exports and other projects that enhance American prosperity and national security."
China has jumped into the fray with both feet. X's Global Government Affairs and Safety teams identified a suspected Chinese bot farm network of roughly 200,000 accounts. Roughly 200 of these accounts actively targeted American energy policy, using AI-generated illustrations, cartoons, and posts designed to amplify local opposition. The posts framed data centers as threats that drain municipal power grids, spike residential electricity bills, and enrich corporate executives at the expense of local taxpayers.
Also, OpenAI uncovered covert networks operating out of China, dubbed clusters like "Data Center Bandwagon," that used ChatGPT to generate text and memes aimed at weaponizing U.S. domestic economic concerns. Prompts in Simplified Chinese were translated to produce English-language narratives about regional power capacity auctions, grid instability, and localized utility strain.
Non-partisan think tank analyses (including reports from the Bitcoin Policy Institute) highlighted that Chinese state-affiliated outlets consistently broadcast storylines focusing on U.S. grid failures, regional water usage controversies, and the reopening of fossil-fuel plants to support AI infrastructure.
If you're a data center opponent, why are you letting China lead you by the nose?
There's major pushback against data centers from powerful labor unions. "Unions and construction trade groups are now entering the fray from the other side, warning that such actions endanger thousands of building-related jobs," reports a piece in a Wall Street Journal article from last week. "They are threatening to withhold support from candidates opposing the data-center projects."
In Kansas, a union representing HVAC and railroad workers broke from decades of precedent to endorse Republican state Sen. Ty Masterson for governor, in part because of the Democratic candidate’s opposition to the construction. In some cases, the unions are working alongside companies building data centers and running artificial-intelligence models in their advocacy.
The apocalyptic estimates of job loss are being dialed back as it's becoming clearer how AI will integrate into the workplace. Some of that was unnecessary hype by AI corporations. Some of it was scare tactics by other, non-AI-using corporations. Regardless, the threat from stupid, timid politicians of handing the future to the Communist Chinese is real and needs to be addressed by Trump and the GOP.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats desperately try to stop it.
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