Data centers use a lot of electricity. That sentence is true, and it is not an argument. Steel mills use a lot of electricity. Refineries use a lot of electricity. Aluminum plants use a lot of electricity. In a free country, a large customer who pays the full cost of the power he consumes, the wires built for him, and the damage he actually causes is not a public enemy. He is a customer.
The political class does not want that sentence to stand, because it leaves them with nothing to sell. So the public is handed red herrings: they are “draining the aquifers,” they are “destroying the grid,” they are “stealing your air conditioner in August.” Those lines are useful. They are not the transaction.
The transaction is corporatism. Politicians take the scare, then sit down with the same chief executives to hand out sales-tax exemptions, property-tax abatements, and interconnection rules that let a hyperscale tenant land on the system while households pick up part of the tab. That is not a free market. That is government picking a winner and sending the invoice to people who never asked for the AI datacenter.
The moral rule is simple: they pay their own way. The scandal is the politicians who violate it.
There is a second beneficiary of the panic, and it is not a mystery. The country that most needs American compute delayed, litigated, and regulated into a crawl is China. Beijing does not have to sabotage a single substation if American politicians will do the delaying for them. Democrats have made “guardrails,” moratoria, and climate theater the respectable face of that delay. RINO Republicans — some of them knowing exactly what they are doing, some of them merely chasing the poll and the donor — supply the bipartisan cover. Whether the motive is ideology, committee jurisdiction, or fear of a town-hall crowd, the result is the same: the United States argues with itself while the rival that wants to win the AI contest keeps pouring concrete.
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