Facts, Not Political Luddite Hype

The argumentCelebrate well-structured projects — and reject the ones that dump costs on households

Eighteen months ago the objections were familiar: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment, and what these buildings would do to small towns. Those were not unserious questions. They were the right questions asked too early, with numbers that in some cases were off by more than 1,000%.

Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed those concerns. Where they have not — especially on power, if a utility socializes the cost of new load onto existing ratepayers — people are right to object. The standard should be high. The verdict, on the projects that meet it, is not close.

On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way.

This should not be a partisan issue. Data centers are re-industrializing parts of the country and creating the working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. Outsourcing this infrastructure to China will age about as well as outsourcing high-quality blue-collar jobs to China already has.

01 · WaterU.S. data centers use a fraction of what farms, golf courses, and power plants use

Direct water use at American data centers is tiny next to cattle, thermoelectric plants, lawns, and even golf. A lot of the viral figures from 18 months ago were off by more than 1,000%. Newer facilities use closed-loop systems or recycled water. That should be required by every town that approves a project.

Who actually uses the water

Agriculture is the largest freshwater consumer on Earth — roughly 70% of global withdrawals and about 47–80% in the United States. The list below is organized so a town council can put a data center next to the industries that dwarf it.

1. Agriculture and food production

By a wide margin the largest consumer of freshwater.

• Crop irrigation. Corn, wheat, and alfalfa require trillions of gallons a year. U.S. corn farming uses more water in a single day than every American data center consumes directly in an entire year.
• Livestock and meat. Hydration, feed crops, and facility sanitation stack on top of one another.
• Food and beverage processing. Washing, cooking, canning, and drink manufacturing add industrial volumes on top of the farm.

2. Energy and power generation

This is the hidden footprint critics sometimes assign to tech: data centers pull from grids that are themselves water-hungry.

• Thermoelectric plants. Nuclear, coal, and gas facilities use billions of gallons a day for steam and cooling towers.
• Hydroelectric. Reservoirs lose enormous volumes to evaporation.

3. Heavy manufacturing

• Paper and pulp mills — chemical and physical processes that are extremely water-intensive.
• Steel and aluminum — continuous cooling and processing water.
• Textiles and dyeing — fabric production plus chemical dyes.
• Chemical manufacturing — water as solvent and coolant for plastics, resins, and industrial chemicals.

4. Semiconductor fabrication

Chip fabs — the plants that make the processors inside data centers — need millions of gallons of ultra-pure water a day to rinse microscopic contaminants off wafers. The water story of AI hardware is mostly here, not in the server hall.

5. Extractive industries

• Mining and ore processing — slurry transport, dust suppression, mineral separation.
• Oil and gas — fracturing and refining rely on large volumes of pressurized water.

6. Lawns, golf, and ordinary municipal use

• Residential lawn care — an estimated 2 to 3.2 trillion gallons a year in the U.S.
• Golf course irrigation — more than 500 billion gallons a year.
• Car washes and restaurant dishwashing — in aggregate, higher total withdrawals than localized data centers.

02 · TaxesDo not evaluate a data center by the sales-tax exemption alone

Looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as some high-profile reporting has done, is the wrong frame. Data centers pay significant property taxes — on the building and, in many jurisdictions, on the servers inside it.

03 · JobsUnambiguously good for blue-collar America — and not a one-time pour

Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC technicians, and contractors has gone vertical. These buildings are not a single construction spike that vanishes when the ribbon is cut. They get upgraded and expanded for a decade. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions now treat opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse a politician.

AI is also pulling manufacturing back: energy plants, chip fabs, and the data halls themselves. That is construction and factory work, not just a handful of remote software jobs.

05 · EnvironmentGas today, solar-plus-storage as the destination — and batteries that help the grid

Data centers overwhelmingly run on natural gas today, the cleanest firm power source outside nuclear, solar, and wind. The companies building them are committed to carbon neutrality, which means an equivalent amount of solar is likely to be built alongside the halls — driven by market demand, not only by subsidy.

Maybe more important: data centers need batteries to function. Those batteries can sell energy back into the grid. That capability recently helped prevent blackouts in Texas. Over time the stack is solar plus storage.

AI is creating demand that drives investment into an aging power grid and into sustainable energy. That is a feature of the boom, not a footnote.

06 · Small townsThe Quincy story is not a one-off

Poverty in Quincy, Washington fell from 29% to 6%. Data-center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, and police and fire stations. This is happening in many left-for-dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land.

The industrial caseAI is re-industrializing the country. Do not outsource the halls.

Data centers are creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties claim to want. Supporting the outsourcing of this infrastructure to China will likely age as poorly as the last wave of offshoring.

Roughly $400 billion has been invested in AI startups in a recent six-month window. The instruction to builders is the same one towns should demand: partner with communities, earn trust, and create local benefits. The opportunity is to leave lasting infrastructure in hometowns and to keep America on the leading edge of the next industrial revolution.

Data centers can and should be awesome for America. Increasingly, the well-run ones already are.