In defense of data centers The opposition is virtue-signaling

Should the construction of new AI data centers be banned in the United States? The Democratic state legislature of New York thinks so: it has passed a law imposing a one-year moratorium on the construction of new ones, which Gov. Kathy Hochul has not yet signed.

Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York agree, and they aren’t leaving the matter to state and local governance. They have introduced a bill to impose a moratorium everywhere in the United States. In a press release, Sanders gives four separate reasons — environmental (“a profound impact on land and water use”), economic (“will drive up electricity costs”), occupational (“eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs”), and apocalyptic: “this revolutionary technology could soon become smarter than humans and escape human control — with potentially cataclysmic outcomes.” You might think that the prospect of a Silicon God enslaving or annihilating humanity, if it were a genuine threat, would be the first item in the list of AI data center dangers, not the last.  

Some Republican supporters of data centers assert that China is responsible for the opposition in the US — a claim as ludicrous as the Democrats’ claim a decade ago that Russia swung the 2016 election from Clinton to Trump.

Today’s opposition to data centers is home-grown, but it is more “astroturf” than grass-roots. The anti-data center movement is merely the latest cause seized upon by a pre-existing coalition of anti-growth environmentalists, anti-corporate progressives, small-is-beautiful populists, and preservationists, who for various reasons want their local landscapes frozen forever as they are now.  

Of the parade of horribles listed as reasons to oppose new data centers, concerns about the environment and electricity prices are legitimate. Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for cooling and electricity for operation. It is both reasonable and necessary to prevent these facilities from exhausting local water supplies or shifting energy costs to local utility bill payers.  How this should be done, and at what level of government, deserve to be important subjects of public debate. The tech accelerationists who oppose all regulation of AI are as misguided as the technophobes.

More from this author

Why NGOs love Tom Steyer

By Michael Lind

But most Americans who oppose data centers do so on the basis of practical concerns, not progressive ideology. According to a Gallup survey in May, 50% of those who opposed data centers in their local areas cited “effects on resources”: water usage (18%), energy consumption (18%), and unspecified environmental impact (14%), with only 13% citing other reasons for opposition, including loss of farmland, threats to wildlife, natural resource consumption, or the fear that the data center would be an “eyesore.” Other concerns included apprehension about higher costs to utility rate-payers and citizens (20%) and concern about pollution (16%).

What about the other concerns raised by progressives like Sanders? Only 12% of the opponents polled by Gallup worried that AI would replace jobs and only 4% agreed with “Scared of AI/Don’t trust it/AI will take over.”  

Most data-center construction is in low-population suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas that tend to prefer Republicans to Democrats in elections. If the anti-data-center movement were really about practical local concerns, we would expect opposition to be greater among small-town and rural Republicans than among big-city Democrats who are not affected by the construction.

Instead, we find the reverse. According to the same survey, Democrats are far more likely to “strongly oppose” data-center construction than Republicans, by a huge gap of 56% to 39%. What is more, there is a gender gap: women are more likely than men to strongly oppose data-center construction, 55% to 43%.

In other words, a Republican man who lives in a rural county where a data center is likely to be constructed is less likely to be worried about it than a Democratic woman who lives in a big city far from the nearest data center. The truth is that the urban female Democrat opposes data centers only because that is quickly becoming the progressive party line.  Her concern about the possible effects on the rural Republican families she otherwise dislikes for their religious and political views is just virtue-signaling and play-acting, like the performative outrage of urban liberals at the thought that the Keystone Pipeline might cross sacred indigenous lands they will never visit but heard about on NPR, or the theatrical alarm among progressive city-dwellers on reading in The New York Times about road-building in the Amazon rainforest.

The debate about data center construction, then, would be boring and technical if the questions most local citizens have about their role in water use, electricity consumption, and pollution were the only issues. In this case, to use the phrase of the 1960s Left, the issue is not the issue. The real objection of many progressive opponents of data centers is not to this particular kind of industrial development, but to industrial development as such. Apart from the dystopian prospect of superhuman computers running amok, every one of the objections listed by Sanders and other supporters of a data center moratorium could be raised — and have been raised in the recent past — against major manufacturing and infrastructure projects of different kinds, including new factories that are built as a result of initiatives to reshore industrial supply chains lost to China, Mexico, and other countries.

Many of the same progressive advocacy groups that are uniting to oppose data center construction have come together in the past to oppose nuclear power, fracking, and offshore oil and gas drilling, using multiple arguments calculated to appeal to “the groups” as the allied single-issue factions on the left are known. Consider the Keystone Pipeline, proposed in 2008 and canceled by President Biden in 2021. (An alternate version is being considered today.) The Christmas tree logic of the anti-development Left is illustrated by an article published in 2022, after the Biden administration canceled the Keystone Pipeline: “this article draws upon environmental, utilitarian, rights and justice ethics in order to explain why the Keystone XL Pipeline extension was unethical and why its permit was revoked by the Biden Administration in 2021. It debunks the common claims that the pipeline would increase jobs and encourage economic growth, as well as sheds light upon the negative environmental effects and risks to indigenous populations, offering ethical guidelines for the future, such as consulting with indigenous communities before embarking on construction projects.”

