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Two things can be true at once. Foreign entities have seeded the opposition to data center growth in the United States. China, in particular, through its control of TikTok and other influence outlets, has relentlessly worked to stop the American AI advantage against China. Also, at this point, much of the opposition is organic, bipartisan and growing. Americans are deeply opposed to data centers. They are wrong and shortsighted, but my view is the minority view.
We should start by understanding the problem. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic and Sam Altman, the proprietor of OpenAI, are two of the worst spokesmen for AI and data centers to exist. In the movies, we were promised cool, slick and socially popular villains who could fool people into believing they were the good guys. In the real world, the villains announce their villainy upfront along with a large helping of weirdness.
Sam Altman recently bragged about how AI could learn your child’s interests and develop a podcast your child could listen to on the way to school about their interests. God forbid you have to talk to your child. Dario Amodei has all but said AI is going to take your job, kill your family, destroy your future and the government needs to shut it all down, but AI is also a good thing. Amodei’s wife, it turns out, tried to start a porn company for women and solicited a post-conviction Jeffrey Epstein for investment in the company.
Austin Power’s nemesis, Dr. Evil, looks positively saintly and normal compared to these weirdo evil clowns who, in another life, would be luring your children into sewers with red balloons.
Only Mark Zuckerberg and Meta seem to understand how to approach Americans on the matter. Meta is investing in local communities. The company is training blue-collar workers with tools the workers do not have to buy and giving them skills they can use for a lifetime. The workers get six-figure jobs without college degrees. In many of the towns Meta is working in, their data centers are generating so much in property taxes that the citizens are seeing reductions in their own property taxes. School funding has increased. Infrastructure funding has increased.
But the builders and owners of data centers are often super-secret too. They want local governments to sign non-disclosure agreements about water intake. That has everything to do with hiding their builds from their competitors and very little to do with keeping water usage from local communities. Most golf courses use more water than data centers and most of the golf course water is recycled, like the data center water. In the post-COVID world, American trust in institutions is low. The secrecy and feeling of powerlessness against giant corporations feed that distrust and amplify opposition.
Every time the conversation might change, Dario Amodei pipes up with another devastating pronouncement about artificial intelligence. One might suspect he wants the government to regulate AI in a way that he helps structure to give his own company a competitive advantage against the others.
Meanwhile, China is pouring money into data center development, power plant construction and anti-data center propaganda in the United States. A recent poll in this country showed people would rather have nuclear power plants in their backyards than data centers. I want both. We need both to control the future because, if we do not, China will control the future and curate all our information.
Americans need to get this right. If you listen to podcasts or check emails or read the Internet, you benefit from data centers. But, I am hard-pressed to blame skeptics when the loudest pro-AI voices are the CEO’s who cannot help but scare you, as their opponents amplify every fear to shut down our future success.