Why an 800-megawatt data center deserves your town's drinking water more than you do

Last week, during a closed-door meeting on K Street, a source close to leadership at a major Silicon Valley firm confessed to me the emotional toll this rhetoric is taking on the industry. The executives who zone these facilities are exhausted. They are tired of being asked to apologize for progress. They are tired of local zoning boards treating a minor rolling blackout as a personal insult rather than a shared sacrifice for the greater good of optimizing targeted banner ads.

The grievances of the local voters, when you actually bother to interrogate them, are incredibly petty. Residents in Loudoun County complain that the constant, low-frequency hum of the server cooling systems is keeping them awake at night. But I ask you: what is a little insomnia compared to the miracle of seamless data retrieval? If your child has to sleep with noise-canceling headphones so that a regional vice president in Seattle can generate an AI image of a dog riding a skateboard in under four seconds, that strikes me as a beautiful example of the American social contract functioning exactly as intended.

Then there is the issue of the power grid. Candidates love to fearmonger about how a single Amazon Web Services facility draws more electricity than fifty thousand suburban homes. This is framed as a crisis, rather than what it actually is: a triumph of consolidation. Why should fifty thousand inefficient, scattered households hoard all that electricity just to power their dishwashers and reading lamps, when a single visionary corporation can use it to train a language model to speak like a pirate?

Let us also address the grotesque complaints regarding municipal tax abatements. Critics love to point out that these data centers are frequently granted decades of total tax immunity by desperate local councils, draining public coffers while offering nothing in return. To which I say: why should a server farm pay property taxes? It does not send its servers to the local public schools. It does not require the fire department, mostly because the halon gas fire-suppression systems installed inside would instantly asphyxiate any first responder who attempted to enter the building.

And then there is the perennial whining about job creation. A local union leader recently had the audacity to complain to me that a newly constructed one-million-square-foot facility created a grand total of fourteen permanent jobs. He completely missed the point. The beauty of the data center is its elegant, misanthropic efficiency. It is a monument to the obsolescence of human labor. We should not be demanding that these facilities hire more locals; we should be studying their business model so we can figure out how to lay off the rest of the town.

Hess is exactly right. The industry is merely asking for a seat at the table, and perhaps the table itself, and the land underneath the table, and the mineral rights to that land. It is a modest proposal. Yet in this toxic political climate, candidates are treating these companies as hostile occupying forces rather than benevolent stewards of our collective digital memory.

The sheer entitlement of the American voter never ceases to amaze me. They want their emails to load instantly. They want their streaming video algorithms to know precisely which true-crime documentary they want to watch before they do. Yet the moment a tech company politely asks to siphon a few billion gallons of groundwater from the local aquifer to keep the servers from melting into a puddle of radioactive slag, suddenly everyone is a conservationist.

I recently confronted a local mayor who was campaigning against a proposed Meta facility in his district. I asked him if he enjoyed the convenience of the modern internet, and he said yes. Yet he stubbornly refused to accept that the cost of that convenience is allowing Mark Zuckerberg to occasionally boil his town's river.

And what is the alternative? If we do not allow Alphabet and Microsoft to pave over the remaining arable farmland in the Midwest, do we honestly think China will hesitate to do the same to their own countryside? The geopolitical stakes are too high for this kind of provincial NIMBYism. Every time a county commissioner in Iowa denies a zoning permit for a cryptomining data center, Xi Jinping laughs. We are handing the future of artificial intelligence to our adversaries because a few thousand rural voters are squeamish about their drinking water tasting faintly of coolant.

I am old enough to remember when this country built things. We built the Hoover Dam. We built the interstate highway system. Now, we are trying to build windowless, temperature-controlled fortresses that employ exactly six security guards and zero local residents, and the populists want to tear them down. It is a betrayal of the American spirit.

The politicians pandering to this backlash are playing a dangerous game. They are teaching voters that their physical needs—clean water, stable electricity, a quiet place to sleep—somehow supersede the needs of the cloud. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the modern economy. The cloud is not a luxury; it is the very fabric of our reality. Without it, we are nothing but biological matter stumbling in the dark, unable to optimize our supply chains or mint our non-fungible tokens.

Exactly. It is a matter of perspective. A dry faucet is not a failure of governance; it is a monument to our technological supremacy. When the lights dim across a three-county radius because a new server bank has just come online to calculate the most efficient route for a food delivery driver, we should not complain. We should stand in our darkened living rooms and applaud.

As we head into the final weeks of this election, I am pleading with the electorate to reject this cynical, anti-data-center rhetoric. Look past the scaremongering about rolling blackouts and depleted reservoirs. Look instead to the majestic, humming boxes on the horizon. They are the engines of our future, working tirelessly in the dark so that we might one day never have to think for ourselves again.

If we cannot find it in our hearts to let these corporate giants extract every last drop of natural resources from our communities in exchange for marginally faster load times, then perhaps we do not deserve the internet at all.