Much of the passionate opposition to data center construction today is merely displaced hostility toward tech oligarchs like Elon Musk. Progressive opponents similarly demonized the Keystone Pipeline as a plot to enrich those important Republican donors, the Koch brothers. In 2011, when a Reuters article reported that the Kochs would profit from Keystone Pipeline construction, two Democratic Representatives, Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), demanded that Congress subpoena documents from Koch Industries about their interests in the project, if any. Yet, if the Keystone Pipeline was bad, it was bad no matter who profited from it, and if it was in the public interest, the identity of its investors was irrelevant. Associating Keystone with the Kochs was pure demagogy, like attempts by contemporary progressives to smear all data centers by association with Elon Musk.

In the view of the anti-development Left, technological civilization is bad and nature is good.  From this Arcadian ideology follows the conclusion that not only should the existing human-built environment not be extended, but also some existing infrastructure, like electricity-generating dams, should be destroyed. 

While New Deal presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson promoted hydropower dams for their ability to generate cheap electricity, for decades, one of the goals of radical environmentalists in the US has been dismantling these New Deal icons and “rewilding” the rivers they modified. As in the case of the anti-data center movement, today’s anti-dam advocates provide multiple alternate rationales for the policy, each rationale calculated to appeal to a different part of the progressive coalition. A recent headline on the website of nonprofit The Post Carbon Institute seeks to unite conservationists, global warming activists, and those whose virtue-signaling includes performative displays of guilt toward Native Americans: “Removing hydropower dams can restore ecosystems, build climate resilience, and restore tribal lands.”

From the point of view of progressive political coalition-building, that is a good “three-fer” but it it could have been converted into a better “four-fer” by linking dams to sinister Big Business, or by smearing dams by association with the benighted, provincial Republican voters with motorboats and lake houses — who, once re-wilding is complete, will be conveniently punished by the drainage of the dam-created reservoirs they use for recreation.

The same progressive nonprofit-industrial complex and allied politicians who define the ever-changing progressive party line have now decided that data centers are to be demonized as symbols of the evils of corporate capitalism and inequality, as personal automobiles, highways, suburbs, oil and gas drilling, hydropower dams, and nuclear power plants have been demonized by the anti-development Left since the 1970s. If zero-carbon nuclear fusion technology generating cheap electricity were invented tomorrow, this same half-century-old anti-development coalition would immediately mobilize against it. Stop Big Fusion Now!

Suggested reading

The year of cosmic shock

By Sohrab Ahmari and Matthew Gasda

The good news is that the anti-development coalition in America is fragile and sometimes breaks down. For example, there is a split between neoliberal boosters of solar power and wind power who back the Green New Deal and more radical deep ecologists and degrowthers. The radical Greens at least are consistent. If Big Data Center is bad for the environment, then so are Big Wind, with its massive windmills spoiling views and killing birds; Big Solar, with its rows of rusting, potentially-toxic solar panels wiping out ground cover and wildlife; and, of course, Big Transmission, with its proposed massive new power lines that are supposed to bring “clean” energy from the bird-killing windmills and the wilderness-killing solar farms.

The progressive coalition against modern industrial and infrastructure development also frequently comes into conflict with organized labor. Construction unions in particular have clashed with environmentalists over their opposition to oil and gas facilities, as well as infrastructure and nuclear power. In the debate about the Keystone Pipeline, for example, the United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters and the Laborers International Union of North America supported the pipeline’s construction, in the interest of more jobs for their members.  

The anti-development left is also fractured by divisions among Green supporters of industrial-scale renewable energy and the group that might be called “local preservationists” — residents of an area who are not particularly ideological, but oppose construction that would alter a beloved landscape or block a lovely view. In Martha’s Vineyard, a Democratic stronghold, a massive offshore industrial wind project favored by environmentalists has met opposition from citizen groups like Nantucket Residents Against Turbines, citing, in true progressive virtue-signaling fashion, alleged harm to marine life and local fishers. 

In the long run, the non-ideological preservationists may prove to be a greater threat to the future of the US economy than small but noisy minorities like degrowthers and anti-capitalist socialists.  The desire to retain an unobstructed view from your dream house is understandable, and so is the concern about an industrial facility or infrastructure corridor being constructed next door. But all of America’s land is in or adjacent to the “viewscape” or homes of some individuals and families. Giving a few people a veto on further development of the United States on aesthetic or sentimental grounds would be fatal for American prosperity and power.  

A country is not a museum. The occasional quaint historic district is a good idea. Turning an entire nation into a historic district, frozen forever at a particular moment in time and technological evolution, would be national suicide.

We should deal with the practical issues of energy use, water use, and pollution that are raised by data center construction. And we should also deal with the separate issues of excessive wealth concentration and insufficient regulation of numerous industries, of which AI is only one. But a crusade against plutocracy and inequality that takes the crude form of blocking all data center construction is as stupid as a crusade against Gilded Age robber barons would have been if it had taken the form of a moratorium on railroad construction. You don’t have to be a godlike, silicon-based, out-of-control artificial intelligence to understand that.

---