In Defense of Building the Data Centers

New York just became the first state in the country to sign a moratorium on data centers. I want you to sit with that, because it tells you everything about the two paths in front of us. One path builds the infrastructure that runs the next fifty years of the American economy. The other talks itself into a moral panic, bans the future, and then acts surprised when the jobs and the money show up in somebody else’s state. I am here to defend the data centers, and I want to walk you through why, because most of the fear you are hearing is manufactured.

Start with a fact that ought to reframe the whole debate: the majority of people opposed to data centers do not live anywhere near one. Their concern isn’t drawn from experience. It’s drawn from a propaganda campaign, and the biggest piece of that campaign is power consumption. So let’s take the concerns one at a time, because there are legitimate ones buried in here, and they all have answers.

Yes, in a lot of cases, you have to run new power lines to these facilities. We’ve got an unfortunate situation in Georgia where Georgia Power used eminent domain to take a home from someone who refused to move so they could string lines, some of which serve a data center. I was an eminent domain attorney for years, so let me tell you how this works.

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UPDATE: I have received this note from Georgia Power:

we have NOT used eminent domain to acquire property in Coweta County. [The family] signed [the] deal with us last week for [the] property. Eminent domain is always a last resort for us and accounts for less than one percent of our land acquisitions. Last year, it was only used five times, and it was not used for residential properties. We work very hard to be fair and transparent with landowners, and to treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve.

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Power companies have eminent domain because power is a social necessity — same as when the state builds a road and some houses get lost. Losing your home doesn’t feel good, but there has always been a balance in this country between an individual’s right and the broader social need. And here’s the part the outrage machine leaves out: in many of these deals the data centers are helping buy the property and paying well above fair market value. Some folks just don’t want to leave, and they’ve been handed a script that calls them victims.

Now, the big lie: that your power bill went up because of the data centers. It did not. The data centers are paying their own way. In fact, they are helping fund the expansion of the power grid itself. If you want to know why New Yorkers pay so much for power, look at what New York actually did. New York was the first state to ban fracking. It still runs largely on natural gas, which it now has to import more of, which costs more. Then New York shut down a perfectly good nuclear plant. Less supply, same demand, higher prices. That is basic economics. It has nothing to do with data centers and everything to do with bad public policy. But the politicians would rather you scream “it’s the data centers” than admit they made your electricity expensive on purpose.

And here’s the kicker, because City Journal has laid out the numbers. A lot of the states building data centers the fastest are watching their energy costs come down, while the states where prices are exploding are the ones that restricted supply and chased climate mandates. Look at where the building is happening: Virginia, Texas, and Georgia have hundreds of projects in the pipeline. New York has six planned. Virginia alone hosts more than a third of the world’s hyperscale data centers, and New York has power rates more than double what Virginians pay. Nationally, residential rates jumped 27 percent from 2019 to 2024, and the steepest climbs track almost perfectly with the states that strangled their own supply and piled on renewable mandates, like New York, whose 2019 climate law alone accounts for 5 to 10 percent of your monthly bill.

Look right here at my home state of Georgia: despite one of the biggest data-center buildouts in the country, Georgia Power is actually cutting rates this year — the typical customer’s bill drops starting in June, and base rates are frozen through 2028. Data centers are pouring in, and rates are going down. The lesson could not be clearer: the states that build get cheaper power, and the states that ban and mandate get more expensive power. New York picked the expensive path and is now blaming the buildings it refused to build.

Then there’s the water. “They’re going to drink the whole town dry,” we’re told. No, they aren’t. A modern facility runs water through a closed cooling system with minimal evaporation and recirculates it through chillers. It works like a golf course — those water hazards aren’t out there just to swallow my tee shots; they exist so the course can recycle its own water. Your average golf course uses more water in a day than one of these data centers, and barely touches the municipal supply because it’s recycled. The water panic doesn’t survive contact with how the things are actually built.

Noise? It can be mitigated, and it is. Ugly? There was a good piece in the Wall Street Journal about an architecture firm now designing these buildings to actually look attractive instead of like a bureaucratic warehouse, and operators are landscaping and planting evergreens to buffer what little sound gets through. The legitimate concerns are being addressed. What’s left is a campaign of fear.

And look at what we’re giving up if we cave to it. Jobs — a lot of them, white-collar and blue-collar both. Electricians, plumbers, welders. Rick Jackson, running for governor here in Georgia, makes a point I keep coming back to: there are impoverished rural counties in this state with land and not many people, and a single data center’s property tax revenue could be enough to zero out the property tax bill for everyone else who lives there. Your local taxes go down when the data center comes in, because it generates so much that it offsets yours. That’s not a threat to rural America. That’s a lifeline.

Here’s the thing people miss: you are already using a data center. If you’re reading this, if your phone sends a text or pulls an email, if you touch the internet at all, you’re using one. I use them constantly. AI has helped my team summarize and transcribe my radio monologues and podcast summaries. Every morning I get an email from Claude telling me the day’s headlines and what to watch in Congress. I’m not scared of this technology, and the data shows AI is creating more jobs than it’s eliminating.

So who benefits from the panic? China. A lot of this fear campaign runs through TikTok and environmental groups with Chinese funding, because China wants these data centers built there, not here. If China controls the data centers, China controls the data, and if China controls the data, China controls you. Building here is a national security mission. We want to own the stack, not rent it from Beijing. New York banning data centers isn’t caution, it’s surrender.

Now, do I have a real fear? I do, and it’s not yours. Mine is that we’re in a bubble that eventually bursts, and we end up with more capacity than we need. But that’s not an argument against building — it’s the opposite. Remember the great fiber-optic buildout of the dot-com era. Companies laid far more cable than anyone needed and went bankrupt doing it. Twenty years later, we’ve nearly used all of it, and our economy is stronger because they overbuilt. Same here. Build the data centers. Some will fail; new owners will reopen them when demand catches up. The infrastructure gets used. The plumbers and welders still get paid.

Is there an inflation concern? Absolutely. Demand for chips is so high right now that technology prices are going up. Apple just raised its product prices. Others are following suit. But, in the latest consumer price index data, car prices and energy prices actually went down despite the microchip shortage.

We should not treat AI the way the blacksmiths treated the automobile. There are real concerns, they have fixes, and the future is going to be built by the states willing to innovate. New York is choosing to leave that opportunity on the table. Let it. The rest of us should build.