The Rhetoric About AI Data Centers Is Ridiculous

hotair.com

There are tons of reasons to worry about the breakneck pace at which AI is being integrated into everything. 

As with any Next New Thing, the pundits get many things wrong; investors place their bets based on the wrong winners and losers; hype men make tons of money with slick presentations; and at some point, reality reasserts itself, and there is a crash that wipes out the unwary and unlucky. 

Advertisement

The Dot Com boom in the late 90s, which was predicated on the correct belief that the internet would change everything, still led to misery for some because money went down ratholes people thought were gold mines. It turned out that Amazon.com, not Pets.com, would be one of the big winners, and few people could have even guessed that. 

I expect there to be some sort of AI crash in the foreseeable future, just as I expect that AI will inevitably find its way into everything for both good and ill. 

Yet for all the legitimate worries one could have about AI—mine is that AI will be programmed to push political biases and strategic misinformation, as the Google and Apple "news" aggregators do—the proliferation of data centers should not be one of them. 

The massive campaign to slow down or stop the building of data centers, which took its first scalp yesterday when Kathy Hochul put a moratorium on new data centers in New York, is built on a stack of lies and funded primarily by China, which finds itself behind in the race to dominate the AI space. 

Advertisement

There's no doubt that, like any new infrastructure, the AI buildout imposes some infrastructure costs, and that adding capacity means added electricity consumption. But that is quite literally true for every single thing we do in the economy. Building new homes requires new energy and infrastructure. New manufacturing, ditto. A new office building, ditto. Economic growth of any kind—and we all want more economic growth—requires new energy and infrastructure. 

Democrats hate data centers because they are at war with energy itself. They do everything they can to reduce the amount of reliable energy produced, spend gobs of money on green energy programs while banning cheap, reliable gas and nuclear power, and now are blaming data centers for driving up prices. 

Almost everything you think you know about the environmental impacts of data centers is wrong. One of the most repeated claims about them is that they use an extraordinary amount of water, completely ignoring the fact that the water used in cooling is recycled rather than disposed of, so the net use of a large data center is similar to that of a golf course. 

Advertisement

“Facts don’t really matter for the de-growth mob.” — The Washington Post’s James Hohmann. The anti–data center hysteria around water was built on a bogus stat about a data center’s water consumption in Chile that was off by a factor of 1,000. All U.S. data centers use less than 0.5% of America’s freshwater. The war on data centers is built on junk math and is funded by China and foreign billionaires!

The massive coalition against data centers is driven by diverse groups of people with divergent motives. Many are "degrowth"-types who want to reduce all human impact on the planet and therefore would oppose any economic development. Some are NIMBYs, who just don't want a data center near them, so they latch onto bad statistics and anecdotes to make their case. Some are legitimately worried about government "economic development" boondoggles, or their representatives cutting deals because they see dollar signs from new tax revenue sources. 

But beneath the coalition is a massive organization and funding campaign, driven by our adversaries, who want to hamper the US economy. It's not that all opposition is driven by ulterior motives; rather, outsiders are stoking a panic and using natural concerns to create an obstacle to the US winning the AI race. 

Advertisement

I have some sympathy for neighbors who have concerns about a data center being plopped on top of what used to be a municipal golf course, as has happened when some city council members see a massive source of new tax revenue and ignore citizen concerns. But for the most part, a data center is just a big warehouse-like building that nobody would notice or care about unless a propaganda campaign generated an uproar. 

Environmentally, they are pretty benign, despite all the hype. 

It's true that they require energy, but so would any new job-generating activity, and the real problem is not that energy is being consumed but that we aren't generating enough of it, and liberal states are actively crushing energy production. 

In 2005, the US generated twice as much electricity as China; in 2025, China generated twice as much electricity as the United States, and is still expanding its grid at an astonishing rate. It is currently building over 30 new nuclear reactors. 

Hochul's New York? They closed down theirs. The problem isn't power consumption—there is no such thing as a high-income/low-energy economy—it's power production, which liberals oppose with the fury of a corned rat. 

Advertisement

Data centers will be built. AI, for good or ill, will expand at an exponential rate for years, and there are real concerns about how to regulate it so that it doesn't create horrific new problems such as turning younger people into brain-rotted mush, as TikTok has. 

But of all the things to worry about, data centers are not one of them. The only purpose served by banning them or slowing their construction is driving them overseas and handing a big gift to China. 

Far-left activists attempting to SABOTAGE the construction of U.S. data centers and critical AI infrastructure are reportedly backed by China-linked funding networks, according to Fox News. 

Darren Botelho: “There are growing concerns right now that China could be sabotaging the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race through backing ‘organic’ opposition to a massive new Utah data center.” 


“With supporters arguing that the project could create jobs and strengthen our national security.”

There's a reason China is pouring money into left-wing parties and nonprofits, and it's not that they are deeply concerned about environmental issues. They believe that there is a dual benefit: weakening the United States and strengthening their own economy by dominating a new economic frontier. 

Advertisement

There's no question that AI will have unpredictable and occasionally awful impacts on our society; at Brown University, a professor did an experiment that showed that almost all the students in his class were using AI chatbots to cheat on take-home exams. When he announced that the final would be in person, many students just dropped out of the class entirely rather than face having to take the test based on their own knowledge. 

The funniest case of "alleged" AI cheating yet—

>Brown Econ professor issues first take-home exam in his two decades of teaching 

>Mid-term average score comes in at 96%

>Past mid-term score typically averaged between 65% and 80%

>Professor and his graders run the mid-term through ChatGPT

>Its answers closely mirror student-written answers

>Professor mandates that final exam be taken in person

>Final exam average score comes in at 48.6%

>Previous average grade for the final had never been below 65%

>Professor voids the midterm and makes final exam 80% of students' final grade 

Stupid games, stupid prizes, etc.

Advertisement

I'm totally on board with taking a good hard look at Ai's impacts on society, but the one impact I am pretty sure is not a big deal is the proliferation of data centers, as long as we build energy infrastructure out to feed the power need—and these days, most AI data centers are taking care of that problem themselves, to avoid the headache to relying on other sources, given how politicians have made the grid unreliable. 

That supposed problem, along with water use, is a myth being pushed by activists. Ignore it. 

Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump’s leadership and bold policies, America’s economy is back on track.

Help us continue to report on the president’s economic successes and combat the lies of the Democrats. Join HotAir VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.